You know that feeling — the one where a riff kicks in and you’re immediately back in 2004, watching some band from New Jersey tear through a VFW basement? 50 Days At Iliam deliver exactly that kind of voltage. Northern NJ metalcore with the urgency of Comeback Kid, the emotional rollercoaster of early Atreyu, the technical ambition of Counterparts, and a streak of Horse The Band and Enter Shikari-style electronics woven through.
The first time you hit play, there’s no slow build or gentle intro — it’s early Bleeding Through aggression meeting metallic hardcore meeting those wicked synth textures from the Underoath era that rewired your brain back in the day. Melodic vocals sit on top of it all, and suddenly you remember what that specific energy felt like when 2000s post-hardcore was the most exciting thing happening in music. This is no boring stuff, and the potential here is enormous.
The band’s debut demo, out February 6 via Bored Science Ltd. (home to Pyre and Ogbert The Nerd), spans five tracks that vocalist, guitarist, and lead songwriter Jordan Emanuel describes as “grandiose, sprawling tracks that don’t sacrifice edge for gravitas.” And if you listen closely, he says, “there’s a ton of musical easter eggs to pull out.”
But the road to this demo was anything but straightforward.
50 Days At Iliam didn’t start as 50 Days At Iliam. They started as Final Resting Pose — a group of friends who set out to play metalcore from the jump.
“Despite playing metalcore being what we set out to do from the beginning, a clash of influences sparked by turnover led us down a different path,” Emanuel explains. A turbulent first year of revolving lineups eventually whittled the project down to a three-piece: Emanuel, guitarist Chris Selman, and drummer Ori Yekutiel. Emanuel took over bass, and the trio cranked out a debut EP he describes as “an amalgam of death metal, hardcore, noise rock, and stoner metal.” Not what they’d originally planned, but in Emanuel’s words, “those songs were all pure feeling, a time capsule of where we were as a group.”
They gigged hard around the Northeast. Jack Carino of Stress Spells stepped in on second guitar and contributed to some of the stuff now on the demo, but left once his other project started gaining local traction. Around the same time, the remaining members were feeling pulled toward heavier territory. “We were listening to a lot of bands like 200 Stab Wounds, Death, Atheist, and Darkness Everywhere at the time,” Emanuel says. He swapped back to guitar, and bassist Mark Dempsey — bringing a jam background and serious metal enthusiasm — completed the lineup. “The four of us were aligned under a single idea, and we needed to mark that with a new name.”
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That name came from a trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Emanuel stumbled upon Cy Twombly’s “50 Days At Iliam” — an expressionist series of paintings based on The Iliad. He admits he wasn’t initially sold on expressionism as a movement. “Visually, a lot of them are very cool, but shallow. I thought that until I came across ‘The Fire That Consumes All Before It’, the imposing midpoint of Twombly’s series where a fire engulfs the city of Troy.”
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He stood there, drawn in completely. “The paint strokes almost resemble hands reaching out of the fire, the blood red hue signaled the pain lying within it, and its imposing size made it impossible to ignore. I was hypnotized by it.” Suddenly the rest of the series clicked — what he’d dismissed as shallow now read as raw depictions of humanity’s most fundamental emotions. “They were modern-day cave paintings, all unified under free expression. The throughline of the Iliad was always present, but Twombly used that universal story to work through something personal, and that is what unifies it all.”
The demo itself was tracked in the band’s rehearsal studio in Rutherford, NJ — a good choice to keep things textured and intimate. They enlisted their friend Mike, known for ambient work under the name N.Minsi, to record and mix. Drums were finished, and then Mike got called to work in Singapore for an undefined stretch. Could’ve derailed the whole thing, but he left his microphones and recording gear behind. Emanuel took over as lead engineer, tracking guitars, bass, and vocals through amp simulation and DI boxes. “It was a grueling process, and it took a lot out of us, but I’m immensely proud of the way the songs came out.”
Lyrically, the five tracks explore love, betrayal, anxiety, and relief — framed as both existential threats and liberators.
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Previously performing as Final Resting Pose, they’ve already shared stages with Massa Nera, Respire, Come Mierda, and Catalyst, and played 2024’s Dilly Dally Festival in Philadelphia. A release show is set for February 7 at CoLab Arts in New Brunswick, NJ.
50 Days At Iliam is: Jordan Emanuel – vocals, guitar & samples, Chris Selman – guitar, Ori Yekutiel – drums, Mark Dempsey – bass & backing vocals.
