Atlanta alt-metal project Moodring have returned with a hard-hitting new single called Half-Life, accompanied by a stark black and white video that marks the band’s debut release for SharpTone Records. The song is a bruising, personal statement from frontman Hunter Young, who has reshaped Moodring into a fluid creative vehicle after recent health issues forced him to step back from life on the road.
Moodring began life in Florida and rose through the US underground with a sound that borrows from nu-metal, shoegaze and 90s alt-rock, before settling into the alt-metal hybrid showcased on their 2022 debut album Stargazer. That record earned the band early critical attention, including a four out of five star review from Kerrang!, and helped position Moodring among a new generation of heavy artists who merge melody and aggression with modern production.
Half-Life arrives after a period of reinvention. It is one of the first songs Hunter Young wrote after receiving what he describes as a life-changing medical diagnosis, and the track reads like a ledger of grief and reclamation. Young lays it out bluntly, “Half-Life was one of the first songs written after I received a life-changing medical diagnosis and was forced to grieve losing the person that I thought I was and had identified as for most of my sentient life,” he says, calling these songs an obituary for that former self. The new single, produced with the cinematic instincts Moodring have refined since their early EPs, translates that trauma into a dense atmosphere that sits somewhere between Deftones-style clouded heaviness and the precise, modern aggression of contemporary alt-metal.
Where Stargazer often wandered into shoegaze textures and electronic flourishes, Half-Life pares the palette back to a raw centre, letting Young’s voice and the song’s brittle melodies carry the emotional weight. The new video, directed by Olli Appleford of Static Dress, leans into contrast and close-up intensity, turning the camera into an accomplice to the song’s claustrophobic narrative.
Moodring’s path to this moment has been abrupt and transformative. The band first signed to UNFD around their debut album cycle and toured behind Stargazer with bands such as Cane Hill, building a reputation for live intensity and carefully arranged noise. The past couple of years have seen the band adapt, with Young’s health limiting touring and prompting Moodring to become a malleable project that can shift collaborators and shapes without strict borders. That flexibility is baked into Half-Life, which sounds like a band both grieving and scheming, turning pain into structure and identity into sound.
The single is out now via SharpTone Records, and the band have hinted that more new material is on the way.
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