There’s a haunted beauty creeping throughout New Years Day’s music—which also happens to be bone-crushingly heavy. Yet this wasn’t always the case. Emerging from the MySpace band boom of the ’00s, they initially specialised in the speedy pop-punk of their native Southern California. Gradually, though, the band morphed into something else entirely: a downright audacious marriage between alt-metal’s bleak ax riffage and gothic rock’s mascara-stained dread. Pushing the package over the top is lead singer and songwriter Ashley “Ash” Costello, whose siren cries and shrieks harbour bottomless depths of heartbreak, rage and defiance.