With panic-inducing chords and down-tuned Jim Root Strats, Jesus Piece are on a mission to shake up metalcore and write riffs that disturb you

Gregory Adams
·2 min read
Jesus Piece
Jesus Piece

As far as omens go, finding out about a studio flood the weekend before you’re supposed to make your new album seems like a bad one. That’s the unlikely predicament Philadelphia’s Jesus Piece found themselves in ahead of recording their sophomore full-length, …So Unknown, when a burst pipe at Belleville, New Jersey’s The Machine Shop forced producer Randy Leboeuf to frantically clear gear out of his lower-floor control room to avoid some serious water damage.

“It was terrible timing,” Jesus Piece guitarist John DiStefano recalls of the plumbing disaster. Leboeuf was nevertheless quick on his feet to keep the sessions on-pace, ultimately setting the metallic hardcore quintet up in The Machine Shop’s upstairs drum room. “Luckily there was a studio already built up there, otherwise I think we would have been screwed. We would have had to wait for him to totally rebuild.”

Since forming Jesus Piece in 2015, DiStefano and co-guitarist David Updike have laid noisily chaotic riffplay above a brutal bed of breakdowns and blast beats. Despite a brief d-beat on first single An Offering to the Night, …So Unknown is a more groove-centered panoply of death metal trilling (Fear of Failure), graveyard swings (Profane) and bounce-heavy passages driven by a series of jarringly dissonant augmented fourths.

“We’re trying to get out of using straight-up power chords all the time, because that can get pretty boring,” DiStefano says, with Updike adding of Jesus Piece’s attraction to panic-inducing chords, “It’s that uneasy feeling. I want people to have an ugly feeling listening to our stuff – [our music’s] a little uncomfortable!”

While both musicians deliver downtuned guitar damage on stage, DiStefano was tasked with riffing most of …So Unknown out in the studio on an EverTuned Jim Root Strat set in B standard. “He has a tighter wrist than mine,” Updike says, noting how he instead focused on the record’s bass work, assisted by the fuzz-forward attack of a borrowed Fowl Sounds The Lifer pedal.

The Machine Shop has since relocated to a barn setting out in Austin, making …So Unknown the final full-length to have been recorded at the East Coast facility. Despite that burst pipe, the sessions were hardly a wash. Instead, they formed a firm and furious knockout blow from Jesus Piece.

“Whatever spiritual nature or god there is [out there] did not want us to have this record. Every step of this was a fight for us,” Updike says, his bandmate countering proudly, “We hit so many barriers [while making] this record, but we got through it.”