"An ode to everyone living in their car": Evil Island share “King Death” video ahead of debut album Terraform The Afterlife

Produced by Ross Robinson, the 13-song LP began as a short session and swelled into a five-month process. It features guests including Alexis Krauss of Sleigh Bells, Michael Gatto of XCOMM, Jordan Blilie of The Blood Brothers, and Guy Picciotto of Fugazi, whose appearance on “T-Hexx” marks his first recorded vocal since The Argument in 2001.

“‘King Death’ is a really simple story about a woman who skips bail and is on the run,” vocalist Johnny Whitney says. “It’s about nihilism - recognising you have no chance at survival but choosing to fight anyway. It’s an ode to everyone living in their car, bleaching their roots in a truck stop bathroom, refusing to disappear quietly.”

The video, filmed at EastWest Studios in Los Angeles, reconstructs Las Vegas as a handmade cardboard cityscape littered with symbols of excess. Whitney stalks the miniature landscape armed with a cardboard scythe, while the rest of the band appear as cutout figures. The cardboard instruments were produced via Cardboard Sessions, a collaboration between SIGNAL EXP and Ernest Packaging, underlining the clip’s scrappy, handmade logic.

Whitney, Cody Votolato, and Mark Gajadhar formed Evil Island in the wake of The Blood Brothers’ 2024 reunion activity, and the group is quick to frame the project as neither nostalgia for the '90s post-hardcore scene they emerged from, nor a side concern. The album shoots for a collision of post-hardcore, noise rock and art punk, pulling anxiety and cultural decay into something agile and confrontational.