Kyle Bond grew up with pages from Hit Parader plastered across his bedroom walls, getting into Shadows Fall, Unearth, Chimaira, Lamb of God and God Forbid, then catching those bands live at Dos Amigos in Odessa, Texas. That stuff stuck with him.
These days he’s fronting Erosion Choir, a five-piece metalcore band from the Pacific Northwest. Their debut EP, “Curse of Memory”, brings back plenty of that early-2000s heaviness, with some seriously personal stuff behind the songs. Kyle lost both parents around the age of 20, and the seven tracks deal with grief, religious guilt and everything he went through trying to make sense of it all.
We’re also premiering their new video for “Faith Based Flagellation Contract” right here on IDIOTEQ. You can check it out up top, and we’ve got the full story behind the song and the rest of the EP below.
The band had initially thrown around the phrase “third wave of American heavy metal”, which sounds like quite a claim for a new group. Kyle is quick to explain where it came from.
“The phrase wasn’t meant as a declaration of the beginning of some new movement. It initially came from a friend who jokingly made the remark months ago when hearing our band for the first time,” he says.
There was a genuine observation behind the joke, though. Records from the late 1990s and early 2000s are finding new audiences, with younger bands revisiting the sounds that dominated that period. Kyle remembers it from the other end, as someone who was there when a lot of those records first arrived.
“The core part of me as a human is a 12-14 year old kid sitting in his room with pages from hit parader magazine plastered all over my wall.”
Erosion Choir are interested in what musicians who grew up with those records can do with that music today. Remembering Never, Martyr AD, The Acacia Strain and Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza are among the bands that helped establish the starting point, alongside the metallic hardcore of Bury Your Dead and 7 Angels 7 Plagues.
The idea became more concrete when Kyle met guitarist Willow Garcia-Fitzpatrick, who had already spent a couple of years playing in Enterprise Earth.
“I dropped out of school at 18 to join Enterprise Earth and played with them until I was about 20,” Willow recalls.
He joined between the band’s first EP and their debut full-length, contributed solos and lead guitar parts, and experienced his first tours with a group operating at that level. Watching how Enterprise Earth developed their music also taught him a lot about taking an initial idea and getting everyone working towards the same result.
When he and Kyle met, they quickly settled on making what Willow calls a “moshy chaotic southern tinged metalcore band“. He liked having a specific direction to work towards, especially when the style pushed him into slightly unfamiliar territory.
Kyle was thinking about the concerts he had attended growing up, particularly the ones where the older hardcore crowd would turn up and make the pit genuinely intimidating.
“I wanted to bring in some Tony Danza / Psyopus type chaos but still have people beating the shit out of each other. End of the day, the shows i remember most were the heaviest ones, where all the OG mosh dudes in the scene would pop out and scare the fuck out you. That balance was kind of the whole point from the start.”
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Their work draws on down-tuned riffs, sharp rhythmic changes and the southern-tinged approach Kyle had in mind. “Dominions Bow“, the band’s first single, gets straight to a heavy opening riff, while the instrumental “10-56ONHWY385” provides a quieter stretch within an otherwise forceful set of songs.
“That opening riff is nasty and southern fried as fuck,” Kyle says of “Dominions Bow”. “It felt like a really immediate way to introduce what we do without overthinking it.”
The decision also made sense after the band’s earliest performances. “Dominions Bow” was already getting the strongest reaction from people moshing at their shows.
“It had the reaction we wanted before we ever put it out.”
Erosion Choir’s current lineup also includes guitarist Roy Trevino, bassist Kyle Bricker and drummer Alexander Cox. They played their first show in a backyard, arranged through friends of Kyle’s, and have been building things themselves around the Pacific Northwest.
For Willow, the whole experience brings back the way he first got involved with heavy music.
“Remember when you were 14 and you’d go see Lamb of God on Saturday and then on Monday, you’d skip school with your 4 idiot friends to go jam Laid to Rest in someone’s mom’s basement? That’s what we’re doing.”
The EP came together in similarly familiar surroundings. Stephen Ellis handled recording and reamping, with sessions taking place in his living room. Willow mixed and mastered the tracks, working on the mix in his home office. Kyle handled the artwork and layout himself.
They’re older now and have access to better resources, but Willow still likes the idea of getting friends together and seeing what they can make without handing the whole process over to somebody else.
The personal history behind the record goes back to Kyle’s upbringing in the West Texas Bible Belt.
“I grew up in a fairly religious household in the West Texas Bible Belt, and religious guilt is something I’ve been navigating my whole life. After losing both of my parents around 20, I really didn’t have much of a foundation for where to go from there.”
That loss changed how he dealt with faith. When something went wrong, he would often feel an obligation to punish himself, as though suffering could somehow put things right.
“For a long time, whenever I felt like I had fucked something up in life, there was this part of me that felt like I had to punish myself somehow to make it right in my head.”
It’s the experience behind “Faith Based Flagellation Contract”, the song receiving its official video premiere right here on IDIOTEQ.
The EP opens with “Intro (God Hates You)”, using a spoken sample in which the speaker identifies himself as the punishment of God, sent in response to humanity’s sins. Its source is left unidentified.
“Faith Based Flagellation Contract” then moves directly into Kyle’s experiences of panic attacks, intrusive anxiety and religious self-punishment. The lyrics describe difficulty breathing, physical distress and thoughts of suicide, before returning to the deaths that left him questioning his beliefs.
“I BURIED MY FAITH WITH THEIR BODIES”, he writes near the end of the song.
The accompanying video takes a different part of Kyle’s personal history and gives it a violent narrative. He directed the clip himself, with Zac Pinney behind the camera and Thomas Dierikx handling the edit.
“The video is basically a depiction of a part of myself I’ve always kept hidden,” Kyle explains.
The woman in the video represents the feminine approval he spent much of his life trying to obtain. His character eliminates people around him in pursuit of that approval, eventually presenting one of the victims almost as a monument to everything he has sacrificed along the way.
Kyle acknowledges that the meaning may be difficult to pick up from watching the clip alone. It’s a personal account of behaviour and feelings he has kept largely to himself.
The video was filmed at Chrysalis Studios in Walla Walla, Washington, with Dustin Jones and Madi Fitzpatrick-Garcia appearing as extras. Chrysalis is Kyle’s own informal creative space, a warehouse where he makes artwork and puts on DIY shows.
Much of “Curse of Memory” deals with what happens after the immediate shock of losing someone has passed. The title track concerns becoming so accustomed to grief that carrying it starts to seem normal. Kyle describes the strange familiarity of something that continues to hurt, yet has been present for so long that living without it becomes difficult to imagine.
The lyrics repeatedly connect religious language with that experience. One of the song’s central declarations is “I AM THE CHOIR / BAPTIZED IN GRIEF”, pulling together the two subjects that run through much of the record.
“A Conversation That Ends in Arson” deals with the guilt attached to leaving people behind. Kyle writes about growing out of relationships, recognising the harm in continually making himself smaller to keep somebody else comfortable, and eventually reaching the point where staying becomes impossible.
The instrumental “10-56ONHWY385” has an especially personal origin.
For approximately six months, Kyle drove Highway 385 every day to visit his father in hospital. It was the hospital where his father eventually died. In the title, he uses “10-56” to mean suicide, giving the short instrumental another direct connection to the grief and distress running through the EP.
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By the time “Dominions Bow” arrives, Kyle has reached a different point in his account of those years. The lyrics are still full of anger and religious references, but he has also begun to recognise that he survived what happened.
“LAUGH IN THE FACE / OF A SLOW CREEPING DEATH” opens the song, followed by the admission that grief itself had become part of how he kept going.
That progression continues into “Orphans Final Prayer“, the record’s final and longest track.
The song features a guest appearance from Lukas, vocalist of Eastern Washington deathcore band Notches on my Pistol.
Both bands played their first shows together, and Lukas contributes vocals in the bridge between the verses.
Much of “Orphans Final Prayer” is openly hostile towards religion. Kyle writes about rejecting heaven, suffering and the idea of being reunited with God after death. The language becomes increasingly severe before the closing lines turn back towards the memories of his parents.
For years, he had directed a great deal of anger towards God. The final part of the song addresses something that had been harder to confront, the memory of losing his parents when he was young and being completely unable to save them.
There was also a delay between writing those words and fully understanding what they meant to him.
The last line only became clear after the entire EP had been written. Looking back at the finished record, Kyle realised that much of his anger at religion had given him somewhere to direct feelings he had been unable to process at the time of his parents’ deaths.
“Fighting with heaven was just easier than going back to the memory of losing the two people who mattered most to me, at an age where I had no idea how to process any of it. The real thing I’ve been avoiding is returning to that place where I couldn’t save them.”
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Erosion Choir self-released the seven-track “Curse of Memory” on 9 October 2026, with the video for “Faith Based Flagellation Contract” premiering right in this piece. Following their release show over the weekend, the band are continuing to book concerts across the Pacific Northwest, with hopes of getting out on a wider tour next year.
