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The big review: Damnation Festival 2024
What happened when Nails, Gatecreeper, Cradle Of Filth and a ton more brought the noise to Manchester for the biggest Damnation Festival yet.
The former Balance And Composure frontman is releasing a new EP.
Balance And Composure may be dead, but frontman Jon Simmons is already making new music. He’s actually been making new music, joining the emo rap community with projects Misery Club (Wicca Phase Eternal Springs, Lil Zubin, Fantasy Camp, Nedarb, foxwedding) and Coward (with Wicca Phase Springs Eternal) before Balance And Composure was even officially over.
But of late, he’s been working on some solo material, and today on Twitter he made a very informal announcement of his new six-song EP titled Summer Demos for July 12th:
As of now, we know nothing about this mysterious new solo EP and/or what genre it will be, but we can only imagine that it'll be great.
Reflecting on Balance And Composure’s latest album, it makes so much sense why Jon has previously immersed himself in the world of emo rap. Light We Made was full of synths, autotune, and flirtatious lyricism.The wave of emo rap endures some conflicting opinions, but, when it comes down to it, you have to give these musicians props for pushing through it and following the direction they want to go in.
During Kerrang!'s recent look at the emo rap movement, we spoke to Smokeasac, who worked with Lil Peep, and he provided some important insight: “I think that the connection between hip-hop and heavy music has been there since both genres started. It wasn’t long before some of the OGs of the music scene were doing it; going all the way back to artists like Run-DMC and Korn and so many others. Working on our sound was kind of our way of introducing a whole new method of attacking that hip-hop and heavy mix. It felt right for both of us coming from musical backgrounds where we grew up being heavily influenced by rock bands and rap, and later on some of the people who were already combining those genres.”
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