As far as guest appearances go, Omerta both do and don’t make a ton of sense jumping on a track with a band like Papercut. Both groups are restlessly creative, alchemizing elements of nu metal, post-hardcore, rap, hyperpop, death metal, and whatever else you see when you look into the void, and both have a yen for a kind of proggy, modular songwriting that will see a tenderly sung verse smashed apart by a deathcore breakdown, only to have an anime sample drop in to signal the slinking entrance of a rap verse before it all cycles back again. The danger in combining two bands with such overlapping MOs is a lack of differentiation–the best guest spots draw latent elements from both sides to the fore, creating something that couldn’t exist otherwise. The shruggy ones just offer a slightly different scream on the breakdown.
Their first single since their 2023 sophomore record Papercut 2, “The Rest Of Us” kinda proves my whole take to be bullshit. The track is almost the ideal form of what these two bands could accomplish together, a sort of Voltronning of their specific strengths into something so powerful it must only be used sparingly. Initially Omerta play largely on Papercut’s turf–”The Rest of Us” begins as a broody post-hardcore track, blackened growls leading to some vocal tag-teaming between the bands and the kind of heart-bruised melody that Papercut specialize in. They grind back into deathcore mode, Papercut screams and Omerta raps (or is it the other way around) swinging like a pair of emotional wrecking balls over the low-end riffage. Then at about the exact halfway mark everything stops and we get a little distorted sample that sounds distinctly Crunchy Roll, and suddenly the bands are double-timing and we’re squarely in Omertaville. We get a few delightful bars of dayglo rapping before Papercut throws some death metal on top just to see if the track can bear it, before they swing back into the melodic chorus to close it off.
Whether I’m correct about which band was pushing which part into the song, it’s a testament to the way these bands work together that their combination can scan as both clearly delineated and utterly organic. “The Rest of Us” feels both competitive and joyful, like top dogs on an all-star team fighting to stand out while having a ball bringing the best out of each other. Papercut 2 was an epic, revealing that band to be an eight-sided die capable of getting at emotions from unexpected angles and making it feel all of a piece, like a scrapbook you spent all of high school making. “The Rest of Us” feels like all of that in miniature. Here’s hoping Omerta do the right thing and bring Papercut onto their next single.
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