Local Review: Sutures — Around My Neck

Sutures
Around My Neck
Self-Released
Street: 03.31.2026
Sutures = A Long Winter + a hint of Tourniquet

Around My Neck is an addictive explosion of sound broken by moments of sobriety. Local metalcore band Suture’s debut EP interrupts and introduces violent static with calm melodies. It’s the kind of music that puts you on the prowl for a fight that’ll break your nose.

The EP opens gently. “Without Hands,” in its first half-minute, soothes you with beauty before the spiral begins. Soon, you will be plunged further and further towards an ugly splat in the record’s conclusion, but for now, you are at ease. The descent starts when the singer shreds his vocal box talking about a girl taken by the gods. The focus here isn’t the lyrics (I can barely decipher them without reading it on Bandcamp), but rather on the intensity of emotion, sick instrumentals, and eerie atmosphere.

“This Wound is All I have” brings the pace up before killing momentum with an eerie industrial sound. You’re brought right back to degeneracy by a song with interesting tempo changes, pulling the veins from your bones and melting your brain through your ears. It’s all-consuming and intense.

“Rotted Red” is the low point of the EP for me. It’s the middle child of the debut, and doesn’t have anything particularly notable to talk about. Listening through the record as much as I have, I still have trouble remembering what differentiates this song from the rest, aside from being the song that features Razel Got Her Wings. Even then, I still enjoy listening to this song. It’s the most brutal of the bunch and alludes to the gunshots you’ll hear at the EP’s end.

A Donnie Darko sample brings you into “You Were Never Really Here.” The best song of this debut, the song starts at a walking pace before bringing it up to full throttle. Getting slower and slower, more and more desperate, until it comes to a total stop. The singer cries out, forcing words through tears. The band struggles to keep the same momentum when it brings a melancholic sound to this particular moment. They try their hardest to bring the song back to its once great intensity, but the center cannot hold. Incredible vocal and instrumental performances from Sutures tells a heartbreaking story about the brutal aftermath of love: dreaming of the terrible things you could do to the one you lost, but somehow still mourning her fictional death. We’ve reached the emotional breaking point of the debut.

At the EP’s climax, “Around Your Neck” is unmitigated hatred, bringing the worst aspect of the self, the self we pretend isn’t there. Despising another person for the almost self-inflicted pain of loss, lamenting even loving them in the first place; a waste of life and flesh. Another voice comes on later in the song, a higher, clearer voice, indicating a deep yearning that cannot be expressed. Three gunshots from SLC Punk bring the EP to a pulpy conclusion.

I love Around My Neck. A fantastic debut for a local hardcore band with incredible variety and excellent storytelling. Going forward, I would love to see how Sutures define themselves, carving a space for their own identity in a scene that is lesser-known in the millennial grey Salt Lake City, Utah. —B. Allan Johnson

Read more reviews by B. Allan Johnson:
Film Review: The Bride!
Film Review: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie