Emily Swingle

Emily Swingle is a freelance music writer who specialises in heavy and alternative scenes, using festival-ground reporting and emotionally candid interviews to show how modern metal, hardcore and emo culture feel from the inside. She describes herself as a full-time freelancer and part-time music festival gremlin, and she first cut her journalistic teeth co-founding the independent outlet Bittersweet Press in 2019. Across Louder and other music titles, she focuses on the bands, records and live moments that define contemporary heavy music, from hardcore’s current wave to progressive metal and shoegaze.

Heavy, hardcore and genre-mixing bands

Swingle’s core beat at Louder is modern heavy music, with a particular emphasis on metal, hardcore and bands that blur genre boundaries. She writes deeply about rising and established metal acts, including ranking every album by Ukrainian metal band Jinjer from worst to best, and naming King of Everything as their strongest release in her criticism for Metal Hammer. Her coverage of Japan’s genre-mixing Paledusk, framed around their ambition to be their country’s “first legendary metal band”, shows her interest in global heavy acts that fuse styles rather than fitting neatly into one lane. Features on bands like Thornhill, where she explores how they are “bringing Deftones-core to a new level,” highlight her focus on hybrid sounds and the evolution of heavy subgenres rather than just straightforward album reviews.

She consistently picks artists whose music carries emotional and thematic weight, as in her profile on As Everything Unfolds and how they rebuilt after tragedy. Her writing for Metal Hammer extends this focus on intensity and innovation, contributing to lists of top metal albums and championing records such as Vexed’s work as “one of 2023’s most emotionally explosive albums.” Away from pure metal, she also takes on scene-spanning pieces like a detailed history of shoegaze, tracing the genre’s distinctive sound and aesthetics across bands and eras. Together, these pieces show a critic who is most interested in how heavy and alternative genres develop, cross-pollinate and connect emotionally with listeners.

Festival culture and live experience

Live music and festival culture are a defining thread in Swingle’s work, matching the “festival gremlin” description she uses of herself. At Louder she has produced pieces such as “10 artists that defined 2000Trees festival 2024,” spotlighting the performances that capture the spirit of the event rather than just listing the bill. Her review of Slam Dunk 2026, written under the headline that the festival was evidence hardcore might be the most exciting music scene on Earth right now, focuses on hardcore’s energy in a live setting and the sense of a scene in motion. She also covers Download Festival in a highly physical and narrative way, writing about a performer who “nearly died at Download Festival” and describing the moment of pulling off a mask “like upturning a bucket” to convey the extremity of the experience.

Her feature on Margot Robbie’s lifelong love of Slipknot and metal fandom adds another angle to her live and festival coverage, drawing on the atmosphere of Slipknot shows and centring the connection between mainstream figures and heavy music culture. Across these pieces she writes in a way that prioritises what it feels like to be in the crowd or onstage – the sweat, anxiety, catharsis and community – rather than treating festivals as detached event reports. That perspective makes her particularly suited to stories that hinge on the live experience, whether they concern hardcore breakouts, metal stalwarts or genre-blending newcomers.

Artist interviews and narrative features

Swingle’s Louder portfolio leans heavily on long-form interviews and narrative features that give artists space to speak, often anchored by vivid quotes in the headline. Her interview with Black Veil Brides frontman Andy Biersack covers being hated by some metal fans, getting beaten up while dressed as Batman and chasing his dreams, framing his story around conflict, resilience and self-belief rather than simple promo. In her piece on UK genre-mashing brat punk artist Delilah Bon, she digs into the topics she “thinks about and screams about,” along with eccentric details like dragons, bunking and strange Sims habits, balancing serious subject matter with subcultural humour. She uses similar methods in profiles where artists recall imagining playing in far-off cities and then realising those ambitions within months, focusing on the narrative arc from fantasy to reality.

These interviews are written with an eye for character and scene detail: she often builds articles around a memorable line or anecdote and then pulls back to show where the artist sits in the wider heavy or alternative landscape. Even in more structured formats like ranking features, she introduces narrative context about how an album fits into a band’s story or the wider metal movement, rather than only focusing on track lists or production notes. Her work therefore suits stories that need more than straight news copy – campaigns where the artist’s voice, journey or personality is central.

Emo, alternative perspectives and work across outlets

Beyond Louder, Swingle maintains a clear identity in the wider music press as “big emo that reviews spicy tunes,” and she writes across multiple specialist music publications. She co-founded Bittersweet Press, giving her a background in running an independent outlet focused on alternative and emo-adjacent scenes. Her X profile notes ongoing work with Clash magazine and Metal Hammer, indicating a spread of coverage from alternative culture to heavyweight metal criticism. Social and industry posts credit her with Metal Hammer features on thrash and progressive records, reinforcing that she is trusted to cover both classic and forward-looking heavy music.

Her progressive metal writing includes pieces described as “The future of progressive metal is here and this is what it sounds like,” showing she takes interest in bands that push the genre into new territory. Taken together with her shoegaze history and hardcore festival reviews, this paints a picture of a journalist who moves comfortably between emo, metal, hardcore, progressive and alternative subgenres, always looking for the acts that feel like they are shaping what comes next. For stories about boundary-pushing heavy music, emotionally charged alternative scenes or the lived reality of festivals and fandom, Swingle’s work shows she brings both deep scene knowledge and an enthusiastic, narrative-led style.