From Below: members of Catharsis, Point of No Return & Bellafea form new metallic hardcore band

From Below is a new band featuring Matt Miller (guitar) and Ernie Hayes (bass) from North Carolina metalcore vets Catharsis, vocalist Fred Freitas of Brazilian metalcore vets Point of No Return, and drummer Nathan Buchanan of H.C. McEntire‘s old band Bellafea. In a new interview with IDIOTEQ, Matt cited Discharge, Corrosion of Conformity, Crumbsuckers, Christian Death, Cro-Mags, Wolfbrigade, and Disfear as influences on this project, and Fred shined a light on how the band came together:

I’ve known Ernie (bass) and Matt (guitar) since the late 1990s, when I visited North Carolina and hung out with them and the rest of their band, CATHARSIS. I got to know them better when I organized CATHARSIS’s South American tour in 2000, and I stayed in touch with them through social media in the years that followed. Eventually, I moved to the U.S. and ended up in North Carolina. In the fall of 2023, Matt posted on social media about his desire to form a new band. I commented on the post, and he invited me to sing for the band. He also invited Nathan to play drums.

Back in the day, Nathan played in Bellafea, but now he was interested in something more hardcore punk. We started practicing around September 2023, writing new songs from the get-go. But since we’re all older and busy with other commitments, it can be hard to get everyone in the same room to practice. Still, we’ve been meeting three to four times a month and already have about nine songs. In the end, writing songs and lyrics wasn’t the hardest part—the real challenge was agreeing on a name for the band.

Their debut EP The Deeds of Monsters comes out April 1 via Bitter Melody Records and Refuse Records, and the ferocious first single “Teratomachia” is out now. It’s a fast-paced metallic hardcore ripper and it finds the band commenting on nuclear war. “But instead of discussing the future—the looming threat of nuclear devastation and the post-apocalyptic reality it would unleash,” Fred told IDOTEQ, “we focus on the past: the actual nuclear attacks that have occurred in history and the devastation and trauma they caused. The ‘monsters’ refer both to the tropes people use to make sense of their trauma and to the actual men (and they were, without exception, men) who decided to launch such attacks, driven by an abhorrent and self-serving utilitarian rationale.”

Of the other two songs, Fred says “Feitoria” is about “colonialism, particularly the Portuguese in Africa and South America between the 1500s and 1900s” and “Empire’s Deceit” “explores the seemingly contradictory yet intrinsically linked relationship between imperialism abroad and xenophobia at home—an attitude that defines much of the right’s politics today.”

Check the new song out below…

The Deeds of Monsters by From Below