We need to talk about New England real quick. It’s not top of mind when anyone talks about nu metal–that distinction goes to SoCal–and the consequence of this has been a decades-long brain drain of some of our most exciting acts and me sitting on the top floor of a triple-decker across the river from Boston with a California-sized chip on my shoulder that I’ve apparently resolved to make everyone else’s problem.
I don’t begrudge anyone who leaves–everyone who does has been grinding in our local scenes way longer than I have, and when they say the infrastructure and requisite support to blow up nationally just isn’t here anymore, I believe they hit the ceiling they say they did–all I know is that it’s worked here before. Listen to Boston historian Dart Adams talk about the hip-hop infrastructure in the 80s that led to Roxbury-kids-made-good Bell Biv Devoe going quadruple platinum with Poison. The clubs and label interest that made “Boston Rock” an institution early in that same decade. The robust hardcore punk scene that put Converge on the map in the mid-‘00s, shortly after lean and hungry Merrimack Valley hopefuls Godsmack and New Hampshire/Western Massachusetts butt rockers Staind ground and lucked their way into becoming New England’s undeniable post-grunge-accented stamp on the nu metal movement.
And it’s hard to argue that there’s something happening here right now. New wave nu-pop darlings Poppy and Amira Elfeky both grew up in southern New England before moving to Cali. Vein.fm’s 2018 debut Errorzone undeniably set the tone for a nu metal revival, proving that the genre still had teeth and relevance and blowing open the door to a resurgent scene forged primarily at local DIY shows. Vein spinoff Fleshwater opened for the goddamn Deftones at the T.D. Garden last year, and no less than two of the Nu Metal Agenda’s top 10 albums of 2025 were from acts that are still largely based in what’s looking more and more everyday like Nü England.
But I’m here to talk about one of our latest cultural exports–this week’s self-titled collaborative album by Connecticut noisecore act Varination and Nü England expat ameokama. Varination is a new project from Connecticut DIY veterans Tucker Spellane and James Rivers, and ameokama is the most recent musical alias of Aki McCullough, current guitarist in goth rock act Crippling Alcoholism, co-founder of Framingham, MA’s Nu House Studios, and whose February 2025 solo debut i will be clouds in the morning and rain in the evening quickly catapulted to the top of my personal AOTY list, running the gamut from shoegaze to avant-garde metal to harsh noise experiments. That just about scratches the surface of a vast and ever-expanding resume that’s already several years deep–sleep on her credentials at your own peril, a girl’s going to end up in your walls eventually.
This new release, though, is precisely the kind of shit I’ve been secretly hoping for from McCullough–and Nü England more broadly–for years. Firmly in the Vein.fm/hardcore-indebted tradition of New England DIY, Varination & ameokama is what nu metal looks like without the LA-based labels putting their paws on the raw catharsis of garage practices and basement shows and repackaging it in cellophane for the Billboard charts. The music is grimey, gritty, but still grooves, balancing the raw brutality of Spellane and Rivers’ arrangements with an accessibility that hinges on McCullough’s emotional honesty and dynamism as a lyricist and vocalist. She tries a lot of new stuff on this album–the black metal high screams and spoken/sung alto sass are still there, but some of these screams are unhinged in a way that made nu metal undeniable in the first place, calling back to Corey Taylor acting out the sounds of emotional and psychological collapse on Iowa. And, listen, the 2020s have not been easy on the dolls, we have as much of a right to this shit as a white dude with an SSRI prescription and a record deal.
McCullough’s also really good at calibrating those cleans to scare the hoes currently scaring us–nine-minute closer “Whispered” further develops her vocal experimentations from i will be clouds to give us something approximating the late Layne Staley if he’d merged those dissonant harmonies with an estrogen prescription and vocal feminization exercises while Spellane and Rivers lay down waves of slowly-escalating unease reminiscent of the spoken word sections on Otep’s 2004 debut Sevas Tra. It’s good shit, and shit that we need more of right now.
What sold me on this album above all else, though, is the fourth-wall-breaking climax near the end of early single “Popularity is Truth,” where what begins as an excited and self-consciously silly in-studio callout accelerates into a bleak event horizon of psychological unraveling and suicidal ideation:
What the fuck is up, y’all? It’s ameokama and Varination 2026, going crazy style in the studio. We’re blowing the fuck up on Tik Tok, on Instagram, on Spotify, on fuckin’ uhhh Venmo, Hinge, Google Maps, uhh Netflix, Pornhub. I got parasocial bitches in 48 states. I take 5-7 business days to check my DMs, but I’m still broke as fuck. I can’t pay my bills. I crash out whenever I check my bank account. My friends fuckin’ hate me. I can’t look in the fuckin’ mirror until I get insurance and blow my shit clean off. And even if they accept clout to get into heaven, I’m still going to fucking hell…
What I find so compelling about moments like this is how immediately it snaps me back to the final days of pre-Musk transfemme Twitter and early-access Bluesky, the distinct ways humor and the need for emotional catharsis and validation–not to mention genuine community–intertwined to encourage clout-chasing performative swagger, sexual availability as social currency, and a hypervisibility that almost never translates into real-world economic stability. It’s a clear spiritual successor to the clear-eyed but shitpost-informed lyricism I fell in love with on Thotcrime’s 2022 sophomore album D1G1T4L_DR1FT–on which the ever-prolific McCullough contributed guest vocals–and yet another poster child for the specific types of viscerality that we as trans women are bringing to a nu metal revival that gets more and more convincing by the day.
Despite a near-national effort to keep a lid on our precise breed of bullshit, Nü England is in your walls now, screaming. Listen if you dare.
Varination & ameokama is available on streaming platforms, and for digital download on Bandcamp.
