Meet Yasmine Liverneaux, the Face Yourself vocalist who turned catcalls to do ‘corset Metal’ into comparisons to Lorna Shore’s Will Ramos, as the band fast become a sharp staple of the modern Deathcore age.
Face Yourself’s latest EP, Fury, is a detonation of extremes: down-tuned breakdowns, behemothic vocals, and gut punches at every turn, triggering an immediate obsession with their brutal blend of Deathcore. But the heart of this band lies in their friendship, their jokes, and their joy at making music together; it just happens to be wrapped in a delectably vicious package of extreme Metal.
“The main reason I do this is because it makes me happy to just write the music and be with the people that I’m with,” vocalist Yasmine Liverneaux says. “And our band makes me happy in general. Obviously, anyone who has a normal life, like we do, has hobbies, and for us, [the band] is just a very extreme hobby. We’re trying to make more from this than just a hobby, but if you are really passionate about something, you always find a way to have time in your life to do it.”
Yasmine, who is already garnering comparisons to the likes of Lorna Shore’s Will Ramos and Entheos’ Chaney Crabb, has come a long way from her hometown in Strasbourg, France, where she first stumbled across drummer Eric DiCarlo’s Facebook advert looking for a vocalist. “I was thinking about auditioning for Mental Cruelty back when they were doing their auditions,” she says. “But when I found out about [Eric’s] post and I saw that it was going to be a completely new project, I was a little more interested.
“I didn’t want to walk in the shoes of someone who had already set up expectations. I feel like, especially when you’re a girl trying to hold the spot of a guy, you have to be able to face a lot of criticism. So I just felt like starting from scratch, with something new, would be cool.”
In the two years since Face Yourself formed, they have released five EPs, signed to Sumerian Records (Bad Omens, Poppy, Slaughter To Prevail), and are now touring with Signs Of The Swarm following a successful Summer Of Rampage tour with Crystal Lake. From being called “lame” by her school peers to becoming one of the brightest rising vocalists in Metal, Yasmine Liverneaux is turning her past pain into obliterating Deathcore lyrics that bleed with authenticity, catharsis, and hope.
“People would tell me, ‘You should do corset Metal because you’re a girl.’”
From as young as six, Yasmine studyied classical music at her father’s behest, who was keen for her to have a musical education. It wasn’t until she was 15 that she joined her first Melodic Death Metal Band. “But it was very Euro Death Metal, like Arch Enemy, Amon Amarth, and that’s not the kind of music I really wanted to do,” Yasmine says. “I wanted to do more brutal Metal, like Deathcore, Grindcore, and things like that.
“But back when I was 15, the mindset was very different in a way that it wasn’t as popular to have girls doing very brutal Metal. We had what we called in France ‘corset Metal’, which was girls wearing corsets doing lyric opera singing in Metal bands like Nightwish. And often when I was trying to find bands, people would tell me, ‘You should do corset Metal because you’re a girl.’” 
Yasmine ended up in a band with a bunch of 30-year-old men, as they were the only ones in her little town to play Metal with. “I was in the middle of high school, and those guys were moving into their first house, getting married, so at a completely different stage of life. I think it was just harder for me back then to do music because it was hard to find people that I could connect with on a musical point of view, and also on a human point of view. But it was still fun.”
The last decade has seen a significant evolution in what things are considered “normal” for women in music to do, and fortunately, playing any and all kinds of Metal is one of them. Yasmine’s first-ever tour, for instance, when Face Yourself toured with Crystal Lake, VCTMS, and Not Enough Space, was rammed full of women: from musicians and crew, to photographers and merch sellers.
“In general, if we want more representation, acting like it’s normal is going to open the doors for everyone,” Yasmine says. “You can compliment people without always pointing out their gender, even though I do understand it’s also a need for representation for a lot of people.”
Musical Inspirations
“One of the bands I was listening to all the time was Cannibal Corpse. Scourge Of Iron was one of my favourite songs – I covered it like a hundred times, honestly. So I was really into Death Metal. I really liked Black Metal as well. My favourite band is Carach Angren; they’re from the Netherlands. There was this one band, though, with a female vocalist, that I would listen to from France called Eths, and I remember their song Crucifère. It was just so good, and it was the first time I heard a girl doing harsh vocals.
“Back then, when I was listening to Metal, I didn’t even think about girls doing it or not. It’s just I never noticed any back then. And when I found out about this band, I was like, ‘Oh, I guess girls do it too.’ And I’ve always really liked, in general, learning new skills. So I was really interested in learning this kind of singing. And slowly, I discovered Deathcore bands. One of the first bands I listened to was Despised Icon, and then Chelsea Grin.”
The Unexpected Ingredients In A Face Yourself Banger
Goofish humour, private jokes, and group chat voice notes used as sampling are not typical ingredients of a Deathcore masterpiece. But in their latest EP, Fury, Face Yourself have done just that. Fractures, which lyrically explores self-hatred and the pressures of beauty standards, features a sample of guitarist and backing vocalist Corey Doremus saying: “I am positively fucking tweaking right now.” Yasmine explains, “That’s from a conversation that we had in the band chat. He took pre-workout for the first time in a really long time. And so we just sampled it and put it in the song.”
“It’s just stuff like that that’s happened. We will add it [into the songs] because in the end, it represents who we are. We don’t force the humour – it’s just a part of us as friends hanging together and making little jokes.”
Another track that not only features a Face Yourself private joke but is titled after one is Wet Dreams. “It was not supposed to be called Wet Dreams,” Yasmine says. “Eric and Dave [Ricco, lead guitars] sat together for like two hours and wrote that song, and then I wrote the whole lyrical content for it. And Dave had some notes.
“So when he was in Denver to work with a different band, we met with him and Corey, and we rented a little practice place nearby. The song was supposed to be called The Rain, because it’s about the rain. And I just made a joke: uh oh, dreaming of the rain is like wet dreams. And then we were like, oh. my. God. We have to change the title of the song.”
Beyond jokes and spontaneity, it is also the band’s teamwork on every song they write that adds to the indestructible heart and soul at the centre of Face Yourself’s music. “The more everyone adds a little bit of themselves into it, the more you get a song that you’re really happy with,” Yasmine says. This includes Joey Sturgis, their mastermind producer, who wrote the haunting piano outro for Ov Agony in the studio in about 10 minutes.
What To Hold Onto When Nothing Seems Worth It Anymore
Most of Face Yourself’s lyrical inspiration comes from Yasmine’s past pain and depression. “I no longer have to hold this pain inside, and now that it has been freed through the music, this pain doesn’t have to be mine anymore,” Yasmine says. In her darkest moments, when she no longer felt like life was worth living, it is hard to say exactly what the key was to getting better. “Even when I was struggling, I always had people around me who would give me the same advice over and over.
“And the thing is, any advice you hear, like talk to someone, write down something that hurts, and then destroy the paper, like all those little things…Anyone who sees someone struggling would say exactly the same things. And it’s true. They’re the things that work. But I feel like it’s so hard because sometimes you really struggle to want to feel better because you’re in such a dark place that it’s really, really hard to even have that wish.
“The reason why I started feeling better is because first, I got the help, but it wasn’t until I had this little click in my mind that I started actually feeling better. So I think it’s just about finding things to hold on to. For example, Wet Dreams is about when I was at the hospital because I had depression when I was 15, and I stayed there for like two months during January/February, so I was watching the rain.
“I was watching the rain, and there were locks on the windows so I could not go outside or feel the rain. And I just held onto looking at the rain and trying to remember what it felt like. I feel like a lot of sensorial things can help. And it was just like, for a long time, I tried to reproduce the feeling of it by taking a shower or something, but nothing felt the same. You know how rain has that smell as well?
“Today I hate the rain! I love living in Colorado because it doesn’t rain and it’s dry. But I feel, holding on for a long time, being like, I want to be able to feel that again, that helped me have a way out of there. I feel like any small thing like this can help; it doesn’t necessarily have to have a very big meaning. If someone has a goal or a dream, allow yourself to dream, even if it seems too big. If your dream is to be able to meet Beyonce someday, I don’t know, but you can’t leave the world until you meet Beyonce.”
Face Yourself are currently supporting Signs Of The Swarm on their North American tour, along with Mental Cruelty, Ten56., and Carcosa.
