Brighton’s Fakeyourdeath already made a strong case with “Shapeshifter” earlier this year — we covered the single back in February when it dropped, and the response was hard to ignore. Now their second EP “(Non)entity” is out in full, produced again by Wayne Adams (Petbrick, Big Lad, Wasted Death), and it lands as a more complete, more layered thing than what came before.
Four tracks, each digging into a different corner of identity — love, self-erasure, mental health, outward anger — held together by the electronic-meets-post-hardcore formula the duo has been sharpening since their debut “null/void.”
What’s worth noting upfront: the EP that exists almost didn’t. Fakeyourdeath wrote and recorded an entire EP before this one and shelved it. Vocalist Candi Underwood is blunt about why. “It just wasn’t good enough and felt more performative. You could tell we were trying to find something new but we weren’t quite getting it.” Sam, who handles the music, puts it similarly — they wrote nearly twice as many tracks as the four that ended up on the finished release, but the first batch didn’t click. “I think we were focusing too much on what we thought people wanted to hear from us, which I perceived at the time to be a more modern metal influence.”
The turning point was “The Parasite That Never Gives In,” which, ironically, was one of the first things Sam wrote when the band started working on stuff during the pandemic. “The direction locked in for this release when we finished that track,” he says. “It felt like a return to the initial focus of the band from there on.” From Underwood’s side, the breakthrough was more of a feeling in the room — a synergy where both of them recognized they’d made something that fit. “It’s just a feeling you sometimes get, so I guess it was both,” she says of whether it was lyrical or sonic. “We then kept building upon that to refine it and bring it to where it is today.”
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The EP opens with “X/Y,” released as a single on February 27th. It’s a desperate, visceral track about needing love and questioning whether you deserve it at all. “X/Y is a reflection on a desperate need for love. It explores how our own demons can taint our expectations and make us question whether we are worthy of it at all. It’s dark and it’s brutal, but it’s also hopeful. Sometimes you just have to let things go and that’s ok.”
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The vocals on this one are heavy. “They are really brutal and I think you can hear the pain in the delivery really clearly,” she adds. One lyric in particular stands out to her: “give me a reason to haunt you.” “It feels so desperate and visceral. It’d almost be taken as romantic if it wasn’t so dark.”
“Shapeshifter” follows — the first single, the one that broke through on Alex Baker’s Fresh Blood show on Kerrang! Radio. It deals with unmasking, fighting your own instinct to people-please, and letting yourself be seen. Underwood wrote it at a point where she needed it: “I really needed to open myself up and stop being afraid to be seen.” We wrote about the track in detail back in February — how it marked a vocal shift for her, more singing alongside the screaming, quick switches between the two, a spoken section she called “this soliloquy of hope.”
Then the two new tracks. “R.I.P.M.E” is, in Underwood’s words, “essentially one big cry for help.” It follows the experience of asking for help when your body and brain feel like they’re working against you. She loves the contrast in it — musically it hits like a bop, lyrically it’s devastating. Her favourite lyric on the whole EP sits here: “if self-help is so helpful why do I feel so alone.” “I think for anyone that has struggled with their mental health or their identity, we’re served this idea that quick fixes will make it better and the truth is it just doesn’t. Healing takes time and no amount of money thrown at quick-fixes makes any difference. It just makes it worse.”
The closer, “The Parasite That Never Gives In,” turns things outward. Less personal reflection, more directed fury. “As humans we do suck,” Underwood says flatly. “We do destroy things and take a lot for granted, and this song is an anger anthem.” The final section is a list of horrible things, repeated, looping — “almost like the voices in your head just going round and round. Utterly horrible.”
The thematic thread across all four tracks — identity fracturing rather than transforming — wasn’t planned. Underwood says it was organic, each song written separately while she was going through a difficult stretch, with some overlap. “I guess there was a natural theme because it was coming from my feelings at the time; coming from my head and my problems, but no it wasn’t on purpose. It was a natural progression and different pieces of a puzzle that just fit when you heard them together.”
She was also doing a lot of therapy during this period, which fed directly into the writing. “Writing this EP was a real help in saying things I was unable to say in person and dealing with some things I had been struggling with for a long time. It definitely helped me to cope during that time and to get back on the same team as my head.”
Sonically, Sam leaned harder into the harsh textures from their earlier stuff but consciously blended them with more upbeat, energetic samples. “I wanted the sound to be hard hitting sonically with an underlying tone of industrial coldness that hopefully creates an uneasy emotional feeling for the listener.” The EP functioning as one connected piece matters to them — not four singles loosely grouped. “These 4 tracks are a statement of our intent, where we are at sonically right now, and highlights our artistic hunger to create something different.”
Underwood is clear about wanting listeners to hear the whole thing as intended: “Now the whole EP is out there, not just the singles, hopefully people will be able to see it’s as multifaceted and messy as we are.”
The press around the band has been consistent. Metal Hammer compared their sound to the territory between the Dillinger Escape Plan and the Armed. Noizze called them “genuine and needed” in a genre they described as too often “sanitised and sterile.” Alex Baker said of “Shapeshifter” that if it was any indication of the EP, “we are in for an absolute treat.” Their debut EP tracks landed on the Kerrang! chart, Knotfest’s “Pulse Of The Maggots” playlist, Metal Hammer’s best new songs list, and BBC Introducing Rock on Radio 1 with Alyx Holcombe. Total Rock gave them debut single of the year. They’ve shared stages with Empire State Bastard, Youth Code, Lake Malice, Graphic Nature, Saint Agnes, Zand, Frontierer, the St Pierre Snake Invasion, and Tokky Horror, and played Noizzefest and Arctangent Festival. Remixes with Copse, 601, Death Goals, El Moono, and Tayne — also featured on Kerrang! — have kept things moving between releases, with more collaborations lined up.
Health, Nine Inch Nails, Youth Code — the influences are audible and acknowledged. But “(Non)entity” doesn’t just recycle that lineage. It puts something lived and specific through the machine. And the band is already writing again.
“We’ve already begun writing again for the next one,” Underwood confirms.
