The story of Fate DeStroyed is turned inside out. Usually, a new band puts together a lineup, rehearses in a garage for months, and only then thinks about making its first recording. Vocalist Franccesca De Struct did things differently: she wrote a song, invested around $5,000 in a music video, and released it before a stable lineup even existed. A risky order of operations. In Los Angeles, where a dozen projects with ready-made logos compete for every open guitarist position, her ad might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
De Struct founded Fate DeStroyed in 2016, initially as a one-off project. Before that, she had played bass and toured, including with The Dreaming, the band led by Chris Hall of Stabbing Westward. But the role of a member of someone else’s band had stopped satisfying her. Franccesca wanted to write her own material and step up to the microphone for the first time. From a bassist in the background to a frontwoman—the transition happened without an intermediate stop.
The first ideas were built at the intersection of melodic metalcore, alternative metal, and 1990s industrial music. The musicians named Deftones, Trivium, and Nine Inch Nails among their influences. From the first, they took the viscous atmosphere; from the second, the metal technique; from the third, the synthesizers and mechanical tension. Fate DeStroyed, however, did not find its own balance between these elements right away.
The debut song “Break Free” was released on May 3, 2018. The material was produced by Carlton Bost, guitarist for Orgy, Deadsy, and The Dreaming, while the video was directed by Matt Zane. Alternative Press premiered the video, and the song appeared on Spotify’s editorial playlists. During the first few months, the video and audio recording collectively accumulated more than 250,000 views and streams across different platforms.
Only after that did the search for members become significantly easier. The lineup came to include guitarists Jonni Law and Art Diharce, bassist Nathan Youngblood, who had connections to Green Jellÿ and Dirty Machine, and drummer Ben Levi of Matriarchs and Cutthroat. In August 2018, a second song, “We Fall,” appeared. De Struct described it as a warning to people so immersed in regret over the past that they fail to notice life continuing around them.
Both compositions were created with the participation of Carlton Bost and were intended for a self-titled EP. However, the planned mini-album was never released in that form. Fate DeStroyed chose a series-of-singles model—in the late 2010s, it was cheaper and more practical for an independent band than releasing a record that risked sinking into the streaming catalog in a single Friday.
The first notable performance took place at Jelly Fest, where Fate DeStroyed were given one of the headline slots. This was followed by opening shows for Orgy, Wednesday 13, and Davey Suicide, as well as a performance on the second night of Wasteland Weekend. The industrial component of the early material worked well alongside artists like these: synthesizers filled the space, while the riffs kept the set from turning into a gothic disco.
At the beginning of 2019, Art Diharce left and was replaced by Roger Bohlen, also known as Roger von Bohlen. The lineup continued to shift. “Inside” came out in March, “Art of Betrayal” in May, followed by “In the Pines” and “Shattered.” The second half of Fate DeStroyed’s name increasingly looked less like decorative spelling and more like a production report: the band constantly had to be taken apart and assembled again.
By 2020, Jonni Law, Roger Bohlen, and Ben Levi were playing alongside Franccesca. “Crave” was released in May. The early sound was no longer limited to metalcore: programming and electronics became more prominent, the vocals shifted from clean parts to screams, and the familiar verse-chorus structure began to crack under the pressure of more rhythm-focused arrangements.
The full-length debut, “Within These Walls,” was released on May 28, 2021, through Knucklehedzinc. It contained eight tracks with a total running time of approximately 27 minutes: “Speak Your Name,” “My Surrender,” “The Need That We Kill For,” “Rather See You Dead,” “This Crown,” “Slipping Away, Losing Ground,” “A Way Out,” and a new version of “Break Free.”
The title was chosen by fans on the band’s Facebook page. De Struct suggested several options and held a vote. “Within These Walls” won—as the vocalist later admitted with a laugh, it was not the option she herself preferred. Still, after the 2020 lockdowns, the phrase “within these walls” acquired too precise a meaning to argue with the result.
The recording stretched over several years. By the time of its release, Franccesca already viewed some of the material as a snapshot of an earlier version of the band: the songs had begun taking shape soon after the project became a full group, but were finished only after the musicians had moved ahead technically and stylistically. This is especially clear when comparing the melodic “Break Free” with the more rhythm-driven material on the next EP.
The album’s most requested song was “Rather See You Dead.” De Struct herself preferred “Art of Betrayal,” a faster composition with a heavy breakdown that audiences accepted noticeably less enthusiastically at shows. A familiar injustice: the author spends months polishing a complex song, while the listener plays the catchiest chorus again.
In the fall of 2021, Fate DeStroyed signed with the small Las Vegas label Dark Kingdom Records and prepared the EP “Two Toned Hearts.” It was released on October 1 and included four songs: “Death Signs,” “Let’s Crash,” “The Hollow,” and “Where We Lie.” Jason Alessi appeared on “Death Signs,” and the video premiere was hosted by Knotfest.
This was where the band noticeably changed the structure of its songs. In place of conventional melodic metalcore came trap beats, hip-hop pulses, electronic drops, and low-tuned breakdowns. De Struct added rapping and deeper extreme vocals. “Death Signs” was not simply another single, but a public refusal to follow Fate DeStroyed’s original formula.
Franccesca connected the song with regaining control over her own life. Musically, this was expressed just as directly: metal, electronics, and trap stopped existing in separate compartments and began colliding within a single composition. For traditionalists, it was a reason to wince. For a younger audience that had long since stopped sorting playlists by genre, it sounded natural.
On September 10, 2021, Fate DeStroyed performed at Blue Ridge Rock Festival in Virginia. The band had originally been selected for the 2020 festival through a Facebook submission, but the event was postponed because of the pandemic. This was followed by Rebel Rock and October dates with Vampires Everywhere!, Assuming We Survive, and The Bunny the Bear.
In 2022, the musicians played their first joint headlining tour and continued their festival run. On July 15, they played Inkcarceration at the former Ohio State Reformatory—the same massive Gothic building where the film “The Shawshank Redemption” was shot. For a band with songs called “Death Signs” and “Within These Walls,” the venue seemed to have been chosen by someone with an excessively literal sense of humor.
The lineup changed again. In 2021, Jonni Law, Roger Bohlen, and drummer Cameron Franklin performed alongside De Struct; for a while, there was no permanent bassist. Later, the vocalist’s main partners became guitarist Chris Kennedy and bassist TJ. The search for a stable drummer continued—Franccesca joked that virtually everyone in the modern heavy-music scene was already occupied with that job.
Over time, Fate DeStroyed began using the abbreviation FDS. The rebranding emphasized the shift from early metalcore toward modern nu metal and trapcore. De Struct herself described the music without a neat genre label: heavy trap beats, guitar breakdowns, rap, clean singing, and deathcore gutturals. “Music for chaotic people with heavy and aggressive emotions”—a formulation noticeably more honest than trying to fit all of it into a single catalog category.
In 2023, FDS released the collaboration “Peace With the Devil” with Australian band The Weight of Silence and recorded their own version of Deftones’ “My Own Summer (Shove It).” By then, “Within These Walls” and “Two Toned Hearts” had collectively accumulated more than 2.6 million streams on Spotify—without a major label or a radio hit.
Franccesca explained the changes bluntly: at first, she wrote music she thought other people would like; now, she writes what she would play in her own car. Because of that, the old catalog feels uneven. But the trajectory is easy to hear: from the melodic “Break Free” to the trap-metal impact of “Death Signs.” Sometimes a band’s biography is more interesting when it does not try to hide the seams.
