![‘Zombie Army VR’ Shuffles to a May 22 Release; Pre-Orders Open Now [Trailer]](https://bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/zombiearmy.jpg)
![Tubi’s ‘Ex Door Neighbor’ Cleverly Plays on Expectations [Review]](https://bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Ex-Door-Neighbor-2025.jpeg)
![Uncovering the True Villains of Gore Verbinski’s ‘The Ring’ [The Lady Killers Podcast]](https://bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Screenshot-2025-03-27-at-8.00.32-AM.png)
.png?#)
Jivebomb’s Kat Madeira breaks down debut LP ‘Ethereal’ track by track
Kat explains how Billie Holiday, Marina Abramović, and the 1980 slasher classic ‘The Boogey Man’ tie in to the Baltimore hardcore band’s debut LP.
Don’t let the title Ethereal fool you; Jivebomb haven’t caught the “hardcore goes hardcore-adjacent” bug one bit. If anything, this debut full-length tones down the catchier sides of 2022’s Primitive Desires EP and finds them leaning further into heavy, metallic hardcore. (In fact, two songs are re-recorded versions of songs from their first demo.) Outside of a little static-y noise that comes in part from working with producer Ben Greenberg (of Uniform), this is no-frills hardcore badassery without a single song that passes the two-minute mark. For a deeper dive into the LP, vocalist Kat Madeira has given us a track-by-track breakdown, and you can read on for what she had to say.
**
TRACK-BY-TRACK BREAKDOWN OF JIVEBOMB’S ETHEREAL
by vocalist Kat Madeira
THE IMPACT
I feel like an intro to a record or opening a set is like the appetizer. A little something to get you started. The beginning sample was so fun to make cause I had just gotten the hang of chopping up samples and me and Ben (Greenberg) made that together in the studio just pulling different sound bites from our phones or online and distorting them as we go. He’s much more efficient at that stuff than me so I’d just give him a prompt and he’d make it sound exactly how I had it in my head
ESTRELA
This song has been written (lyrically) for a while and I was on a heavy Billie Holiday kick at the time. She has a devastating song where she says, “angels have no thoughts of ever returning you – would they be angry if I thought of joining you?” so there’s an ode to that in “Estrela.” Let a past self die in order to grow rather than being complacent as your shit self in your shit life or whatever.
SURVIVAL
This that shit that makes you feel unrivaled. It’s unserious, it’s anti-you, IT’S HARDCORE, BABY!!!!!!!!
WISE CHOICE
I feel like we had to re-record this demo song to do it justice. The typical “i hate you” trope — I don’t even remember what I was on about, I was like 19 when I originally wrote this.
FATES DOMAIN
Theres too much i could say about this song, I love “Fates Domain.” This is an Ethan and Nick interlude through and through. I made the sample for it after we all watched The Boogey Man (1980) one night. She says, “I watch you, I look at you. But you don’t look back”.
RHYTHM ZERO
“Rhythm Zero” was still pretty new to me when we were demoing out the LP so I didn’t have anything written for this until days before I was in the studio with Ben. I wanted to match how intense and driven this song is sonically and had just recently gone down a Marina Abramović rabbit-hole so I guess you could say this is in the perspective of her art piece. My take away from Rhythm 0 was that when absolved of consequence for behavior, people lean towards violence by nature.
MISTAKEN
This song was kind of entirely studio magic, I feel like we finalized the structure of MISTAKEN while in the studio so I wrote for this in the span of a couple days. I’m probably most excited to play this one live.
CHARM
We re-recorded our demo song “Cidade Charme” and I revamped the intro sample. I think this version just sounds beefier. It’s more aligned with how we sound when we play it live. This is a song from Baltimore, about Baltimore.
SERAPHIM (MARINAS SONG)
This is another song that I’ve had written (lyrically) for a long time now. I think the initial draft of “Seraphim” started out as a love song, but I’d say now it’s more of a yearning. I love the name Marina — I’ve never met a Marina, I don’t know one presently, and that bodes well with the theme of this intangible being you want to make sense of.
DISFIGURED IDENTITY
The literal and figurative impact of dropping a weight from, say, the top of a building and the damage caused when making contact at the bottom leaves a lot to the imagination. Could be about anything though! The sound design at the end of this song is made up almost entirely of audio recordings I took of random sounds while Jivebomb was in Europe, chopped and screwed style.
