Alternative Press teamed up with GEL for an exclusive violet vinyl colorway of Persona, limited to 300 copies. Head to the AP Shop to grab yours.
Since the release of their debut LP, 2023’s Only Constant, New Jersey hardcore greats GEL have been touring nonstop. In between their crammed schedule, though, the group escaped to a cabin in the woods to begin working out new songs, beaming with confidence from their recent shows. The result, the fiercely bold Persona EP, sounds far different than what’s come before. Produced and engineered by Jon Markson (Drug Church, Drain), GEL opted for a different approach — namely to make their songs sound bigger without sacrificing their ferocity — and succeeded tremendously. “We really wanted to fill out the songs more and make them more nuanced,” vocalist Sami Kaiser says. “It’s a step forward. It’s different, it’s catchy, but it still really sounds like us.” You can hear that throughout the project’s pummeling five songs, which revs up the stickiness without losing any of the heart or intensity of their earlier work. Yet it’s not just the recording that sounds colossal — the band’s songwriting is more vibrant and fleshed out. It is still uncompromisingly GEL, but the tracks possess unabashedly memorable hooks couched in an ultra-furious ethos that proves why they’re one of the greatest hardcore bands operating today.
Read more: In conversation with Scowl and Frank Iero
Ahead of their Persona tour next month, guitarist Anthony Webster walked us through the songs that influenced their latest EP.
Obituary – “Body Bag”
Obituary’s Cause Of Death was a huge influence on this record, from the tuning, the guitar tones, and the way I approached riff writing. Like most of the songs or artists on this list, you maybe won’t be able to draw a direct line from their music to ours, but it was more so a mindset when approaching writing a new record. Even when recording and going for a more fully produced sound, I wanted to keep the guitar tones ugly and loud.
Swervedriver – “Sci-Flyer”
Both Raise and Mezcal Head are records I really love and have been influenced by as a musician. In GEL, I do a lot of stuff on the tremolo arm most people would credit MBV for, myself included, but I think, for me, I always had Swervedriver in mind when doing those little flourishes. This song in particular is what sparked the original demo of “Shame” as a song, having it start on a sort of build-up that we pushed until later in the final versions of the song.
Sonic Youth – “Starpower”
Evol is probably my favorite Sonic Youth record, and this song is probably my favorite on the record. I always loved how ugly yet pretty they can make a guitar sound. And while experimenting with alternate tunings is something I’m too lazy to do, I like finding my own ways to make my guitar sound a bit different when playing the admittedly very simple riffs I write — even just adding notes where they shouldn’t belong.
Mind Eraser – “Spectral Dominance”
This pick is pretty specific to the song “Vanity” on the EP. It’s the slowest GEL song we’ve ever written, directly inspired by slower and heavy songs by bands like Mind Eraser and Weekend Nachos. This whole record/band is great.
Negative Approach – “Nothing”
One of my favorite, and the best, hardcore-punk songs ever. From day one, NA was the biggest influence on how I wrote songs for GEL. There’s just a timelessness of the ’80s hardcore songwriting formula — riff A, riff B, riff A, riff B, done. At its purest form, if you have two good riffs, you can have a good hardcore song.
