Mitchell Layton spent a year and a half yelling vocals in his mom’s basement and recording DI guitar parts on his apartment couch — then sent the files to John Naclerio, the engineer behind records by My Chemical Romance and Senses Fail, to mix and master. That gap between the process and the result is basically the Pipe Bomb story in miniature.
“Hell Hole,” out March 18th on streaming platforms with vinyl available via Resuscitation Records Records, is the debut full-length from Pipe Bomb, Layton’s solo metalcore project that he started in 2023 while already playing guitar and touring with indie punk band Church Girls. The itch was simple enough: he grew up on Norma Jean, Every Time I Die, and The Chariot, and wanted somewhere to put that energy.
“I started writing demos for fun,” Layton explains, “just recording guitar tracks on Logic and adding MIDI drums.” His brother Steven was a potential drummer, but schedules didn’t align, so rather than wait, Layton bought a bass at Guitar Center, drove to his mom’s place, found an old condenser mic, and tracked everything himself. The first single — “False God” — went up with low expectations. For a few days, quiet. Then a friend passed it to Sean at KingdomCore, who shared it on Instagram. Layton woke up with 1,000 new followers. “I get that that’s not a big deal for a lot of artists,” he says, “but for me, it was huge.”
What followed was a stretch of releasing one song at a time, then the “Stomp EP” in 2024 on The Charon Collective. For “Hell Hole,” Layton went deeper — ten tracks, more ground to cover, and a conscious push into adjacent territory.
Tracks like “Tabloid” and “Bliss” pull into false grind; “Straight Edge Hate” lands in a harder, more modern hardcore pocket. The chaotic metalcore/mathcore backbone holds it together, but nothing here sounds like it was checked against a genre rulebook first.
“I didn’t overthink it,” Layton says.
“If I liked it, I recorded it. I wanted every song to sound like me, not like I was trying to copy my favorite bands. So if I got an idea and it felt sincere, it’s on the track, regardless of whether it felt ‘too hardcore’ or ‘too metal’ compared to what I’ve done before.”
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Lyrically, “Hell Hole” moves across depression and mental health, the Straight Edge lifestyle, and modern politics and its relationship to the Christian gospel. Layton doesn’t frame any of it as resolved.
“Life was pretty turbulent for me mentally when I was writing this album, both in terms of my take on existence and my outlook on the people around me,” he says.
“Looking back, the emotions behind most of these songs were overwhelmingly negative. I know there can be pain and anger in truth, but I was getting a bit lopsided. I felt like there wasn’t really much I could do to solve any of the problems I saw around me, so these songs were a way of dissecting a world that’s upside down.”
Production credits: guitar, vocals, and bass all handled by Layton; drums by his brother Steven Layton; artwork by Jonathan Zboray. After months of painstaking self-editing — “I was driving myself a little bit crazy, to be honest” — Layton sent the files to Naclerio at Nada Recording to mix and master.
Getting a live lineup together came with its own friction. Layton’s perfectionism nearly killed the idea before it started; he’d convinced himself that if Pipe Bomb couldn’t match what he’d pictured on stage, it wasn’t worth attempting. The soft launch happened through his other band Plead the Widow’s Cause: a few of those members offered to run through “False God” during a Plead set. It clicked well enough to move forward. The lineup now includes Plead members on guitar and bass and Steven Layton on drums.
Progress has been incremental and honest about it. “As with everything in Pipe Bomb, I’m kind of winging it as I go,” Layton says.
“This live lineup is a work in progress, and we’re still learning the songs. I’m also in the process of relearning how to scream because I blow my voice out whenever I do it. My style of guitar playing is a bit faster and more spastic than a lot of the guys are used to, and the tempos are very fast for the drums specifically, so that’s been a learning curve as well. But we’re figuring it out. And we’re having fun.”
Pipe Bomb has two festival dates confirmed: AudioFeed Music Festival in Illinois and Undead Revival Festival in Ohio.
“The fact that anyone cares enough to buy merch or wants to see Pipe Bomb live is wild to me,” Layton says. “Things have grown more than I thought they would since that first demo I released, so I want to do it justice and bring the same energy of the recording to the stage.”
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