Ethereal Metal

Ryan Murray | Co-Owner | Chief Editor | Contributor | Photographer

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There’s a moment in the lifecycle of any rising band where potential suddenly detonates into something undeniable. Not a slow-burn ascent, not a polite unfurling, but an eruption. zero.point.genesis, the debut LP from Vegas sister-duo The Pretty Wild, is exactly that kind of rupture: a neon-tinted, trauma-exorcising, genre-obliterating supernova that doesn’t just introduce who Jyl and Jules are, but rewrites the damn blueprint. For a band whose very name implies duality, volatility, and feral femininity, this record is the sound of two artists tearing through their own boundaries with a kind of ecstatic violence, then stepping out of the ashes gleaming like chrome-spined phoenixes.

To say the hype was already feverish would be an understatement. After the viral blowup of 2025 singles like Button Eyes and the music-box menace of PARADOX, the Pretty Wild fanbase has been vibrating in anticipation. Their tour run with In This Moment introduced them to the exact audience primed for this—metal-heads who love theatrics, pop fans who crave danger, and alt-goths who collect emotional wounds like trading cards. Millions of streams later, and after a press cycle peppered with cryptic symbolism and dream-logic aesthetics, the stage was set. But zero.point.genesis doesn’t meet its moment. It devours it.

What The Pretty Wild have crafted isn’t simply a debut album. It’s a world, a narrative universe, and a digital-age grimoire of collapse, reclamation, and feminine resurrection. “An album of collapse and resurrection—mythic, yet memeable in its rawness,” is how Jyl described it, and honestly, that’s the most accurate teaser possible. These songs operate with the delirious push-pull of a lucid dream: glittery then grotesque, cybernetic then ceremonial, post-traumatic then wildly, defiantly alive. Jules framed it even more boldly: “We pushed into concepts that once felt untouchable… It’s an album of poetic contrasts, brutally heavy moments, with haunting instrumentation and flayed-open lyrics.”

And the sisters deliver exactly that—contrast sharpened into weaponry, honesty sharpened into doom-pop drama, genre-blending sharpened into something wholly their own.

Opening with PARADOX is a decision that says everything about this album’s epic architecture. The track is the Pretty Wild thesis statement: contradictions embraced, fears confronted, aesthetics dissolved in acid and reassembled into something more sacred. The song is a brutalist funhouse of ideas with nu-grooves that stomp like industrial giants, hyper-aggro scream passages, serotonin-spike rap cadences, and an eerie, Tim Burton-coded music box motif that gives the entire structure a haunted carnival atmosphere.

It shouldn’t work. It absolutely shouldn’t work. But of course, it does. Violently, brilliantly, almost arrogantly well.

Where many genre-hybrid bands sound like they’re throwing darts at a moodboard, The Pretty Wild sound like they’re channeling something. There’s purpose to every whiplash transition. There’s emotional infrastructure beneath the chaos. PARADOX doesn’t just open the album; it opens the psychic rift listeners are about to be pulled through. The key is that it never feels like chaos for chaos’s sake; it feels like the sisters transmuting inner conflict into sound. If their music is a diary, this track rips out the first page and lights it on fire.

That willingness to self-excavate defines the entire record.

The title track, zero.point.genesis, sinks deeper into that excavation, pulling the listener into a hush of ceremonial ambience, a reflection chamber shaped by the idea that destruction is not the end but the catalyst. You can hear Jyl and Jules peeling away layers they were never allowed to shed before. The song moves like a ritual that keeps shifting under your feet. Quiet, breath-held passages open into sudden, explosive bursts of sound, as if the track itself is tearing seams to let the truth spill out. There is weight here: shimmering synth shadows, a low and resonant sense of finality, and the feeling of standing on sacred ground without knowing whether you’re there to mourn or to be reborn.

But just when you think the album might drift toward something ethereal, the sisters yank you back by the throat. The Pretty Wild have always thrived in the collision between fragility and ferocity, and zero.point.genesis perfects that duality. living ded is the perfect example: glossy and hook-heavy but dripping with rot-glam attitude, as if someone resurrected bubblegum pop and sent it stumbling through a neon graveyard wearing a leather jacket. The chorus sticks like gum on a combat boot. It’s addictive, slightly dangerous, and impossible to shake.

Button Eyes, their early viral catalyst, becomes a different creature entirely when heard in the album’s narrative. Where it once stood alone as a haunted alt-pop single, here it morphs into a psychological breaking point—the moment the album’s porcelain façade fractures. The Pretty Wild’s fascination with body-horror-as-emotional-metaphor hits its apex here: sewn-shut eyes, stitched expressions, the sense of becoming a doll in your own life. It’s unsettling, but that’s precisely the point. The sisters aren’t afraid to hold up grotesque imagery if it serves emotional truth.

What truly sets the album apart from other genre-blending debuts is how deftly it integrates sacred feminine imagery. But the Pretty Wild don’t reach for soft goddess archetypes or sanitized empowerment. Their version of the sacred is jagged, blood-warm, moonlit, primal. Nowhere is that clearer than in priestess, a track that feels like a ritual carved into waveforms: pulsing percussion like a heartbeat, layered chants like ghosts circling the fire. It doesn’t play like an empowerment anthem, it plays like a reclamation rite. It’s spirituality with claws.

And then comes one of the most unhinged corners of the album, a track that makes you realize you’re not just listening to a record but moving through a haunted funhouse built from the sisters’ subconscious.

OMENS is the bridge between the album’s ceremonial center and its feral underbelly. This is not a slow burn; this is a pressure cooker teetering on the edge of explosion. The mid-tempo pace coils tightly around itself as the track mutates, each verse tightening the screws until the entire thing breaks into gleefully unrestrained breakdowns. It’s gripping, gnashing, pulse-spiking, and then a GPS voice delivers a chilling, almost wry deadpan: “Proceed to the route,” before the music bursts back to life, shredding through its own architecture with reckless abandon.

It’s jarring in the best way. It feels like being instructed through your own psychological labyrinth, as if a coldly polite AI is trying to navigate you through emotional wreckage. It’s one of the clearest examples of the Pretty Wild’s ability to weave macabre humor, metal ferocity, and digital surrealism into one seamless moment.

And right when the chaos crests, the album pulls you into The Trial, a reckoning dressed in velvet knives. Infectious hooks cut straight through the haze—especially that line that lodges itself in your skull like a warning flare: “You’ve been hiding behind false prophesies.” The track walks a tightrope between shimmering ethereality and gut-punch impact, always seconds from cracking open into something raw and unfiltered. It’s accusatory, vulnerable, and weaponized all at once. The Pretty Wild turn confrontation into choreography, and it lands as a defining emotional pivot point for the entire record.

The emotional center of the album doesn’t lie in the chaos, it lies in the fragile, half-lit spaces between eruptions.

hALf aLiVE emerges as one of the most quietly devastating parts of the record. It’s not a ballad, nor is it a scream. It’s a song suspended in midair, raw in its uncertainty. The sisters strip away the theatrics just long enough for their voices to tremble, letting the cracks show. It’s the kind of vulnerability that feels like leaning your head on a cold window, exhausted but still present. Without moments like this, the album’s intensity would overwhelm. With it, the intensity gains depth.

That depth expands again when Magnolia Park step into the frame for AFTERLIFE. Collaborations can sometimes feel like appendages stitched onto a debut album, but this one glows. Magnolia Park’s technicolor emo-pop blends beautifully with the Pretty Wild’s goth-pop-metal palette, creating a track that bursts with emotional adrenaline. It’s euphoric and melancholy all at once—like finally running into the sun after months inside your own head. You can practically feel the crowd swell when this drops live.

On the opposite end of the spectrum lies the snarling, furnace-hot aggression of INFRARED, which reaffirms that no matter how many genres the Pretty Wild touch, their bite is real. It’s a track built for catharsis—the kind you feel all the way down your spine. The riffs scrape asphalt. The screams land like claws. It’s the moment on the record where the sisters stop storytelling and start swinging.

And then, as if closing a spellbook, the album ends its standard run with persephone. Choosing the queen of the underworld as the emotional endpoint says everything. This isn’t a retelling, it’s a resonance. It captures the feeling of stepping out of darkness with new authority, not erasing what happened there but integrating it. The track doesn’t crown the listener, it invites them to crown themselves. It’s gorgeous, aching, and symbolic in a way that reinforces the album’s heartbeat.

The physical-edition bonus cut, sLeepwALKeR, is anything but a throwaway epilogue. In fact, it’s one of the record’s most infectious late-night surges. Loaded with sugar-rush melodies, serrated screams, and that twitchy, liminal energy that blurs the threshold between consciousness and shadow, it feels like the sisters letting their id run wild one last time before the lights cut out. It snaps, it swerves, it spirals—less a cool-down and more a final, delirious sprint through the neon underworld they’ve spent the entire album constructing. If the standard tracklist ends with reclamation, sLeepwALKeR ends with possession.

What makes zero.point.genesis such a triumph isn’t just its ambition, but its embodiment. Many artists attempt genre collision; few make it feel this lived-in. The Pretty Wild don’t borrow aesthetics, they inhabit them. They don’t dabble in horror; they drag it in by the hand. They don’t sprinkle femininity on top; they carve it from bone and remold it into something powerful. The result isn’t chaos. It’s architecture.

More than anything, this record feels like they have built a universe that could safely contain the truths they needed to tell. In a landscape overflowing with incredible voices carving their own lanes, the Pretty Wild aren’t competing, they’re expanding the map. Their universe is its own dimension: glitter and gore, ritual and rupture, confession and carnivorous breakdowns.

The Pretty Wild haven’t just arrived — they’ve arrived with fangs bared, eyes glowing, hands still trembling from the ritual of making this record. zero.point.genesis is not a safe debut, nor a polite one—it is a feral coming-of-age odyssey, a holographic mirror held up to the parts of ourselves we try not to look at, a resurrection lit with strobe lights and shadow.

And if this is the genesis? The rest of the world better brace for whatever eruption comes next.

VERDICT: 4.5/5