By Staff Writer James Mellen III.
From Aerosmith to The Mighty Mighty Bosstones to Pixies the greater Boston area has been the cradle of incredible music acts for years, and will continue to create great and innovative acts for years to come.
Boston is known all around the country for it’s every-present and diehard punk and hardcore scene, with legendary venues like The Palladium and The Rat Cellar, and immortal hardcore bands like Gang Green and Jerry’s Kids.
The legacy of these bands has been fulfilled by bands like Four Years Strong, and more recently Wind Walkers, a 5 piece metal/ hardcore band from central Massachusetts, who are making great strides towards being the next big hardcore band from Mass.
WInd Walkers formed in late 2014, but in 2018 have made huge strides towards their goals. In June they released their first full length album The Lost Boys.
The album is 40 minutes and twelve songs long, and is absolutely unreal place for the band to start. The musicality of the album reaches from slow melodic metal to hard-hitting fast paced post hardcore beatdowns. The band shows off not only their technical skills and musicality, but also their appreciation and deep knowledge of the scene they represent, the band also shows off their roots on the song New England Palm Trees.
On Halloween the band released a music video for the single off the album “Reservations For Dorsia”.The band also released a metal cover of Halsey’s Without Me on October 24th.
Reservations For Doria is one of my favorites on the album, immediately assaulting you with an intense rhythmic intro, only to bait you into the more melodic chorus. The video has a clear horror theme, with chilling images of men bathing in blood.
The video was taken down and re-uploaded, so the exact amount of views is difficult to estimate. However the band has 30 thousand followers on Instagram and 40 thousand monthly spotify listeners. By comparison, a much more established band like Counterparts gets about 127 thousand monthly listeners.
WHile Boston;’s legacy is mostly placed in hardcore and metal music, the hip hop scene is slowly making a name for itself.
Cousin Stizz is the most obvious example of a newly established Boston rapper, attracting attention of rappers like Drake and the late MAc Miller (Rest In Peace) who he opened for on tour.
Stizzy currently has three albums since 2015, and has an average of 718 thousand monthly spotify listeners, and played at Umass Dartmouth earlier this year.
However earlier this month local Brockton rapper Dtheflyest released a music video for his song Fugazi ft. Lil Baby. The video received 1.5 million views on youtube, and for good reason, the song is nothing short of excellent. The song does nothing particularly innovative to the standard billboard rap song, it just does it really really well. As a huge Lil Baby fan, it pains me to write that the low point of the song is Lil Baby’s feature, however Dtheflyest’s verse and hook clearly outperform the more famous artist.
Dtheflyest released the song in preparation for his new mixtape Dope Boy Diaries, which dropped on November 9th. The tape shows great potential for the up and coming Brockton rapper. The tape is reminiscent of a Lil Durk project both in style and talent level, however D put his own spin on the classic trap style, using his laidback flow over simplistic beats to paint a dark picture of the life he lived in Brockton.
Between these two acts, 2018 has been a fantastic year for local Massachusetts music acts, and while the music I’ve been around is separate from these act, it’s been nothing but an honor to be apart of the music scenes around the South Shore.
If you’ve never seen and supported local music acts, I couldn’t recommend it more, some of the best nights of my life have been spent in a garage or a basement. I’ve been to shows with 50 people that had more energy behind it than shows witt 10,000 attendees, and there’s something so powerful about nights spent like that.