When it comes to heavy, boundary-pushing music, Empty Shell Casing are an absolute kick in the head. The Dallas-Fort Worth sextet have already made an indelible impression with their slippery and altogether mind-blowing approach to the heavy rock sound—folding in rap-rock’s innate sense of groove, the cavernous beats affiliated with electronic subgenres like techno and dubstep, and metalcore’s serrated blast-beat breakdowns. The result is a sonic style that you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in the American hard rock underground, and their forthcoming mixtape on Atlantic’s newly minted Deep Love Recordings imprint only stands to broaden their cultural impact. If you’re not tapped in to what these guys are up to now, you’d best be caught up before they’re everywhere.

The group—comprised of vocalist Jakaree, DJ Punchdrunk, guitarist/singer Jak, drummer Ben, guitarist Zach, and bassist Aden—formed within the always-thriving hardcore and metal scene in Dallas-Fort Worth, making their live debut alongside DJ Punchdrunk’s former band Since My Beloved and clocking time onstage with bands like I Promised the World and Bullets Between Tongues. “We met all these people from going to shows, and all of us knew each other,” Ben says. “We were very fortunate to have a very good first couple shows that gave us some traction.”

Their snarling debut EP And Slowly…As I Turn My Back from 2024 was written and recorded over the course of eight months, built partially from discarded demos that Ben had previously intended for a prior band: “We took pieces of riffs and rewrote them a million times, with everyone giving their ideas. We were so busy, and we were all in, like, five bands—but because we were so invested in all of the bands we were in, it helped us write better because we were so sharp.” “We recorded vocals in Jakaree’s closet, and we recorded guitars at our practice space,” DJ Punchdrunk adds. “It was very indicative of how we were brought up, and what all brought us here.”

Around this time, the band came in contact with Deep Love Recordings boss Cody Verdecias—who’s previously worked in an A&R capacity with similarly iconoclastic acts like 100 gecs, Rico Nasty, and Turnstile—after appearing on a livestream hosted by the viral meme Twitter account “crazy ass moments in nu metal history.” “Cody had already heard of us because of videos on the internet of us playing with I Promised the World,” Ben recalls, “and after he tuned into that interview, he hit us up and we talked to him that same night. As we kept in contact, we just kept moving forward.”

Empty Shell Casing’s first release under the Deep Love Recordings umbrella was 2025’s two-tracker Empty, which featured the ferocious singles “Grasp” and “Push Away.” Whereas the group has always drawn from prior influences like the genre-busting work of French nü-metal collective Team Nowhere and gabber’s intense, dizzying pulse, Empty saw the group taking full advantage of new tools that upgraded studio spaces afforded. “It was the reasonable next step for the band,” Ben explains. ”We were very thankful to have the opportunity to go into a real studio to record, which influenced the sound of the music itself.”

And the takeaways from those sessions further informed Empty Shell Casing’s forthcoming mixtape, which DJ Punchdrunk says is the result of an increase in detail-oriented focus that has made the group’s all-edges sound that much sharper. “We’ve been super involved in the mixing process, and all of the production has been super time-consuming and detail-oriented,” he explains. “As a producer, I had an epiphany that pretty much all of our influences up until this point have been from 1998 and earlier. I was focused on trying to keep an old-school sound, and it wouldn’t stick—so we started to pull from more more modern examples of electronic music.”

Indeed, “MT” breaks the door open with hellhound electronic textures that are reminiscent of dubstep’s brutal beauty and techno’s tunnel-vision cyberdelia, before bursting into a scratch-heavy rap-rock groove that’s whiplash-inducing in the best possible sense. Midway through the bruising “No Reason,” Empty Shell Casing cast a net of electronic samples and tangled beats that sound like something Aphex Twin might cook up if he spent more time in the pit—before a metalcore breakdown washes everything away in one awesome wave. “There’s so many more layers to it,” Ben says of the song, “and it took us accruing the last several years of experience to get to a point where we can make a track like this.”

Sounds like a lot, right? Well, that’s precisely the point of what Empty Shell Casing are up to. “It’s about maximum energy and embracing maximalism as a whole,” DJ Punchdrunk explains while discussing the band’s main aim as they put the finishing touches on their mixtape, before issuing the rhetorical dare, “How many tracks can we put in our DAW before we send it off to get mastered?” For a band that sounds as exciting as Empty Shell Casing, such suggestions of gamemanship are purely thrilling when it comes to the future. Wherever they keep taking their sound, it’s a guarantee that you’ll want to be there to hear it all go down.