Song You Need: Dead Heat unleash hell with thrash-metal

The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.

Sincerity can be searing, and Dead Heat are a red-hot poker aimed at your eyeball. The Oxnard group put the thrash metal and hardcore punk sounds of the '80s into a suplex, contorting them in familiar yet fascinating ways. Consider "Endless Torment," the title track from their upcoming EP. Sci-fi synths sweep from channel to channel in the song's opening, like searchlights from the killer robots' spaceships scanning a scorched battlefield for survivors (once or twice, a bell tolls). Like Slayer's "Raining Blood," a close sibling of "Endless Torment," this is a setting of the stage — soon, Dead Heat emerge on a plume of ripping metal rage, bellowing existential entreaties and clobbering out mosh-ready rhythms. Far from kayfabe of metal bands past, "Endless Torment" and Dead Heat are terrifying serious and thrillingly themselves.