On June 15, 2024, at Seattle’s historic Showbox theatre, Botch will play their final show. Again. Time flies. For the Tacoma trailblazers, it always has. Emerging from the United States’ Pacific Northwest in the mid-1990s, their brand of gnarly, chaotic mathcore detonated like a car bomb, blowing away the plaid-clad spectre of grunge with an unequivocal progressivism and urgency that felt almost predestined to be shortlived. By February 2002, their incendiary chemistry was declared no longer workable and they called it a day. Twenty-two years on, they’re drawing that line in the sand again: older, wiser, but still knowing that it’s better to burn out than fade away. “Any time you start out on a project, it’s good to think about the mortality of it,” reckons bassist...