Asked by Lambgoat in February 2012 why bands sign to Sumerian, Ash Avildsen allowed that his leverage as an agent had helped at the start and named, for today, its "brand power, creative engine" and a reputation for being "incredibly artist friendly". That is a founder talking. The machine that turned Sumerian Records into the home of a whole wing of late-2000s deathcore was cruder than any brand and far more effective: a booking agent's phone list, one producer's desk in the San Fernando Valley and a summer package tour, all of them answering to the same man.
Born in November 1981, the son of John G. Avildsen, who directed Rocky, a singer in Reflux, a metalcore band whose album The Illusion of Democracy came out on Prosthetic in 2004 with Tosin Abasi on guitar, and then for years a booking agent before he opened an agency of his own, the twenty-four-year-old who kicked in the side door of the record business with a laptop and a one-bedroom lease was Avildsen. He started the label in 2006. An agent who also owns the records owns the whole night, from the van to the sleeve.
It started slowly, then it caught.
Sumerian Records, one man and a phone list
For the first stretch the company was Avildsen alone on the West Coast, and everything it did ran through his own phone list. Distribution came from Victory, the Chicago rock label that added Sumerian to its roster of third-party distributed labels in September 2006, two months before the first record was due.
Built around Michael Keene, its guitarist, who recorded and produced its debut at his Keene Machine Studios in Tarzana in 2006, the technical death metal outfit out of Encino that broke the label's silence was The Faceless, and that debut, Akeldama, an Aramaic title meaning field of blood, went on sale on 14 November 2006 as the first record Sumerian ever released. Avildsen later credited that signing with launching the label. The second release was a hardcore record by Stick to Your Guns, a sign the roster would not be one genre. Then, by his own count, he waited almost a year before putting out a third.
The third record was the one that mattered. Born of Osiris released The New Reign through Sumerian on 2 October 2007, an EP produced by Keene, and by Avildsen's own account it sold slowly for the better part of nine months before it caught. That lag is worth noticing. In the middle of the myspace deathcore boom, when a band could fill a hall off a profile page, the label's first breakthrough still took most of a year of touring and word of mouth to arrive.
Who runs Sumerian Records? The man who started it. Avildsen is still its founder and chief executive, and the company is still independent.
One producer, one agency, one summer
The sound of the early roster was assembled rather than declared, and the person doing most of the assembling was Keene. The same guitarist who made Akeldama produced The New Reign and then both of Veil of Maya's first two Sumerian records, The Common Man's Collapse in April 2008 and [id] in April 2010, so that most of the label's first progressive releases passed through one producer's hands. A guitarist producing guitarists kept the whole line in one pair of them.
The road ran through the same man. Avildsen's booking company, The Pantheon Agency, put bands on stages, and in 2012 he insisted that it and the label were completely separate companies and that the label played no part in booking, which is true on paper and beside the point: the same man ran both, and an agent who believes in a record knows exactly which bills to put it on. He also founded the Summer Slaughter tour, which began in the summer of 2007 with The Faceless on its first bill, and within three summers Born of Osiris, After the Burial and Veil of Maya had all played it.
Put that together on a package tour and you get one rig worn into one shape. Picture a summer bill's shared wall of 4x12 cabinets, every band on the night plugging into it, and young bands from one label working the low end of it date after date, until somewhere in August the vinyl splits along one seam on every cabinet in the line and every guitarist on the bill is playing through the same split. That is what a label's sound is. Not a manifesto, a wear pattern.
Released on 1 April 2008 with Keene producing, The Common Man's Collapse is the plainest evidence of how the label worked in its first two years. Two of its songs were re-recorded from the band's first album, All Things Set Aside, and a third reworked a song from a 2005 demo, so the record works partly as a second, tighter draft of material the Chicago band already owned. That was a habit across the early catalogue. Demos went up online, songs were tested on the road, and the Sumerian version arrived as the finished take.
"It's Torn Away" is the demo song in question, rebuilt from a track the band had called "Aim for the Head" in 2005, and the label has it on its own channel. It is a fair test of the method: an old demo cut again with new lyrics and some new riffs, and released as the finished take.
What the Sumerian sound did to a breakdown
The label's early deathcore records shared a producer and a booking desk more than a template. The breakdown was not a slower verse. It was a sortie launched out of odd-timed, syncopated riffing, which is how a 2023 review on Metalwani hears Veil of Maya, setting its "complex chug patterns with odd-timed syncopated rhythms" inside the progressive metalcore and deathcore of the day.
The same review grouped Born of Osiris, After the Burial and Veil of Maya, with I, the Breather at a distance, as the original "Sumeriancore" bands. The tag was half a compliment. Once a sound is recognisable enough to name after a label, it is recognisable enough to be accused of sameness, and Distorted Sound's review of Veil of Maya's False Idol in 2017 found the production grossly over-polished and the band meandering down a generic path paved by the label. The record shows both readings sticking to the same catalogue.
| Released | Band, record | Producer | What it proved |
|---|---|---|---|
| 14 November 2006 | The Faceless, Akeldama | Michael Keene | The label's first release, and its house producer |
| 2 October 2007 | Born of Osiris, The New Reign (EP) | Michael Keene | A slow seller that caught nine months in |
| 1 April 2008 | Veil of Maya, The Common Man's Collapse | Michael Keene | Old songs rebuilt as the finished take |
| 22 July 2008 | After the Burial, Rareform | the band | Reissued in September 2009 with a new singer |
| 11 November 2008 | The Faceless, Planetary Duality | Michael Keene | Number 119 on the Billboard 200 |
| 6 April 2010 | Upon a Burning Body, The World Is Ours | Will Putney | The roster's Texan, groove-heavy wing |
| 6 April 2010 | Veil of Maya, [id] | Michael Keene | Number 1 on the Heatseekers chart |
The charts give the shape. Planetary Duality, released on 11 November 2008, sold around 5,600 copies in its first week and entered the Billboard 200 at number 119, a technical death metal record from a label two years old sitting on the same list as the majors. For four years one guitarist's ears shaped most of what the wing sounded like.
Asking Alexandria and the widening of the label
For four years one guitarist's ears shaped most of what the wing sounded like.
In those same years the frame widened, and it widened in one direction first. With six songs already heard as demos on its MySpace and PureVolume pages and a debut album recorded between May and June 2009 with Joey Sturgis producing, the British quintet that tore the label's catalogue wide open to synthesisers, trance hooks and sung choruses was Asking Alexandria, and Sumerian released that album, Stand Up and Scream, on 15 September 2009. It peaked at number 170 on the Billboard 200 and at number 4 on the Heatseekers chart. Small numbers. They kept growing.
"The Final Episode (Let's Change the Channel)" is the single that carried that record, and the official video sits on the Sumerian channel. The breakdown is still there, but it lands like a strobe zip-tied to the lip of an all-ages stage and hammering the room white on the drop, every bounce in the room frozen white for a split second while a dance-floor synth line keeps running over the top. The RIAA later certified the song gold, as it did "Not the American Average" from the same record.
The photographs travelled with the songs. Look at the band shots the label sent out around 2009 and 2010 and you see swoops, snakebites and black skinny jeans, the dress of the era, on bands from both sides of the Atlantic, and a label that had started with a technical death metal record now sent out a look as well as a riff.
The rest of the widening came fast. I See Stars put out 3-D on 14 April 2009, number 176 on the Billboard 200 and a record built on electronics; Periphery, Misha Mansoor's band from the Washington, D.C. area, released its first album through Sumerian on 20 April 2010, number 128 and number 2 on the Heatseekers chart; and Asking Alexandria's From Death to Destiny entered the Billboard 200 at number 5 in August 2013, the label's biggest first week to that date. After that the roster stopped looking like one scene at all.
The deathcore wing that never left
None of that widening pushed the heavy end out. Formed in San Antonio, produced on its first two records by Will Putney, and in the habit of naming every song after a film, the Texan band that kept the label's groove-heavy deathcore rampart standing while the synths moved in was Upon a Burning Body. The World Is Ours came out on 6 April 2010, the same day as [id].
Released by Sumerian on 10 April 2012 and recorded in the autumn before at The Machine Shop with Putney again behind the desk, Red. White. Green. took its song titles mostly from films Robert Rodriguez directed or produced, "Sin City" and "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" among them, and entered the Billboard 200 at number 105. Two years later The World Is My Enemy Now, recorded at the label's own Sumerian Studios in Los Angeles, reached number 39.
"Texas Blood Money", the fourth track on Red. White. Green. and a song the label gave its own video, is the label's heavy wing at its most direct. The chug rattles along like a pickup taking a cattle guard at sixty, every steel pipe of the grid hammered in turn under the tyres, and the breakdown is the truck leaving the far side of it and slamming back onto the dirt road with its whole tonnage at once.
The label kept signing from the regional scenes too. Betraying the Martyrs, a Paris band, signed with Sumerian for North America in 2011 and released Breathe in Life that September, and in April 2012 the label sent it across the United States with Upon a Burning Body and I, the Breather on a run billed as the Sumerianos Tour. A label tour with its own name. That is the agent's instinct again.
The later signings were the heaviest of all. Slaughter to Prevail, out of Yekaterinburg, joined in 2016, when Sumerian reissued its Chapters of Misery EP, and the label released Misery Sermon on 5 May 2017 and Kostolom in 2021. In May 2026 Carnifex, one of the genre's long-running bands, two decades in, signed as well. Born of Osiris and Veil of Maya are still on the roster.
So the label was never a deathcore label in the strict sense. It began with a technical death metal record and a hardcore one, built its first identity on three progressive deathcore bands and one producer, found its money in Asking Alexandria and then kept the heavy end supplied for twenty years. What held it together was the office: an agency, a tour and a label run by one person, deciding which records got made and which stages they were played on.
