Rejoice finds a brutal cohesion on ‘All of Heaven’s Luck’

In the time-warping crucible of a punk scene, five years can be an eternity. Just ask Rejoice, which formed in 2019 and whose members now serve as shockingly youthful elder statesmen in the city’s even more shockingly youthful hardcore scene, which exploded with the lifting of Covid restrictions in 2021. “We used to play shows in Columbus when all these people didn’t go to shows,” drummer Bradon Studebaker said, and then deadpanned, “[because] they were children.”

“There were shows we played pre-Covid … that we played to like 13 people,” said vocalist Nate Snitchler, who added that the band’s gigs now regularly draw 150-plus. “I’m appreciative that the current crop of people seems to fuck very heavily with Rejoice.”

The young crowds at Columbus’s DIY mecca du jour, Dirty Dungarees Laundromat, have certainly come to embrace Rejoice, but theirs is still an outsiders’ take on hardcore when compared to the most dominant strains in the Ohio scene. (Rejoice’s next show at the venue is Friday, Aug. 30, with Broken Vow, Sign Language, and Montclair.) 

On its debut full-length, All of Heaven’s Luck, Rejoice infuses its tightly wound hardcore with hellish black metal atmospherics and punishing death metal riffage. The result is a sound that’s a shade darker, a touch more menacing, and certainly much more metallic than most of the crew’s Columbus hardcore peers. The most mosh-friendly thing about Rejoice’s music is its constant sense of forward motion, propelled by Studebaker’s whirring drums. But the musicians don’t like to go out of their way to get the pit moving.

“When I’m writing riffs, I feel like people would mosh if we would mosh,” Snitchler said. “But I don’t care if they do or don’t. I’m more interested in writing the song at hand.”

“It sucks when you play live and no one does anything, or it feels like it sucks the energy out of the room,” Studebaker conceded. “I don’t think we’re necessarily like, ‘People need to two-step to this.’ But if it’s something that’s gonna suck the energy out of the room, then we’re not gonna do it.”

The core lineup of Rejoice – Studebaker, Snitchler, and guitarist Nate Arthur – met through a combination of scene connections and serendipity. Studebaker and Arthur found each other on Craigslist, and Snitchler jumped in at the behest of a bandmate from one of his other projects, En Love. At first, as they’ll readily admit, the musicians simply tried to rip off Converge, which was “horrible,” said Snitchler, “because none of us are Kurt Ballou or Nate Newton or Ben Koller.” The earliest Rejoice material has been all but scrubbed from the internet. 

“It was a very muddy vision at the beginning,” Snitchler said. “We really did not have clarity. We put out a two-song demo and a single that we’ve since deleted. And then Nate wrote ‘Prisoner of the Divine Mind.’ It’s on our EP [Damnation No Longer Hurts]. And that’s the first song where we all went, ‘Oh, this is kind of, like, a band. That could be a thing.’ It was a hard pivot that led to a much clearer sense of direction.”

That song opened a door through which All of Heaven’s Luck confidently strides. Rejoice has figured out how to pull all the disparate parts of its sound – heavy hardcore, black metal, grindcore, crust, “thrash metal dance party riffs” – into a cohesive whole. Snitchler illustrates this evolution by explaining how the track “Menace” came together, beginning as a riff in which he attempted to rip off “Bridge Burner,” by Magrudergrind and then taking on black metal tones and groovier elements as it filtered through the other band members. “I think that was indicative of the whole process,” Snitchler said, “because we were melding all of those elements.”

Rejoice’s visual identity has also come into much sharper focus with time. Studebaker serves as the band’s de facto art director, and his clever plays on black metal iconography – an unreadable logo of his own design, a slanted reimagining of an old Immortal tour shirt – help the group stand apart in a genre that can get a little identikit. The album covers for Damnation No Longer Hurts and All of Heaven’s Luck, a pair of smeary oil paintings by the Madrid-based artist Simona Cheli, complete the effect. Rejoice feels like a complete aesthetic experience.

The imagery is heavily metal-inspired, but Rejoice still identify as a hardcore band, in part because of the political context of their music. “I feel like the thing that distinguishes hardcore from other genres of music – like proper metal, for instance – is a sense of social consciousness,” Snitchler said. 

All of Heaven’s Luck is “about capitalism and how evil it is.” And Rejoice’s next release, a promo that will be made available at Flyover Fest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, tackles another issue important to Snitchler and the rest of the band.

“One of the new songs on the promo is about Palestine,” he said of the track “Ghouls Under a Festering Sun.” “Rejoice believes in a free Palestine, from the river to the sea. Always will. Fuck the IDF.”