Deadringer

"Deadringer" achieves something genuinely unsettling through collaboration: Poppy's voice — deliberately, eerily sweet — layered against Bryan Garris's hardcore aggression creates a dialogue that sounds less like a duet than a confrontation between two incompatible realities. The production maintains Knocked Loose's signature density — downtuned guitar work that feels geological, breakdowns deployed with surgical precision — but Poppy's contributions introduce a melodic sweetness that makes the heavy sections hit harder by contrast. Garris screams through verses that catalog the pressure of expectation and performance, while Poppy's choruses arrive with an almost disturbing calm, as though the violence is perfectly ordinary. Together they construct a song about doubling and recognition — the deadringer as the version of yourself produced by other people's projections. It fits within the Kentucky band's expanding engagement with what hardcore can accommodate without losing its core physicality. For listeners who came to either artist independently, the collision is disorienting in the best sense — each vocalist reveals something new about the other simply by occupying the same track. Best suited to a first listen at full volume, where the shifts in register arrive as surprises rather than anticipated turns.