XCOMM

An Instagram post, a Venice back room and a name borrowed from John Wick

XCOMM began in May 2023 as the idea of a drummer who was then twelve years old. Revel Ian is the son of Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian and singer Pearl Aday, and by his own account he was already knocking around Los Angeles hardcore spaces in smaller projects, including a cover band, before he started writing straightforward hardcore with bassist Adan Escoto. The two of them posted on Instagram looking for a singer and a guitarist. Michael Gatto, previously of the band 2dust, answered almost immediately. Ian told NME in May 2026 that it happened naturally, and that the song which became the title track of their debut album was written in that first session together.

The name went through several drafts. Ian wanted Excommunicado, the six-syllable word from John Wick: Chapter 4, then considered No Communication, before the whole thing was cut down to XCOMM. The lineup settled through 2024. Escoto joined early in the year and an early guitarist, Erek Gracias, left after a brief spell. The band played their first show in Venice in March 2024, and Gatto and second guitarist Jay Vargas were on board by the spring. Hunter Grogan, who handles turntables and samples, was the last to arrive in late 2025.

That the band is young is the first thing every piece of press mentions, and the numbers as reported by NME on 20 May 2026 bear repeating: Gatto nineteen, Grogan twenty, Escoto sixteen, Vargas fifteen and Ian fourteen. Wikipedia notes that most of the members are still minors. It is the kind of detail that could have made them a novelty, and the more interesting story is how quickly they stopped being treated as one.

From Westside Punks to a studio nicknamed daycare

The first release was an EP called Westside Punks, out in July 2024 and produced by Roy Mayorga at Secret Hand Studios in Van Nuys. It was enough to get the band written up on Theprp.com that August, largely on the strength of the Anthrax connection, and enough to get them onto stages well beyond Venice. They played Sick New World in Las Vegas, where, according to an interview with Good Call Music, Tony Hawk recognised them.

The bigger turn came with Ross Robinson, the producer behind early Korn, Slipknot, At the Drive-In and Glassjaw. The connection was not industry machinery. Wikipedia records that Gatto reached Robinson through his girlfriend's uncle, and the band told Good Call Music that Robinson turned up of his own accord to their demo release show in Hollywood. On 6 February 2025 Theprp.com reported that XCOMM had signed to Blowed Out Records, the label Robinson founded with Ghostemane and Bill Armstrong, and that Robinson would produce their debut. His statement at the time described raw, talented kids who had turned to punk expression rather than self-destruction in the face of heavy adversity.

The sessions, by every account, were not gentle. Robinson has said XCOMM were the youngest band he had ever worked with and that he nicknamed the sessions daycare. The band describe something closer to boot camp. Ian told Good Call Music it felt like a big hardcore therapy session with instruments, and that Robinson pushed tempos up by roughly twenty beats per minute in pre-production. Gatto told NME he sang one refrain hundreds of times, with the take pushed further each time, and the album's Wikipedia entry records Robinson feeding him large ginger shots during ten-hour days to get him to the point of tears. Escoto's summary, quoted on the Bumbershoot festival site, is that working with Robinson was brutal but that he cared in a way that is rare.

Time to Burn: the record and how it landed

The album arrived in stages. Reasons came out on 17 September 2025, followed by the title track on 11 November, Fake ID on 15 January 2026, Hot Pursuit / One and Nothing on 27 February and Borrowed Happiness on 8 April, the day the album itself was announced. Time to Burn was released on 22 May 2026 through Blowed Out Records. It runs a little over half an hour, with songs ranging from the eighty-second Purity to the four-minute Hot Pursuit / One and Nothing, and Ghostemane guests on Pirates. Borrowed Happiness was also placed in the 2026 film Jackass: Best and Last.

Reviews were largely warm, with the reservations aimed at familiarity rather than execution. Distorted Sound gave it seven out of ten on 27 May 2026, hearing the chaos and looseness of Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Fugazi under modern production, and singling out Reasons, Running Zeroes, No Teeth and Hot Pursuit / One and Nothing. The reviewer's main plea was that listeners turn it up and take the band as a new force rather than filing them as a nostalgia act. Out of Rage went further with nine out of ten on 19 May, describing a record that clamps down with its teeth from the first track and a band built for the pit. Kerrang! also reviewed it, noting that the title track slows from an onslaught into a stoner-rock crawl and that Running Zeroes leans into a mutated kind of pop-rock, which is a fair description of what separates XCOMM from a straight revival act.

That range is deliberate. The influences the band listed to NME run from At the Drive-In, Bad Brains, Terror and Turnstile to early Deftones, Korn, Slipknot and The Cars, and Grogan's samples and turntables give the songs somewhere to go when they break from the riff. NME's description of the material was of songs that fracture and veer suddenly into electronics or melody without losing momentum. Gatto's own line, quoted by Bumbershoot, is that XCOMM is aggressive music for impressionable minds.

Where they stand in September 2026

The Foo Fighters show came first. In January 2026 XCOMM opened for them at a sold-out charity date at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, and the album announcement in April credited Fake ID with helping to earn that slot and a place on NME's 100 list for 2026. Ian's verdict on the arena, given to NME, was not what a press office would have written: there were people just standing still, and he would rather play a two-hundred-capacity room where everyone was going insane.

The summer was festivals. They played the California Chaos festival at Pacific Electric in Los Angeles on 11 April, the Washington, D.C. leg of the revived Vans Warped Tour on 13 and 14 June, and the Long Beach leg on 25 and 26 July, then released a video for Purity cut from the Long Beach footage. On 30 July Theprp.com reported that they had been added as the opener for Guns N' Roses at Truist Park in Atlanta on 19 September 2026, which will be the largest room they have played. On 5 September they played the Mural Stage at Bumbershoot in Seattle in a thirty-minute early-afternoon slot.

What is on sale now is a short run that shows the spread of company they keep. On 12 September they play Pappy & Harriet's in Pioneertown at the Thrasher Death Match, billed with Melvins according to Songkick. After Atlanta, they are on the Fight to Unite festival in Los Angeles on 9 and 10 October, then support The Dillinger Escape Plan, with Squid Pisser also on the bill, at Revolution Hall in Portland on 25 October, the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver on 26 October and the Neptune Theatre in Seattle on 27 October. Ian told Good Call Music that the next ambition is Europe and hearing a crowd sing the words back.

The show: no barricades, thirty minutes, everything

A current XCOMM set is short, because the songs are short. The album release show at the Hollywood Palladium on 22 May 2026, according to setlist.fm, ran to thirteen songs and covered the entire record plus Quick and to the Pointless. On Warped Tour in Washington on 14 June the set was ten songs, opening with Reasons and Hot Pursuit / One and Nothing and closing with Negativity and Borrowed Happiness. With the songs averaging under three minutes, that is a set of roughly twenty-five to thirty minutes, and the Bumbershoot slot was booked at exactly thirty. There is no sprawl and no acoustic interlude. Fans logging shows on setlist.fm have recorded them in record shops, a barbecue restaurant in Ojai and a Riverside municipal hall in the same summer as the stadium bookings.

The band's stated preference is for the small rooms. Ian told Good Call Music he wants every show to be crazy, with stage dives and pits and no barricades, citing Terror's view that barriers separate a band from its audience. Out of Rage's review described the live reputation as uproarious fun in the pits. On the support dates this autumn the format is the standard opening slot, with XCOMM on first, then Squid Pisser, then Dillinger on the west-coast run. In Atlanta they open for Guns N' Roses, which will test Ian's complaint about standing-still arena crowds on the biggest scale yet.