Riot Son does not sound particularly interested in keeping things small. On “PULSE,” the Boone, North Carolina artist takes the isolation he calls “Appalachian Gloom” and stretches it across a towering alternative rock production. It is dramatic, restless and intentionally excessive, a song that seems to believe the only appropriate response to feeling trapped is to build something huge enough to escape through.
The track opens in a darker register, with Riot Son slipping into an Elvis-shaped swagger that gives the verses an almost cinematic menace. Then comes the switch. The bridge tightens into something sharper and more mechanical, pulling from the twitchy precision of new wave and Devo before the song loses control entirely. Guitars crash into the arrangement and the vocal becomes increasingly theatrical, pushing towards the kind of chaotic release associated with Smashing Pumpkins and My Chemical Romance at their most emotionally unrestrained.
Behind that sense of scale is an equally international production story. Philip Spalding, working from London as Flip X, built the complete instrumental architecture, extending a collaboration that began with Riot Son’s contribution to Spalding’s Baying for Blood project. The record then travelled to Quebec, where VE Beats handled its final analogue mix and master. The result is a song created across continents but rooted in one very specific emotional landscape.
That landscape is important to understanding Riot Son. “Appalachian Gloom” describes more than fog, forests and gothic imagery. It is his phrase for the darker reality of the high country, where isolation becomes something psychological as much as geographical. There is an obvious romanticism to turning that feeling into a rock mythology, but “PULSE” works because the music is willing to embody the pressure rather than simply describe it. The song keeps tightening until it finally explodes.
“PULSE” arrives ahead of Riot Son’s self-titled debut EP on August 12. With Northeast headline shows planned around the release and a potential London run developing for the autumn, the project is already reaching beyond Boone. The interesting question is whether Riot Son can sustain this level of theatrical ambition across a larger body of work. On “PULSE,” at least, he makes a convincing case that independent rock can still be messy, oversized and completely unapologetic about wanting to be heard.
