The first time DEATH META got real was when Corey Regensburg opened his DAW in LA and started building what would become “[DESECRATED]”. The idea had been sitting for years—just a name tossed around by longtime friend and designer Kyle Stetz.
But after a reunion trip in late 2024 to see The Blood Brothers and Deaf Club, a window opened. Jeremy Garber, drummer, label head at Grind Select, and Corey’s oldest collaborator, flew out from Philadelphia.
They hadn’t hung like that since high school. “We started reminiscing on a lot of the music that inspired us back in the day,” Jeremy said. “Our high school ‘myspacegrind’/deathcore/whatever you want to call it band (A Dire Symphony).”
Out of that visit came a torrent of wild, off-kilter demos. The resulting record, MALWARE, is DEATH META’s debut LP, out September 5 via Grind Select. The album is built from jagged breakdowns, layered electronics, and a deliberately unstable songwriting structure. “Think myspace grind meets beatdown/slam meets bleak, gazy post-metal,” Jeremy says. Weekly singles lead up to the release, starting with “[BLOWHARD]”, available now.
The group behind the chaos is a tight unit: Corey (vocals, production), Jeremy (drums), Kyle (art and guitars), and Zach Trebino (bass, visuals). Each member has a hand in the presentation. Zach’s videos repurpose warped VHS footage to match the sonic unease. Kyle’s art pushes the project further off-axis.
The logo feels bent, broken, wrong in a way that’s intentional. And the album art? It’s a phone photo of Jeremy’s son’s ultrasound. “I pulled it up and said ‘this is going to be the art’.
Corey immediately agreed,” Jeremy explains. “My son’s birth was a very difficult experience. Seeing those images is still very distressing to me. I was able to talk candidly with Corey about it… It’s both horrific and beautiful—the essence of what it means to be alive.”
DEATH META leans into that edge. It’s not just breakdowns; it’s the twists between them. “It’s never been just about ‘let’s write a cool breakdown,’” Jeremy says. “It’s about the in-betweens… arriving at these explosive moments in more unexpected ways.” That approach carries through “[DIE FASTER]”, one of the more pummeling cuts on the record, with lines like:
Die
Die faster
Die
Die as fast as you can
Caught bleeding out
Without a suture or a remedy
They’re inching closer
They’re plotting torture
They’re putting out feelers
They’re feeling your innards
They’re eating your future
They’re inhaling your dreams
The lyrics hit somewhere between body horror and burnout. And they’re meant to. “This LP feels like that ethos embodied in musical form,” Jeremy explains, referencing the name Grind Select, which he and Corey coined at performing arts summer camp. “The act of Grind Selecting is when you put money in a vending machine, simultaneously mash all the buttons and accept the fate of the grind lords.”
MALWARE is that broken vending machine. Corey’s production draws from his electronic project Moon Bounce, where odd time signatures and unexpected chord progressions have always been part of the toolkit. “Even when Corey was primarily focused on producing pop/electronic music… I still heard the musical DNA he applied to our early endeavors,” Jeremy says.
The DNA in question traces back to Long Island. Bands like The Great Redneck Hope, Destroyer Destroyer, Thumbscrew, and On Broken Wings. Local acts like This Years Addiction and Fire For Effect. The sound that shaped their teenage years is all over MALWARE, just filtered through years of experimentation and trauma. “The way I look at the album is really a love letter to all the music that shaped us in our adolescence,” Jeremy says. “It captured some pretty special, lightning-in-a-bottle energy.”
The release of MALWARE also comes with a full set of visualizers for each track. Each one leans into the discomfort—grainy, analog, and twitchy. They’re all live now as the band drops singles in weekly succession.
Death Meta is a wild pack of four friends pulling a thread from 2006 and watching it unravel into something meaner. The band’s just getting started, but for now, they’re letting the glitches speak. Ouch!
