Album of the Year lists are always exciting and intimidating for me. I wonder if I’ve listened to enough of the right music, what a list would say about my tastes, and contemplate countless other insecurities. But the exciting part? People share the music they love with me, and I find new and exceptional artists. Our editor, David, was chatting with me about his favourite death metal releases of 2024, and an artist I hadn’t encountered before jumped off the list and caught my… ahem… eye: Eye Eater.
Eye Eater‘s debut record, Alienate, landed in August 2024, contrasting the summer weather where I live with cold, brutal dissonance. But it wasn’t just the claustrophobic, brooding, dissonant death metal atmosphere that captivated me. Once I wandered through the fog, I found an album that rewarded me with repeat listens, unveiling surprisingly groovy, technical, hooky riffs and eerie sung melodies amidst cavernous growls. It’s no wonder Alienate appeared on our 2024 AOTY list.
The band’s sound is a chaotic yet calculated maelstrom, drawing from the depths of dissonant death metal, progressive metalcore, and blackened post-metal. This potent mixture is evident from the creeping guitar lines opening the record’s title track, jaggedly skittering into blast beats and syncopated chugs that possibly answer the question, ‘What if Ulcerate and Vildhjarta collaborated?’ Even in David and I’s first conversation about the band, we knew we had to cover this band as a Weekly Featured Artist.
Eye Eater evolved from Thunderwalker, guitarist and vocalist Richard M’s solo project. Still, as the New Zealand musician’s songwriting evolved, he knew he wanted to expand beyond a solo endeavor and start bringing on bandmates, immediately thinking of longtime friend and bassist Evan T. ‘Evan was always my first choice for a bassist,’ Richard explains. ‘We played together in a band called Incarnium ten or so years ago, have remained very close friends, and I’ve always loved his approach to writing bass parts.’
Finding the right drummer took more time, but eventually, a mutual friend introduced Richard to David A: ‘After chatting with him and writing some stuff together, it became clear he was a great fit for the group as well, in terms of personality as well as his style of playing.’
The band’s name, Eye Eater, references the Māori warrior Kereopa Te Rau, who, in 1865, consumed the eyes of a hanged and decapitated missionary, calling one eye the parliament and the other the Queen and British law.
While the trio’s musical backgrounds span everything from jazz and hip-hop to indie and EDM, their collective foundation in metal is firmly rooted in progressive, dissonant, blackened, and atmospheric death metal. Richard explains, ‘One thing that we all agree on with Eye Eater is not being locked into any one subgenre of extreme metal… Anything is on the table as long as it’s heavy or nasty.’
Even with this breadth of musical interests, much of the band’s sound coalesce around shared influences like Ulcerate, Artificial Brain, Cattle Decapitation, Départe, and Meshuggah. This breadth is evident, even on the shortest track of eight on Alienate, “Teachings of the Insentient”, demonstrate this balance thoughtfully, with TesseracT-esque delay-soaked lines contrasting groaning, lurching post-metal that would not be amiss on an Amenra record. Elsewhere, “Other Planets” bounces and “Failure Artefacts” uses crushing, down-tuned grooves that can only be inspired by a love and dedication to Meshuggah, giving Alienate an enjoyable energy, momentum, and groove that a lot of dissonant death metal shies away from.
The result is an amorphous, genre-defying sound. Sometimes, I’m not sure why I do music journalism when a listener on Bandcamp summed up the record perfectly: ‘Feels like a progressive metalcore album disguised as a blackened death album chained in the basement of a post-metal album (positive).’
As a person who writes songs often, I’m always curious how others go about this esoteric process, and Eye Eater‘s is one I’ve never heard of before! Richard started writing Alienate with a loose concept and a handful of working titles. He then collaborated with writer and poet Nicola, who crafted poems inspired by the titles. These poems in turn influenced Richard’s riff writing, shaping the structure of the songs. ‘I also wrote all the drums for Alienate, since at this point I hadn’t met David,’ he explains. ‘After I got done with the guitars and drums, I shaped the poems into lyrics that I felt fit the tracks, while Evan started working on bass parts based on guitar tabs and rough demos. After that, all you have to do is play it perfectly—then I did the mix, and Evan did the master. Easy as that, haha.‘
Despite never having played a show or invested heavily in promotion, Alienate has racked up over 50,000 streams across Spotify and Bandcamp, and the album even saw a tape release through Sludgelord Records (limited copies still available via Bandcamp): ‘The response has been incredible, to be honest. We’re absolutely blown away.’
Eye Eater is currently onto the writing process for their second album, and this time, all three members have been involved from the very beginning. ‘It’s been great to learn how we all write music and find out what kind of ideas we want to bring to future Eye Eater releases,’ Richard says. While there’s no firm release date yet, they’re aiming for early 2026.
For now, the band remains focused on finishing the record. Live performances and further plans remain uncertain, but if Alienate is anything to go by, whatever comes next will be something worth paying attention to.
Follow Eye Eater on Bandcamp and Facebook to stay up to date with their latest release and upcoming projects.
Eye Eater is:
Richard M – Guitar/Vocals
Evan T – Bass
David A – Drums
