Aural Aggravation

Christopher Nosnibor

When you’ve singlehandedly created a new subgenre, what better way than to cement the trail you’ve blazed with a release bearing its name? This is precisely what Eville had done here with the Brat Metal EP. For the uninitiated, their unique contribution to the musical landscape has been to give the slugging, concrete-slab guitar riffery of nu-metal a makeover, and by blending it with strong pop elements and delivering it all with a strong, empowering feminist message and truckloads of attitude, they’ve kicked the whole ‘sports metal’ ‘rock for jocks’ kind of thing in the nuts and made it something that’s culturally relevant here in 2025.

Maybe I need to unpack ‘relevant’ here. It’s a fact that in music, what goes around comes around, and there are always cycles of recycling, revivals and renaissances, waves and generations. But a nu-metal revival always seemed unlikely because it was so patently uncool, even at the time. But here we are: a new generation is discovering Limp Bizkit, who are back and riding a wave that combines nostalgia for those who were in their teens around the turn of the millennium, and the fact their kids are now teens who are educating themselves with their parents’… what, Spotify playlists now? But more significantly, women are still having to fight just as hard now as they ever did just to hold ground. Sexism, misogyny, and abuse are rife, and there are enablers everywhere.

This all makes Eville’s rapid ascent even more impressive, and something the world truly needs. It’s remarkable just how a flip can transform testosterone-led whiny shit into something truly powerful, and Eville have, over the course of a handful of single releases gone from being hopeful newcomers to Kerrang favourites performing Reading and Leeds with festival dates already on the calendar for 2026. There’s a very good reason for this: as I’ve been saying from their very inception, they’ve completely nailed their sound, are confident in their identity, and have killer tunes.

Brat Metal offers four more. None of the songs on here breach the three-minute mark, and all are thumping, riff-driven blasts bristling with hooks. ‘BR4T MBL’ powers in with a Prodigy / later Pitch Shifter vibe paired with sneering vocals which are autotuned to fuck for the verses, but then switch to a lung-busting guttural roar. Single cuts ‘No Pictures Please’ and ‘Accidents Happen’ bring real attack, sassy rap and stuttering beats colliding with force. In the former, ‘bitches’ takes on a different slant when delivered by a woman, and it feels like there’s a reclamation of sexist language happening here.

‘Bikini Top’ again brings the dense chug and squalling harmonics of Pitch Shifter, and at the same time offers the flippant lyrical simplicity of Wet Leg’s ‘Chaise Longue’ but it’s charged with the challenge to the male gaze, and it’s a lesson in how it’s possible to make music that’s heavy but accessible, to entertain while offering substance instead of mere fluff. Brat Metal shows that Eville can sustain the intensity and the quality over the duration of more than just standalone singles: it is packed solid, and their most focused document yet.

AA