In 2010, Johnny Franck was the clean-voiced guy in a band nicknamed for the way its members squatted while playing guitar. Sixteen years and roughly fifteen self-released albums later, he is a Columbia Records artist with a Billboard 200 entry, a sold-out night at London's Kentish Town Forum behind him, and a genre tag of his own invention: Y'all-ternative. The distance between those two facts is the whole story of Bilmuri.
Crabcore and a Crisis of Faith
Franck co-founded Attack Attack! in Westerville, Ohio, in 2007, singing clean vocals and playing rhythm guitar while Austin Carlile screamed. The band's signature squatting stance earned it the derisive shorthand "crabcore," and a later retrospective called Attack Attack! "the Justin Bieber of metalcore," a band "everyone had an opinion" about. It worked commercially: the self-titled 2010 record hit No. 27 on the Billboard 200. It did not work for Franck. He left that November, citing damage to his relationship with God, and spent the next several years running Bible studies, fronting the heavier project The March Ahead, and quietly engineering more than 70 scene records out of his mother's basement as Johnny Franck Productions.
A Depression Project That Found an Audience
Bilmuri began in 2016 not as a career move but as survival. Franck has said he had made plans to take his own life during that period. "Music is the friend that never left me," he told Kerrang!. "I was incredibly alone during that period of time... I would get online and talk with the people who listen to our music on Twitter and they made me not feel so alone." The project's name is a scrambled joke, a way to hide a Bill Murray tribute from search engines, but the songs underneath it were unguarded in a way Attack Attack! never was.
I learned so much more just sitting in my mom's basement for 10 years recording metal bands.Johnny Franck, Kerrang!
Thirteen Albums, No Label, One Man
Between 2016 and 2024, Bilmuri operated entirely outside the industry. Franck wrote, recorded, mixed and mastered somewhere between 13 and 16 full-length projects out of his Westerville home studio, sometimes releasing two or three in a single year. Wet Milk (2019) is generally cited as the turning point toward more accessible songwriting; Rich Sips, released the same year, buried a reunion with former Attack Attack! bandmate Caleb Shomo inside a parody track so thoroughly that Loudwire called it "somewhat of a rickroll." The pandemic shutdown of touring pushed Franck into powerlifting hard enough that he commemorated a 405-pound squat with the title of an entire album.
Sixteen years and roughly fifteen self-released albums later, he coined his own genre tag: Y'all-ternative.
The Reset, Then Columbia
Goblin Hours, released October 14, 2022, was the record Franck later called his "big ego" album, guitar-solo-heavy and, by his own account, a commercial disappointment relative to his expectations. It forced a deliberate simplification that fed directly into American Motor Sports, his June 2024 major-label debut for Columbia Records, home also to AC/DC and Beyoncé. The deal ran under exclusive license from his own imprint, Johnny Franck Productions, LLC, meaning Franck kept his masters even as Columbia opened the door to arena stages. American Motor Sports never charted, but it nearly doubled his monthly Spotify audience within weeks of release, and it landed him an opening slot on Sleep Token's arena tour, including back-to-back sold-out nights at London's O2 Arena that November.
Kinda Hard Finally Charts
The 2026 album cycle opened with "More Than Hate" in June 2025, ahead of a support run with Bad Omens that Franck called a "full circle moment" since he'd once recorded frontman Noah Sebastian's teenage pop-punk band. Ohio singer-songwriter Ally Nicholas opened dates on the American Motor Sports Tour's second lap that same season, part of a pattern of Franck touring alongside developing indie and alt-rock acts rather than only metalcore peers. The album's centerpiece, "Always Let You Down" with A Day To Remember's Jeremy McKinnon, became Bilmuri's biggest hit yet, reaching No. 3 on the US Hard Rock chart; Kerrang! called it "a direct 50/50 blend" of "20 years of metalcore."
Kinda Hard arrived April 10, 2026, and did what nothing in Franck's solo catalog had managed before: it charted, debuting at No. 108 on the Billboard 200 and No. 10 on the UK Rock & Metal Chart. Kerrang! gave it 4/5, praising a record that blends "offbeat humor, exaggerated track titles with genre mashups and the underlying themes of relationships, burnout, and self-reflection" while staying "grounded in real emotion." Sputnikmusic was cooler, calling it "solid enough chub" at 3.5/5.
Still the Basement Kid
Franck still lives and records in Westerville, the same Columbus suburb where he learned guitar in sixth grade and, decades later, squatted his way into a punchline. The joke never quite left him: the deluxe reissue of American Motor Sports was subtitled 420cc after a lawn-mower engine, and Bilmuri's live billing still swings between "Dethcore/ambient/post-jazz" and "Alternative Rock, Progressive Metalcore" depending on who booked the show. That contradiction, once a liability, is now the entire brand. A man who left a charting metalcore band over its cost to his soul spent a decade making unclassifiable music alone, for an audience he built one reply at a time. It finally caught up with the charts. It never needed to.