Ex-Sworn In members launch Bliss By Proxy with debut single SKINSUIT

Tyler Dennen and Zakary Gibson, the former vocalist and guitarist of Sworn In, have restarted their partnership under a new name. Bliss By Proxy released its debut single, SKINSUIT, on August 27 with a video, and it is the first music Dennen has put out since he left Sworn In in 2018.

Sworn In were early to a sound that much of heavy music spent the next decade chasing. Their 2013 debut The Death Card pushed the heaviest possible guitar work into metalcore and leaned openly on nu metal for its low end, which was an unusual choice at the time. Later records widened that further, folding in breakbeats and amen breaks under Dennen's screaming.

SKINSUIT reads as the same collaboration moved forward rather than simply revived. Dennen still swings between screaming, an almost rapped cadence and sung passages inside one song, and Gibson's playing turns from pretty to ugly without any run up. The track is weirder, poppier and heavier than the band the pair came from.

The two said very little about the project beyond a single line of their own. "we're bliss by proxy and we make the heavy music we want to hear," the duo wrote in a statement, framing the whole thing as filling a gap nobody else was filling for them.

No album, label or release schedule has been announced, so SKINSUIT is the only thing the project has issued so far. Anyone tracking what comes next in metal can follow the pair through the release calendar as dates are confirmed.

The reunion lands in a hard year for the scene the two came out of, with Mike Milford, the singer of metalcore band Scars of Tomorrow, dying after a cancer battle. Newer hardcore acts have kept the pipeline moving, among them Pain of Truth, who released the single Stranded.