Cartoons Can’t Die – Rebirth
Cartoons Can’t Die – Rebirth
Self-Released
Release Date: 06/02/2026
Review by Jon Deaux
7/10
I have been confining myself to a dismal Salford flat for the last seventy-two hours, surrounded by nothing but this album, three bottles of Mad Dog 20/20, and an intolerable amount of salt and vinegar crisps, and I have been converted into something new. My landlord thinks that I am a cult recruit, my neighbors have called the cops on me because I have been disturbing the peace, and the village vicar touched holy water upon seeing me on the street. Well, I have been saved, and that salvation looks like an STD from the apocalypse.
Cartoons Can’t Die —the titular act sounding as though it consists of a philosophy major with a chemical dependency on renaissances and ketamine inkings on a cubicle elsewhere in the school’s lavatory facilities—have somehow managed to create something utterly and stupendously insane with Rebirth. This is no father’s metal record, unless that father spent the 90’s in German industrial clubs engaging in acts that can only be described as unthinkable to the rhythm.
Mac Gaisford screams like a man possessed by every demon ever exorcised from a Tory MP—in other words, a very guttural and angry scream indeed, as though Mac has looked at the news and thought to himself, “Arson? Yes, perhaps a good solution.” Meanwhile, Maria Megally is flying high above all this carnage as though she has suddenly decided to reclaim VAT on her flaming sword of justice! Her voice pierces through all this brutality in a way that should not work in a thousand million years of conceptual television mismatch—but absolutely does as LIKE finding a Vivienne Westwood gown in a skip on fire.
Even their dual vocalist attack is roughly equivalent to what could result from a torrid love affair between Rammstein and early Fleetwood Mac in the ashes of a fetish nightclub in a post-apocalyptic Berlin—out and out awesome, nuts, and serving. It’s like listening to a knife fight between two drag queens—it’s pretty, ghastly, and something to behold both so fiercely fascinating and so repugnantly awful to look at that one ought to look away.
‘Rebirth’ starts the album off like a door kicked off its hinges. “Rebirth” is an origin story told in breakdown choruses and blast beats – the musical equivalent of crawling out of your own grave in last night’s eye makeup and yesterday’s regrets. The production – astoundingly whatever kind of dark wizardry went on in the recording studio – is remarkably claustrophobic – the idea being that being born is supposed to be violent, messy, and ultimately somebody else’s fault.
‘Kinslayer’ is like the subtle entrance of the Molotov Cocktail through the church window. There is something deliciously Old Testament about the wrath of the music, the fury of the retribution, the Danny 5 guitar riffs cutting through the din like a particularly aggressive circumcision. I have to pause the track at the breakdown at the 2:47 mark to spill wine on my Only Fans hoodie, but I’m not even mad at myself.
But then ‘5AM’ comes on, and life is like night and day. It’s like the song is about an hour of the day that actually exists and is like that. There’s something like regret, something like leather, something like existential crisis, and something like a type of horny that can only be had in the dead of night when you’re scrolling through your ex’s Instagram and considering arson is actually an impractical crime. Shepherd’s use of the drums on this one is nasty. It’s like 4/4 is an offer.
‘On A Mission’ is where things get weird, and weird in the most flattering possible way. The mission they’re clearly on involves genre tourism so brazen it’d give Anthony Bourdain the vapors—industrial touches that could’ve been plundered from Ministry’s crack-era worst, melodic sections that sound as though Devin Townsend himself had just discovered MDMA, and a chunk that’s really only comparable to saying “what if djent, but gay?” It doesn’t sound like it’s supposed to. It sounds fantastic. It sounds like a band that’s not only read all the rules but decided the only way to truly succeed was to ignore those with vision.
‘The Loss Of Something Dear’ is the album’s wounded heart, though it bleeds more with the dark ichor of the supernatural than with anything so mundane as blood. The vocals of Mac and Maria come together like two lovers or two people who simply cannot stand each other or, more likely, both. It’s the kind of track that inspires images of running around, lighting candles, and perhaps crying into Chianti-level wine while dressed in something vintage and probably velvet. There’s the kind of guitar solo where it sounds like the guitar itself is attempting to escape the confines of the music to begin with.
‘Bodysnatchers’—their lead single, their calling card, their middle finger thrown defiantly towards the realm of the mediocre—in the world of music, the ability to make a song as good as this, as indelibly catchy, represents a kind of loving assault, the musical equivalent of getting punched in the throat by someone you wish would punch you more. The video, which I’ve seen roughly forty-seven times, as I’m a bit unwell, goes all out with their horror-apocalyptic aesthetic as if the artists involved were aware of the maxim, which goes, ‘If you’re going to be camp, be camp, or better, be home.’ This is the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie made by someone who thinks subtlety is for the faint of heart. The song, itself, is the musical equivalent of keyed car, the thrill of the act, the inability to feel the slightest hint of guilt.
And then, ‘Godless’ is like the heat death of the universe in fishnets to end all fishnets. Seven minutes of increasingly crazypants musical theater that just builds and builds and builds until you’re pretty certain that when it’s all said and done, someone up there might actually explode from all that excess effort and emotion. It’s that kind of finish that leaves you going out and setting your birth certificate on fire and starting all over again as opposed to everything you were told to believe in and know to believe in regarding levels of decency and levels of acceptable taste and levels of acceptable decibel levels unless you’re out in your back yard. Because when it was all said and done and had come to that apocalyptic finish line? Standing up on my coffee table in my pants and shrieking out all of the lyrics like it was my job. Which it would have to be to regret as much as I enjoyed
There is something innately queer about their whole operation, and by that, I’m not just referring to the camps they engage in. No, there is a larger perspective to be seen here, a larger approach to the way they choose to box themselves into so-called genres, the way they choose to change genres as easily as they change their own identity. There is a larger concept to their music, one that is not lost when referring to rebirth. They are songs about rebirth as a method.
Of course, here’s the cynical remark people love making: the reality of metal in the UK in 2026 is tired; another meaningless round of Metallica karaoke in crowded pubs with the stench of flat lager and regretted life choices. Oh joy; two decades of metalcore bands with the level of depth needed to transition from breakdown to statement, two decades of tech metal fetishists pleasuring themselves over complex time signatures, two decades of “real” metal bands aping their own dads’ aesthetics.
Cartoons Can’t Die are different because they know that the key thing about heavy music isn’t that it needs to be heavier, but that it needs to be weirder. Not that that’s some kind of law; that it needs to defy all expectations with regard to genre. But that theatricality isn’t the opposite of authenticity; most often, they’re the same thing.
They’re part of a lineage that goes from Rammstein’s industrial goading, Devin Townsend’s everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink maximalism, that brief era in the early 2000s when metalcore bands discovered that, hey, they could have keyboards and feelings too! But they’re also drawing from sources that are somehow beyond the scope or interest of metal in general – the melodrama of theatrical pop, the transgressiveness of queer club culture, the apocalypse now-esque romanticism of good goth rock.
The end result is an album that feels. current – not in that annoying “pertinent to current events” sort of manner that music critics love to coo about, but rather in that sense of seizing a particular aesthetic moment and putting to music the worries and thrills and paradoxes that come with it. This is music for people who get to see late-capitalist civilization grind into slow-motion collapse from the inside out while the climate apocalypse properly unfolds right on schedule while simultaneously scrolling through something approaching genocide qua state policy and realizing that if the world’s ending anyway then why not make it the end of an era for our dignity as well?
Is “Rebirth” perfect? Far from it, nothing is perfect, else anything interesting is boring. Some songs slog when they ought to gallop. Some of the production really sinks Maria’s vocals when they ought to take flight. ‘On A Mission’ ambitious as it is, sometimes feels like the best parts of three different songs are struggling to come to the front of the pack rather than being properly synched up as one cohesive piece. It could also lose eight minutes of runtime to tighten things up.
But what you realize is that in terms of flaws, quirky failures trumps safe success every time. I’d much rather hear a band struggle to succeed by attempting something that fails than another meticulous exercise in perfection that fails to exist in terms of emotion or more lucid definitions of a genre of music. Cartoons Can’t Die are messy because life is messy, because becoming is messy because innovation requires failure occasionally.
By the time I stumbled back out of my self-induced seclusion with this record, I was a changed man. More hair damage, definitely. Possibly even an onset of tinnitus too. But I was also someone who was truly convinced of the potential for heavy music to explore untread ground, untold tales, untainted genres.
Cartoons Can’t Die have titled their album “Rebirth” because they truly believe in it, this being a band that claws its way out of the cold darkness of the boringly predictable in today’s metal scene with glittering sequins on their boxing gloves and raised middle fingers in their hairdos, loudly shrieking that the only place that’s suitable for death is on a stage!
This is not metal for people who want the music they listen to to validate their existing knowledge of the genre. This is for the freaks, the weirdos, the people who have yet to find a place they truly belong to and decided that was everybody else’s problem too. This is for the people who are awake at 5 AM, the godless heathen-types, the people whose body is hijacked by a force that they cannot begin to understand. Camp as Christmas, heavy as guilt, and brings the life that this tired Genre is missing.
Well, I suppose I’ll get on and go and say sorry to my neighbors and possibly move home. There is one thing that forces you to change and that is burning bridges. It is an experience I learned from on this album.
Highly recommended for: 3AM crying sessions, rejecting heteronormativity, damaging your vocal cords, festival season violence, for anyone who’s ever thought about punching God but in a fashionable way.
Not recommended for: Tories, parents of the above, people with functional noise ordinances, the “accessibility”-oriented, purists of the genres, cowards
TRACKLISTING:
01. Rebirth;
02. Kinslayer;
03. 5AM;
04. On A Mission;
05. The Loss Of Something Dear;
06. Bodysnatchers;
07. Godless.
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Jon Deaux and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
