AXTY Release Fourth Album The Pain Made Me Who I Am, Their Napalm Records Debut

AXTY, a Brazilian metalcore and deathcore band, released The Pain Made Me Who I Am on August 21, 2026. It's the band's fourth full-length and the first since signing to Napalm Records, the Austria-based label that now serves as the band's new home.

The band, a three-piece of vocalist Felipe Hervoso, guitarist and mixer Jonathas Peschiera, and drummer Gabriel Vacari, built momentum well before release day. Napalm's own description of the record says pre-release singles "selfish" and "fragile" helped push AXTY past 7 million combined Spotify streams, an unusually large number for a band still touring clubs and theaters rather than arenas.

The album continues a run of high-profile US support slots that Peschiera credits with growing the band's audience outside Brazil. AXTY opened for Born of Osiris on a North American run in late 2025, then returned for a bigger tour alongside Lacuna Coil and Escape the Fate. "It was our third tour in the US," Peschiera told Dead Rhetoric less than two weeks before the album's release. "We were really well received by everyone and all the bands were really nice."

Peschiera described a real change in how the band built this record. AXTY's last few albums grew one single at a time: write a song, release it, watch the reaction, then write the next one. The Pain Made Me Who I Am scrapped that approach. "We spent a month or two together writing and recording everything," Peschiera said. "I think that for this album, there's more unity... that was something that Napalm had asked of us. To make an album, and not a bunch of singles."

That request shaped the record's themes as much as its schedule. Per Peschiera, the album's title concept treats pain as raw material rather than an endpoint: "The main concept of the album is the idea that the pain and suffering is something that can make us better... All of the good things are also related to your past pain." He named Architects, Bring Me the Horizon, and Chelsea Grin as reference points the band leaned on while writing.

Dead Rhetoric's review of the finished album, published independently of the band's promotional cycle, backs up at least part of that pitch: a 7.5-out-of-10 write-up calling the record "tremendously heavy" with "massively groovy melodies," while noting the metalcore/deathcore/nu-metal blend "isn't exactly a new phenomena" for the genre. The review singled out opener "pain made me," the "nu-metal downtuned riffing" of "who I am," and the "thunderous riffing and darkened tones" of "selfish" as highlights.

Two sources with no reason to coordinate independently describe the same thing about The Pain Made Me Who I Am: the guitars are tuned low. Napalm's own album copy calls the opening chugs "dense" and "down-tuned." Dead Rhetoric's review, written without label input, separately flags "nu-metal downtuned riffing" on that same early stretch of the record. That's real corroboration, even though neither source, nor Peschiera himself in his Dead Rhetoric interview, names the specific tuning or string gauge AXTY used to get there. Treat any more precise claim as unconfirmed.

What is documented, broadly, is the tuning territory modern metalcore and deathcore bands work in to get this kind of low, chuggy rhythm tone: Drop B and neighboring down-tunings, built for exactly the sort of breakdown-heavy riffing AXTY leans into. Slipknot's Jim Root built his own signature Dunlop set for that same job, a heavier wound low string paired with a standard top end so rhythm chugging stays tight without choking out lead runs. The Dunlop Jim Root Signature Guitar Strings, Drop B (.011-.056) and the Ernie Ball Not Even Slinky Cobalt (.012-.056), a set CYS catalogs for metalcore and Drop B work, are both built around that same brief. Jim Root's full CYS profile covers how he actually uses that gauge on stage.