Photo: Mick Hutson
The producer behind Korn, Slipknot, and Glassjaw signed a band of Venice teenagers to his own label. He says they gave him a "yes" he hadn't felt in years.
Ross Robinson could produce anyone he wants. He chose a band of Venice teenagers he found entirely by accident. Metal Edge caught up with the producer to talk about XCOMM, the "daycare" sessions behind their debut Time to Burn, and why a room full of kids reminded him what he got into this for.
Ross Robinson has spent three decades chasing one thing behind a mixing board: the sound of people losing control on purpose. He found it again in a room full of teenagers, and he got there because of a favor.
Near Robinson's home in Venice, California, a friendship with a hotel maintenance worker led to an unexpected recommendation. One day, the man asked Robinson to check out his niece's boyfriend's band. Robinson didn't ask who was in it or what was attached to it.
"I said fuck yeah and that's how it happened," he says. "I had zero clue of who or what was connected to the band."
He liked the demo enough to show up at a small club, where the group ripped through a set while little kids roamed around the room, and the whole thing cracked him up. "It made me laugh out loud at how intense, young and cool they were."
The band was XCOMM, short for Excommunication, a hardcore punk five-piece out of Venice formed in 2023 by drummer Revel Ian, son of Anthrax's Scott Ian. The rest of the lineup is Michael Gatto on vocals and guitar, Adan Escoto on bass, Jay Vargas on guitar, and Hunter Grogan on DJ and sampler. Robinson signed them to Blowed Out Records, the label he runs with Ghostemane and Bill Armstrong, and produced their debut, Time to Burn, which arrived May 22.
He didn't need a meeting to decide.
"When I first heard them play, I felt an instinctive yes with zero hesitation," he says, before listing the company that yes keeps: Korn, Slipknot, At the Drive-In, Glassjaw, The Cure. "I felt the same way with all of those bands."
XCOMM is the youngest band Robinson has ever worked with, young enough that he started calling the sessions "daycare." It is a funny nickname, because daycare is the last thing the room sounded like.
"My process actually turned up," he says. "They were so full of an unbridled adolescent life-force."
His whole approach was built around protecting that, making the band feel safe enough to capture what he calls their youthful fire. When something dark or negative surfaced in a session, he didn't shut it down.
"Anything negative that came up was explored to see how and why it would be something positive and powerful musically and spiritually. We went deep into musical expression with a definite purpose behind it."
Robinson has talked for years about untainted expression as the thing he is really after in a studio. With kids this young, he says, it comes without a fight.
"Their whole life has been about music," he says. "Without the heaviness of adulthood, the floodgates are open."
You can hear that on Time to Burn, which refuses to sit in one place. The bulk of it is fast and feral, but "Time to Burn" itself drops into a slow, almost stoner crawl, and "Running Zeroes" leans toward something closer to pop rock.
Robinson says he wasn't steering it either direction.
"That was simply flowing with whatever the songs called them to do," he says. "I just made sure we didn't leave any stones unturned sonically or with vibe."
The clearest example is "One and Nothing," the track where the hardcore drops away into a goth groove. It started as a problem. The punk section felt too short, so Robinson asked Revel for a Ghouls and Munsters-style beat, the kind of campy horror shuffle that sounds like it should not belong on a hardcore record. From there the song built itself in the room.
Grogan, whose textures color the record, came aboard after tracking wrapped to handle the parts live, and Robinson is already curious what he drags into the next one.
"I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of cool ideas he brings to the next album."
There is an obvious story sitting right there in the band's zip code. Suicidal Tendencies cut their self-titled debut in 1983 and turned Venice into a cornerstone of California hardcore, and here is a band of kids throwing all-ages shows out of a Venice house forty years later. Robinson waves it off.
"The Suicidal thing was pretty cool, but we didn't really tap into that spirit," he says. "Venice is just a place some of us live."
Blowed Out is the other thing that makes this different from a producer-for-hire job. Robinson has spent his career developing bands from the ground up, and the label is where he gets to do it without anyone looking over his shoulder.
"Blowed Out means I get to play amongst my friends in our own little sandbox," he says. "I guess it means I'm home and just doing my thing."
What he wants out of the record is simple, and he is blunt about how it was made. No click tracks, no samples standing in for real playing, no fixing imperfect parts after the fact, no copy and paste.
"Every instrument was actually played," he says. "It's 100% kid-powered."
When he describes what he hopes a sixteen-year-old hears in it, he doesn't reach for a genre or a scene.
"I want the listener to feel a deep sense of freedom within themselves. I think that's what we captured on this record."
Time to Burn is out now via Blowed Out Records.
