Upset, May 2023

Y’reet?

May 2023

By the time a band gets to Enter Shikari’s vintage, they’re supposed to be done with being exciting or pushing the boundaries. And yet probably quite predictably - this lot are nothing of the sort. With a new album that doesn’t just do fizzy, exciting musical backflips - but also does it in a way that challenges the very world around it - this is Enter Shikari at the very top of their game. Back on the cover of Upset this month, there could be no better flag-bearer for modern rock music.

RIOT! 4. Fall Out Boy 8. Understand 12. Jamie Lenman ABOUT TO BREAK 14. Lambrini Girls FEATURES 18. Enter Shikari 26. City and Colour 30. Scowl 34. DRAIN 38. nothing, nowhere.

44. Covet REVIEWS 48. Waterparks TEENAGE KICKS 50. Honey Revenge

Stephen Ackroyd @stephenackroyd Editor

UPSET Editor Stephen Ackroyd Deputy Editor Victoria Sinden Associate Editor Ali Shutler

Scribblers Alexander Bradley, Alex Ingle, Dan Harrison, Dillon Eastoe, Jack Press, Jamie MacMillan, Kelsey McClure, Linsey Teggert, Rob Mair, Sam Taylor, Steven Loftin Snappers Alice Baxley, Bridie Florence, Eli Chavez, Eli Rae, Jamie MacMillan, Jonathan Weiner, Julian Berman, Sarah Louise Bennett, Steve Gullick, Vanessa Heins PUBLISHED FROM WELCOMETOTHEBUNKER.COM PO BOX 420, HASTINGS, TN34 9LZ

All material copyright (c). All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of The Bunker Publishing Ltd. Disclaimer: While every effort is made to ensure the information in this magazine is correct, changes can occur which affect the accuracy of copy, for which The Bunker Publishing Ltd holds no responsibility. The opinions of the contributors do not necessarily bear a relation to those of Dork or its staff and we disclaim liability for those impressions. Distributed nationally.

THE MONTH IN ROCK

FALL OUT BOY are back! And they’re sounding brilliant.

Words: Ali Shutler.

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→ For the past decade, Fall Out Boy have been one of the few groups repping guitar music on the radio and at the top of festival bills. The band may have had their tongue firmly pressed against their cheek when they called their 2013 comeback record ‘Save Rock And Roll’, but it proved somewhat prophetic.

Speaking the afternoon after their intimate show at London’s Heaven, bassist Pete Wentz explains how there was a “fuck it” attitude to their posthiatus material. “People were saying we couldn’t do music like that anymore.

So, we just wanted to make anthems.

We were trying to make [rock music] undeniable.”

And it’s hard to argue with tracks like ‘The Phoenix’, ‘Centuries’ or ‘Champion’.

“We did it, and we clawed our way

through, and we figured it out. But we got pretty frustrated doing it,” says Pete.

By the time it got to ‘MANIA’ as a whole, Fall Out Boy “weren’t comfortable”.

“We were in a place where we were just really frustrated [with the scene],” says Pete before comparing it to 2008’s ‘Folie à Deux’. “They’re both very artistic albums. They’re both fraught. They both come from a frustrated place. The music is all Patrick, so I can say this; there are brilliant ideas on both those records, but then there are unfinished parts as well.

I can see why both of those would be somebody’s favourite record.”

New album ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ feels different, though. Yes, ‘Love From The Other Side’ and ‘Hold Me Like A Grudge’ bang and throughout the album, there are moments of daring brilliance.

But there’s also an intricacy that feels

distinctly like pre-hiatus Fall Out Boy. “We’ve solved the contradictions of the two eras,” grins drummer Andy Hurley. “Now, new contradictions will arise.”

Pete goes on to describe their breakout run of albums (‘From Under The Cork Tree’, ‘Infinity On High’ and ‘Folie à Deux’) as one trilogy, while ‘Save Rock And Roll’, ‘American Beauty/ American Psycho’ and ‘MANIA’ is their second trilogy.

“That’s terrifying because you’re saying that, and I’m thinking, ‘oh shit, are we starting The Sequel Trilogy with ‘Stardust’,” jokes Patrick Stump, beating Pete to a Star Wars reference. “I hope we stick the landing better.”

“I remember when Patrick first played the demo for ‘Love From The Other Side’, and it felt new and old at the same

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time,” continues Pete. “It was something we would have wanted to do [back then], but we wouldn’t have really known how to do it.” Not only did Pete instantly know that the track needed to be the lead single for their eighth album, but it was the moment he bought into Patrick’s “back to basics” vision. “I knew we could build a statement around that song.”

He believes the frustration of ‘MANIA’ is one of the reasons it’s taken Fall Out Boy five years to release an album, with the other being the pandemic. “The album really benefited from us taking our time, though,” says Pete. “The tools we use on the record were sharper because of it.” “’Stardust’ wasn’t frustrated,” he continues.

“This record feels way more balanced. When we were in the studio together, ideas were bouncing back and forth. Everything was flowing.

And then [returning producer Neal Avron] was there, making sure everyone got their perspective across.”

Previously, Patrick has described ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ as ‘what if Fall Out Boy made a record after ‘Folie’, instead of going on a five-year hiatus’. The result is a spiritual successor to that controversial record, if not a sonic one. “Last time we worked with Neal, Pete and I were not getting on very well, to be entirely honest,” says Patrick.

“I feel like every record has been more and bigger until we got to ‘MANIA’, which was everything, all at once.

With ‘Stardust’, there’s a lot of purposeful space,” adds Pete.

“Working with Neal reminded us that there doesn’t need to be as much sauce to cover things up if you just start with better ingredients. There’s actually less on this album, but it feels bigger.”

“I don’t want this to sound to boomer-y,” begins Patrick, of his vision for ‘So Much (For) Stardust’.

6 Upset

“Great start,” laughs Pete.

“But these damn kids and these damn phones,” jokes Patrick, as Pete checks his. “But seriously, there is a kind of distance to the human experience these days. During the pandemic, there was this forced way of communicating, and I wanted to make a record that was tangible. I wanted to make a record that was touched and was made by hand.

The instruments were very much played, and Neal was very serious about getting takes. If I tried to be lazy by suggesting we just tune a line or something, he’d insist we do it properly. I wanted that kind of record, though. It feels like a palate cleanser from this period of impersonal distance.”

As a side effect of wanting to prove that guitar music could still be part of that mainstream conversation, Fall Out Boy’s post-hiatus records have been driven by an ambition to be heard by as many people as possible.

With ‘Stardust’ though, “it was more about, let’s craft something that we love, that we think our fans will love. I don’t think this is designed for the wider world,” admits Pete. “We live in a time where going deep with people that care feels so much more important than going wide.”

It’s perhaps why at their recent headline shows, Fall Out Boy have resurrected ‘Folie’ deep cuts like ‘Disloyal Order Of Water Buffaloes’ and ‘Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown On A Bad Bet’.

“People always say that ‘Folie’ is their favourite record. Okay, let’s prove that.

Plus, songs like ‘Headfirst Slide’ and a couple of others we’ve talked about always went off. I feel like we’re gonna work some more of it in at future shows.”

Pete goes on to talk about how people always return to the music that they first discovered for themselves, that made them feel something. “I feel like with

‘Stardust’, we made an album for those fans that have come on the journey with us.” Instead of still acting like teenagers, though, “it’s like, let’s talk about all the stuff we’re going through now.”

“I love the way you explained ‘Stardust’ – half nihilism, half undeniable optimism. I totally feel that really speaks to the times,” adds Andy.

Pete thinks that undeniable optimism comes from making music alongside “hanging out with your friends and doing things that put joy into the world. It’s usually simple shit, but that goes a long way because we live in a world that isn’t supportive of that at all.”

“But I also think it’s okay to live in the nihilism and feel hopeless,” adds Andy. “It’s okay to feel like this world’s fucked, and it’s not going to get better, but you’ve still got

to get up and do stuff. You’ve still got to live. You’ve still got to try.”

We’re talking a week before ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ is released. Despite a string of album listening parties and the positive response to the singles, Patrick is nervous, while Andy is just excited. “I think people are going to love it,” he says.

Pete feels really good “right now”, but Patrick is already braced for the string of wild texts he gets from him the night before every album release, asking him if it’s possible for it to not come out. “I always have a massive anxiety attack,” says Pete.

“The finality of it is always a lot. It feels like we’re on the precipice of something, I guess.”

‘So Much (For) Stardust’ might be the start of a new trilogy for Fall Out Boy, but the band aren’t planning

RIOT!

GOING DEEP WITH PEOPLE THAT CARE FEELS SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN GOING WIDE"

PETE WENTZ

ahead. Or as Pete puts it, “I don’t know where we are in any of the whatever.”

It does feel like the start of something new, though.

“This record is the first time, accidentally or on purpose, where we’ve embraced the two eras of Fall Out Boy and tried to mesh them together,” says Pete.

Neal being involved was super helpful with that marriage of past and paster, but also the way people think about genre has shifted since 2018. “We live in a world that’s gatekeeper-less now.

You’re just more free as an artist, which I know definitely helps Patrick. I mean, listen to ‘What A Time To Be Alive’; that song is full-on Patrick Stump. You couldn’t do that during the other two eras because it felt like there were all these things you could and couldn’t do, even if we bent those rules as much as

we did.”

“I’ve always had some confusion and concern about where I fit into things,” admits Patrick. “When we started, I was kind of a jazz kid, but I wasn’t. I was a film score kid, but I wasn’t. I was a hardcore kid, but not really.”

“What did we call them, armchair hardcore kids,” asks Pete.

“I was a mail-order kid. I would buy hardcore records through a catalogue, but I wouldn’t go to shows because I was terrified. I felt like I was always swimming in the middle of lots of different things.”

When it came to writing those early Fall Out Boy songs, Patrick would “do impersonations of other pop-punk bands”, but in the margins, there’d be ideas he was too afraid to try out until Pete encouraged him.

“The falsetto in ‘Saturday’ was a complete accident,” he admits. “It sorta just happened, and Pete wanted me to do it again, but I was scared because pop-punk bands weren’t supposed to do that. There’s been a lot of that throughout our career,” he admits. The fact those ‘rules’ don’t exist for Fall Out Boy anymore “is the only reason I can be in a band,” admits Patrick. “I don’t know what band I would be in if I weren’t in this band, though. I don’t know what band would let me do what we do.”

‘So Much (For) Stardust’ will undoubtedly be part of the conversation about the emo revival that’s taken

hold over the past few years, but as promised, it isn’t a throwback album. “I think the resurgence is great,” says Pete. “All ships rise with the tide, and everyone benefits.

Plus, my son’s friends have started listening to guitar bands and now want to play guitar, which is really fucking cool.”

He wants this era of Fall Out Boy to be what Green Day was to that 00s scene. “Instead of releasing ‘American Idiot’, they could have done another record that sounded like ‘Dookie’, and that would have been fine, but instead, they did this thing that was adjacent to us, Paramore, My Chem. It felt like something only they could do. It stepped out from everything else. That’s the aspiration for ‘Stardust’.”

“It’s that thing where, if you don’t push yourself, you aren’t being yourself. If you stay the same, you’re not being honest,” he adds.

‘So Much (For) Stardust’ isn’t just a reaction to the more creatively free world Fall Out Boy now inhabits.

“There is just a general sense of dread at the moment, isn’t there?” asks Pete. “One day, I will not exist. I will be dust, and everybody I know will be dust. It’s enough to make you not want to do anything, but when I really think about that, I know you have to actually do everything.” He’s not talking about spending your days doing death-defying stunts, “but you need to do the things that break you out of those nihilistic feelings.”

Taking his own advice, at the very start of lockdown, Pete spoke about creating a record inspired by cult film Reality Bites and the speech Ethan Hawkes’ character gives after finding out his dad had cancer. The crux of it is that maybe life is pointless, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy moments of happiness. “I wrote a record with Ryland Blackinton from Cobra Starship that was like, spoken word poetry over the sort of music you hear on the Headspace app but we never did anything with it,” says Pete, chalking it up to a pandemic hobby. The influence on ‘Reality Bites’ can be felt across ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ with the band even sampling the film on ‘The Pink Seashell’ interlude.

However, getting older hasn’t helped with that feeling of dread. When Pete was a kid, he thought his parents had it all figured out.

He distinctly remembers the feeling of hopelessness that came from the news reports about the AIDS crisis, and how his parents talked him through it. “Now I have to talk people through stuff, and I just feel like my parents probably didn’t have it as figured out as I thought they did. I definitely don’t have it figured out.”

“There’s a loneliness to the fact there’s not somebody who can figure everything out for you. There’s a sadness to knowing there’s nobody to wrap a blanket around you and tell you that everything is going to be okay.” It’s made worse by the fact that “for the past couple of years, it feels like the world is bubbling and on edge. It feels like it could all go sideways at any time.”

That’s paralysing,” continues Pete. “But it’s reminded me that you should go out and try new things because life is short. I hope this record can be someone’s companion on that journey.”

■ Fall Out Boy’s album ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ is out now.

Upset 7

RIOT!

Twenty-five years after Southenders UNDERSTAND disbanded, the group finally release their long-awaited second album, ‘Real Food at Last’, posthumously celebrating founding member John Hannon.

Words: Steven Loftin. Photos: Steve Gullick + Band’s Own

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→ Twenty-five years ago, Southenders Understand set about recording demos for their potential second album.

After the dissolution of their deal with then-label East/West Records, post the fumbled distribution handling of their 1995 debut album ‘Burning Bushes and Burning Bridges’, interest came from left and right with a new deal elsewhere to be scribbled and sealed imminently. So they set to work. Holing up a shack, piecing together ideas, they were planning on following up a debut which had received critical as well as fan acclaim. Everything seemed to be going their way.

Unfortunately, nothing came to fruition.

While ‘Burning Bushes’ found its footing as a solid example of the future of posthardcore, becoming a cult favourite with its gloriously melodic sounds amongst a barrage of hardcore daggers, they inevitably wound up going their separate ways after a final show in 1998.

The five of Understand - John Hannon (guitar), Dom Anderson (vocals), Stuart Quinell (bass), Andy Shepherd (drums), and Rob Coleman (guitar) - let the sketches and demoed tracks lie. Taking them out over the years, slowly converting them from the older formats they’d recorded them - in what was essentially a shed with a few rented mics - it was an Understand WhatsApp group that led to the tracks properly resurfacing.

Very much separated by land and sea, the five-piece had followed differing paths.

Various industry-related jobs ended up carrying them to different corners of the globe.

But it was these jobs that would inevitably lead to ‘Real Food at Last’ finding its way out into the world. Calling in favours, and with Rise Records eventually coming on board also, the album was finally establishing its footing.

Though not before tragedy struck.

The process of getting the

IT’S GONNA BE A NICE CLOSURE OF THAT PERIOD"

DOM ANDERSON album licked and polished was well underway - and during Covid to boot - but there was no real rush, after all these were songs that had been germinating for decades. But in May 2021, Understand suffered the tragic loss of John. This is why ‘Real Food at Last’ now holds even more weight to the band. Not only is it a moment of celebration for the band writ large, but also for their founding friend. It was with him that Understand established itself and almost made the dream come true.

Reflecting on their time now as a band, Dom describes the scene they found themselves in back in the mid-90s. “It wasn’t like we were all super serious people.

We were lumped in with the straight-edge scene back in the day; we played with a lot of those bands, and a couple of the members of the band just chose not to drink. But we weren’t one of these super serious, straight-edge bands.

We weren’t singing about straight-edge themes or anything like that.”

The band’s entire look was all a part of their charm.

They felt like the kids down the road who one day heard Fugazi and then decided that was it. “We weren’t a regular hardcore band, so none of the normal, metal-y kind of aggro imagery ever felt appropriate to us. We were always presenting ourselves as more along that DC band style. It was never a band that felt like it could be funny or cheesy; it was always very serious and just very straight to the point.”

‘Real Food at Last’

picks up where ‘Burning Bushes’ left off. This was mostly in part due to John’s commitment to bringing the tracks to life. John was part of the band’s integral aesthetic and musical glue. So much so that while being the “studio guy”, this also meant that “he was the keeper of all of the files,” says Dom. “And the tapes and all the stuff. So, there was a whole process of having to get hold of his computer and get it in the hands of someone over there in England who could find the files and get the files sent to where we needed them sent to get them mixed.

“John was also the tastekeeper for the band,” Dom continues. “He was the one who did all of the graphic design and artwork for the earliest stuff that we did, and for our first album. So everything moving forward with this record always had that ‘what would John do’ mentality.”

The band’s issues in 1995 which led to their breaking up never came from any personal level for the group, which is why this return feels even more triumphant. “It seemed like a fairly natural thing,” says Dom. “It wasn’t like the band had this big break up, it wasn’t like we had this big, ‘Oh, you’ve been dropped from the record label’, everything just kind of petered out, you know.

And obviously, that was disappointing. And it was disappointing at the time that the first album didn’t do better because it got great reviews, and was received well. And the band was on a big high at the time.

“We were touring with lots of cool bands when the record actually came out. Like the week of release, we were on tour opening for Therapy? around the UK and Europe, and you couldn’t really be with a bigger alternative band at that time in whatever that was, 94/95. So everything was going great apart from no one could get actually go and buy the record, because they just didn’t really make any!

Which was crazy; I still, to this day, don’t really understand how it got so fucked up. But I think we were just lost in a world of major labels at the time, suddenly just grabbing every alternative band that they could, and throwing them all at the wall and see which ones stuck.”

As for the idea of new material, it’s something that has been bandied about the WhatsApp chats, albeit in a not-so-serious manner.

“We’ve talked about it. And it’s really been only in kind of jokey conversation.” The reality is, with a couple of members tour-managing gigantic rock acts (Dom is currently with Muse, and Rob with Iron Maiden), the others living halfway around the world, and with John’s passing, an understandable and perhaps even untenable gap created, it’s just not likely.

Twenty years is a long time for anything to be sat around, let alone a literal snapshot of who you were, and how you sounded when you were two decades younger. Thinking upon it now, Dom is pleased with the outcome. “I have a copy of it; it looks great. It sounds great.

The feedback is really good.

So I think it’s gonna be a nice closure of that period,” he says earnestly. “And of that little set of songs. I think it’s going to do itself proud, and considering it was recorded by ourselves basically in a shed on a pig farm in Hullbridge, Essex, it sounds great. It’s a good final piece of the puzzle.” ■ Understand’s album ‘Real Food At Last’ is out now.

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BIG PICTURE

Sleeping With Sirens smash Shepherd’s Bush Empire

With the equally brilliant Static Dress in support. SWS know how to bring ‘it’ to London’s iconic Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Not even a tube strike was gonna stop this one going off. Photo: Sarah Louise Bennett.

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Photo: Jen Hingley.

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EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NEW EP FROM...

RIOT!

Jamie runs us through his reallyverygood new EP, ‘Iknowyouknowiknow’

→ This is my first EP as a solo artist A lot of people think my last record, ‘King of Clubs’, was an EP, and that’s how it started, but it grew into something much bigger in terms of themes and obviously runtime, with its own world and its own design elements etc. I consider it to be a mini-album, and it’s an important distinction for me.

Even though ‘Iknowyouknowiknow’ is only one track and a couple minutes shorter, it doesn’t have its own identity in the same way that ‘King Of Clubs’ did – it’s very much tied to the themes of main album ‘The Atheist’, so it’s more like a companion piece. I did put out two EPs with my band Reuben – our first ever release was a five-tracker called ‘Pilot’, and then the last thing we did before we broke up was a six-track split with two other bands. I love EPs – bigger than a snack but not as filling as a full meal – they’re like the brunch of the record world. → There wasn’t supposed to be an EP at all I went into the studio in January last year with about fifteen songs, and the idea that we would simply record them all and see which ones worked best as an album. It’s always good if you have a track or two left over for things like b sides or charity compilations etc, but I felt like the eleven tracks we picked for the record told a complete story by themselves, and I didn’t want to overstuff it. That meant we had four tunes spare – enough for an EP – and the later I recorded one more song and added a remix of one of the album tracks to flesh it out a bit. It’s not that these are the songs that aren’t good enough to go on the album, they just weren’t necessary, and they work better outside it. → It wasn’t supposed to be called ‘Iknowyouknowiknow’ Originally, the album was going to be called ‘Iknowyouknowiknow’, after a line

in the song ‘This Town Will Never Let Us Go’. Then quite late into production, I decided I wanted to make a bolder statement with the title, so I stole The Atheist off the final track and re-named that song ‘War of Doubt’. I still really liked the phrase ‘Iknowyouknowiknow’, though, and it seemed perfect for the smaller EP – like a quiet echo of the album. Plus, they both have the song that the phrase is from on them, so they share that link. Before everything got bumped around, I was considering things like ‘Onetwothreefour’, ‘Readyasilleverbe’ or ‘Let’s Get Sad’, but I’m happy with the way it turned out.

all the illustrations for 2013’s ‘Muscle Memory’ and 2019’s ‘Shuffle’, and although the other records I put out in between had photo-based designs, I still directed those shoots and pumped out a lot of drawings for things like merch and single covers. This time it’s all the work of my friend Michel Parkin, an amazing illustrator who lives close to me and does fantastic stuff for very high-brow publications. We had a lot of meetings, and there was a lot of collaboration on the concepts, but every mark you see was made by him – apart from the lettering on the vinyl etching, which was my fault.

→ It’s designed to work as the third side of ‘The Atheist’ or function on its own Even though I had enough material to make a big record, I didn’t want to make a big one – I wanted a normallength forty-minuter, to stay inside those confines. So that’s why the other tracks got put onto the EP, although at various points, they were all in the running for inclusion on the album.

There are versions of ‘The Atheist’ that I put together with these songs on them, and even some versions of the artwork with ‘Crazy Horse’ or ‘The Burning Tree’ on them made their way onto the reviews. So it’s like a second helping of the album, fifty per cent more if you want it. You can finish side B of the main record and then put the EP on straight away, and hopefully, it will make sense. Or you can listen to them separately, and it will still work. It all depends what your mood is, or how much time you have.

→ All the tracks were recorded at different times ‘Crazy Horse’ and ‘The Last Supper’ were actually recorded in 2019, between making ‘Shuffle’ in January and ‘King of Clubs’ in December. I was working on some demo recordings with a lighter sound, as I was pretty sure that was what I wanted to do next, but then ‘King of Clubs’ got in the way so I had to see that through first. As soon as I’d finished that, I went back into the studio and tried a few more tracks, of which ‘Words of Love’ was one. Much later still, we went in to record the bulk of the album, which is when ‘I Done Things I Ain’t Proud Of’ was recorded, and right at the end of mixing we used a spare half-day to create the acoustic version of ‘This Town Will Never Let Us Go’. Finally, in the summer of last year, after everything was done and dusted, I recorded Run Right Home in my house for a charity compilation, and it sounded so similar to the rest of the material I decided to whack it on the EP. So that’s maybe why it’s not as cohesive as the record – there are three whole years between the second and third tracks – but I think it has its own patchwork charm.

→ This is my first album since 2007 where I handed the artwork over to someone else Because I am an illustrator and a designer myself, it’s hard for me to give up creative control to somebody else – particularly when doing the album art, because in many ways, that’s my favourite part of the process. I provided

Jamie Lenman’s EP ‘Iknowyouknowiknow’ is out 5th May. Upset 13

THE BEST NEW TALENT.

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Truth be told, there’s little that makes a new band more exciting than a bit of chaos - and on that metric, there are few that get the heart racing quite like LAMBRINI GIRLS. Words: Jamie MacMillan. Photos: Bridie Florence.

→ Life for Brighton’s Lambrini Girls has been pure chaos from the very beginning. Born in lockdown, the band’s very first gig took place at a huge celebration of the local scene at Brighton Dome. For vocalist and guitarist Phoebe Lunny, the night did not go entirely as planned.

“Drank three bottles of wine, ripped my trousers, came out to my mum on stage,” she grins, while bassist Lilly Maciera, not yet in the band at that point, laughs as she describes the show as “a fucking circus…”.

“It was a bit of a strange time,” ponders Phoebe. “But anyway, loads of people were like, ‘who the fuck is this band?’”

Now, with support slots with the likes of Frank Carter being followed by being hand-picked by Iggy Pop for his Dog Day Afternoon festival later this summer, that’s a question that has to be asked less and less these days.

The Brighton scene has a rich history of producing interesting alternative bands, and Lambrini Girls fit straight into that heritage.

Both Phoebe and Lilly played in local cult punk band Wife Swap USA (a

DRANK THREE BOTTLES OF WINE, RIPPED MY TROUSERS, CAME OUT TO MY MUM ON STAGE"

PHOEBE LUNNY

group that also included half of buzzy Lime Garden), and after snagging a last-minute invite to headline The Great Escape’s opening party last year, things really began to click into place with a set that combined an anarchic sense of punky mayhem with a biting and searing dead-eyed stare at some major issues at play within both the local area and the wider world.

It wasn’t all cartwheels and downing bottles of Lambrini (though there remains plenty of that). The

brutalising ‘Boys In The Band’, based on a specific band, takes a fierce aim at a DIY scene that still protects abusers rather than dealing with them. “The worst thing about it is when it gets ignored because it totally perpetuates the issue,” explains Phoebe. “And it makes us as much of an issue as the people actually doing it and abusing.”

After time living in London, and chatting to people from other towns and cities, she realised it wasn’t a purely Brighton problem.

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“It’s an inherent problem with DIY punk culture,” she says. “It is fucking everywhere!” “It’s across all music genres, to be honest,” adds Lilly. “There is a power dynamic between men and everyone else in the music industry, just because it’s obviously been so dominated by them for quite a long time already.”

The uncompromising way that Phoebe introduces ‘Boys In The Band’ at each show makes it impossible to look away. “The only way sometimes to make people listen is to literally shout it in their faces,” she says.

“Because it’s not going to be a safe space if people aren’t informed as well.”

“It’s just as much a part of us as the chaotic, rowdy side of things,” agrees Lilly, “You can’t pick and choose; you’ve got to take it as it is.”

As you’d expect from a band with song titles like ‘Terf Wars’, there’s no disguising that Lambrini Girls are fiercely unafraid to wade into issues. But don’t expect just a bunch of catchy slogans, for this is a band that live and breathe the subject matters that they’re bringing to the stage. So are they expecting any backlash from The Internet the bigger they get? “We probably will get a shit ton,” laughs Phoebe.

“But when that comes, we’ll just eat it up, yum yum yum.

Bon appetit.”

They’re already facing down the haters, whether that is sound guys calling them “stupid women” and trying to mute their mics mid-set (apparently due to ‘obscenities’) or poorly thought-out toilet graffiti.

“I am fucking ready for it!” grins Phoebe before revealing that Brighton police have a folder marked ‘Lambrini Girls’ for reasons she can’t divulge. We still don’t know whether to believe her or not…

Their debut EP ‘You’re Welcome’ transfers all that chaotic live energy onto 16 Upset

record perfectly, right down to the memorable album art - a flaming turd. “It was surprisingly difficult finding someone who would just do that,” explains Lilly sadly.

“Some people just have too much artistic integrity to draw a pile of poo these days.”

The recordings themselves carry all the fire and unpolished power of the live show, something that was important to the pair. “I think it takes away a bit of the authenticity when that happens,” explains Phoebe.

“You look at certain bands; Sorry is a good example.

Their production on ‘925’ is fucking sick. What an album, what a fucking blinder. Then you hear them live, and it just sounds like two people busking in a tunnel.”

As the shows get bigger then, the band are intent on continuing to open up a safe space for their fans.

‘Gay Legend’, in particular, is always a set highlight, with the front of the room reserved for those gay legends in the crowd. It’s a natural progression from the Riot Grrl ‘Girls To The Front’ movement.

“Loads of people don’t identify as women,” points out Phoebe. “We’ve got nonbinary legends there too.

And we want all the people who are in the minority to be like, ‘this is my fucking space; let’s go’. Even if it’s just for one song, you are moshing cheek-to-cheek with other gay legends. Spit is swapping. If you’re on the floor, a gay legend picks you up.”

It’s not just Phoebe herself that’s come out during a Lambrini Girls set now, either. “We had a guy in Manchester do it,” she says. “What a fucking legend. It’s quite a compliment, really. I wouldn’t come out to me, Jesus Christ. This girl is fucking mental!” ■ Lambrini Girls’ debut EP ‘You’re Welcome’ is out 19th May.

Upset 17

A KISS

T 18 Upset

WIT

TH A FIST ENTER SHIKARI faced a creative block during the pandemic, questioning their purpose as live music was put on hold. Rather than step back, they’ve tackled those feelings head on with their new record, ‘A Kiss For The Whole World’, which captures the energy of their shows and embraces the joy of human connection.

Words: Dillon Eastoe. Photos: Sarah Louise Bennett.

Upset 19

HAT IS THE POINT IN MUSIC IF IT CANNOT BE SHARED? What is the point in writing music if it’s not to be experienced with others?” That was the central question facing Enter Shikari as they contemplated writing their new record, ‘A Kiss For The Whole World’. Long established as one of the most creative and restless acts on the UK circuit, the St Albans outfit take pride in bringing “steppers, movers, shakers, skankers, punks, metalheads, all under one roof”. With six Top 20 albums already under their belt and countless triumphs in the live arena, they’ve got the proof.

But as live music ground to a halt a few years ago, so did the band’s inspiration run aground. Never before had they been at such a loss for meaning for their unique brand of genre-bending experiments, having made their name blending hardcore, rave, electronica (and anything in between). Finding a way through writer’s block and navigating life without gigs, ‘A Kiss For The Whole World’ finally sees Shikari looking inwards and then roaring back at full throttle, re-energised and ready to take on the world again.

To get there, we need to rewind three trips around the sun.

Mere weeks before the release of their last album ‘Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible’ in 2020, live music stopped. Promo shows at intimate venues across the UK were pulled, and from gearing up for a year of worldwide touring and festivals, the four friends returned home; for how long, they had no idea. For a group whose very purpose derives from the sense of connection

THERE WERE PARTS OF THAT YEAR AND A HALF WHERE I THOUGHT, ‘WELL, MAYBE THAT’S IT. MAYBE I CAN’T WRITE MUSIC ANYMORE" ROU REYNOLDS

20 Upset

THE STUDIO WAS COMPLETELY OFF-GRID; WE COULDN’T BOIL A KETTLE AND RECORD A GUITAR AT THE SAME TIME"

ROU REYNOLDS

and community they create at their shows, the members of Enter Shikari were left questioning exactly who they were, if not the rabble-rousers who’ve spent their entire adult lives commanding mosh pits, human pyramids and mass singalongs from the toilet circuit all the way to the main stage.

While some artists used the lack of touring to hunker down and keep themselves busy rush-recording albums, without being able to process ‘Nothing is True’ in the live arena, frontman Rou Reynolds lacked the inspiration to create.

“Writer’s block to me [up until then] was just like, a couple of weeks of not really having a good idea or something,” Rou says, joining us alongside bassist Chris Batten from the band’s HQ as they take a break from a frantic day signing thousands of copies of the new record before jetting out to Japan to perform at Slipknot’s Knotfest.

“But a year and a half without writing any music is something altogether different, especially for someone who’s written music since… whenever we

started writing tunes, when we were like ten years old or something.”

Having formed Enter Shikari while still in secondary school (via a few lineup and name changes), Rou, Chris, guitarist Rory Clelow and drummer Rob Rolfe have been writing and releasing music continuously; even years without an album release have seen standalone singles and collaborations with acts as diverse as Big Narstie and more recently Wargasm.

2021 was the first time they’d gone a year without releasing original music since their inception.

“It was an incredibly disorientating, disconcerting thing,” Rou recalls.

“Songwriting has been, to some extent, one of the ways I organised my thoughts.

It’s catharsis; it’s a way of exercising demons. It’s so many things. So to suddenly take that away, at a time when we weren’t playing shows either, it was a very strange, quite scary experience.”

In June 2021, Shikari were selected to headline the Download Pilot at the iconic Donington Park, a testament Upset 21

to their status as a big-draw festival act and one of the premier live bands in the UK. One of a series of, with the gift of hindsight, curious events trialling ‘Covid-safe’ festivals (premised on intensive testing of attendees), and thankfully made redundant by the advent of vaccines, the show proved transformative for Shikari.

“It was amazing,” grins Chris. “The main thing I remember was everyone there was just in the best mood. There was no hassle, no aggro at all on the sides. And I just remember getting out there, having the best time and…”

Chris pauses. “And then feeling really depressed almost immediately after because it was like, ‘Well, now what?’

This was just a ‘test [event]’; you don’t know when this is going to be happening again. When do we get this big part of what we do back?”

Emerging from the bunker and finally able to unleash ‘Nothing Is True’ on their fans over a year after it dropped, the band were able to release the handbrake and start barreling towards the future.

Having reconnected with their audience and rediscovered their purpose, the band had the jolt they needed to get back on the horse and start plotting their next move.

“It wasn’t like a tsunami of positive ideas and creativity after that [Download performance], it was still a slow process, but that was certainly the turning point,” says Rou. “I think the first song that actually got finished was [lead single, and banger] ‘(pls) set me on fire’, but there were a lot of ideas that were sort of slowly forming.” ‘(pls) set me on fire’ opens with a looping synth arpeggio before lurching into chugging guitars and unfurling a scream-along chorus that’s already a fan favourite. It’s an instructive peek at the rest of the album, a call for connection channelled through some of Shikari’s most immediate songwriting in years.

“A lot of it was almost like getting confidence back because… there were parts of that year and a half where I thought, ‘Well, maybe that’s it. Maybe I can’t write music anymore. And there were obviously times, especially in the beginning of the pandemic, when we all thought maybe life wasn’t gonna get back to normal at all. You know, it’s a very strange experience,” Rou admits. “’(pls) set me on fire’ was literally about that whole time [after playing Download] and wanting to have my soul set alight with the thrill of songwriting, with the excitement of playing live with human connection and creativity. All the best things about life, really.”

22 Upset

Decamping to an old farmhouse in Chichester last year, the band set about converting it to a makeshift studio to lay down the tracks for ‘A Kiss For The Whole World’. “Basically, it was completely off-grid, and so it ran on solar power, which meant we couldn’t boil a kettle and record a guitar at the same time we had to schedule the day out,” Rou chuckles. “But that’s exactly what we wanted. There’s no central heating. It’s in this picturesque, beautiful area, and it is an incredible old place, but it needs a lot of work doing. But that was perfect for us. We had to persuade [the owner] on the phone, like ‘No, no, no. We don’t care about being cold. We want

to be two miles away from everything!’

We were in this old farmland with little pockets of woods. There were deer across the horizon every day. It was a lovely experience.”

If any band is going to record an album “powered entirely by the sun”, it’s going to be this one. Across its twelve tracks, ‘A Kiss For The Whole World’ is a breakneck speed headrush that bottles the energy and vitality of a Shikari show, with mosh-pit ready breakdowns, earworm choruses and tripped-out interludes stitching the songs together for an experience that doesn’t let up.

“It felt like the music was coming out very genuinely excitable. So it was a

WE’VE ALWAYS THROWN EVERYTHING AT OUR ALBUMS"

ROU REYNOLDS

very instinctual thing,” Rou remembers.

“There was, for me, such a sense of relief and the gratitude of ‘Ok, I can still write music; this is still working. Everything was quite energised and up-tempo, and positive sounding. We started joking that maybe this album will just be the album of bangers, and to really rein in any sort of self-indulgence, and to just have the songs really getting to the point quickly and letting melodies shine through.”

In the past, Enter Shikari have included melancholy tunes that unfurl into hardcore riffs (‘Gap in the Fence’), blissed-out acoustic love songs erupting into arena rock (subject of a thousand tattoos ‘Adieu’) and enlisting an

orchestra for their very own symphony with ‘Elegy for Extinction’. On ‘A Kiss For The Whole World’, the band are laserfocused, eschewing any excess for their most concise collection yet.

“We’ve always thrown everything at our albums,” Rou acknowledges. “For example, ‘The Mindsweep’ [Shikari’s fourth album, considered their opus by many fans], which is probably the main contender for this, instead of just letting a melody sit and take the forefront, there are layers and layers of all these different ideas, and the songs will go on big journeys, and they’ll be like five or six minutes long.”

“Whereas this album is just having

the confidence to go, ‘No, this is a sick melody. This is the song’. It’s just this short, sharp, hard-hitting thing. And so it ended up that the album was full of bangers.”

The title-track sets things in motion with a layered brass fanfare giving way to dirty guitar riffs; you can almost picture Rou conducting the first circle pit of the evening as he barks “Go! Go! Go! Go!” before the rhythm section crashes into view. Having warned against “optimism for optimism’s sake” on ‘Nothing is True’, have the band had a change of heart?

“Ohh no, I don’t think any of those tracks are optimistic for optimism’s sake,” Rou counters. “I think there’s a lot of positivity there, but, for instance, ‘A Kiss For The Whole World x’, the first track, it’s all about joy in 2023. It’s our ‘Ode to Joy’. It has the melody from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in it, which was actually the first piece that I ever learned on the trumpet as a kid.”

“I thought it’d be interesting to write a song about how our experience of joy has changed since Beethoven’s time,” Rou explains. “And I thought the main difference is that in 2023 joy is very fragile, very fleeting. It’s quite hard to hold on to. I think we feel a sense of joy, but then we’re so quickly reminded at every turn in life just how bad things are getting and just how many crises there are. The direction that we’re going in, it can be quite terrifying if you look close enough.

“I thought it was just interesting that joy, therefore, isn’t being felt very much.

It has a quick half-life, and I thought that was quite sad, really, because joy is such a motivating, energising, unifying feeling.

I suppose that song is not particularly optimistic or pessimistic; it’s just trying to look realistically at the times we live in.”

Having become known for using their platform to charge headlong into important topics, trashing the UK government for its involvement in Upset 23

24 Upset

WE STARTED JOKING THAT MAYBE THIS ALBUM WILL JUST BE THE ALBUM OF BANGERS...”

ROU REYNOLDS the Iraq war early in their career and exhaustively exploring the link between consumption and climate change, there is perhaps expectation from some quarters that with each release, Enter Shikari should examine in song the crisis du jour. They largely swerved singing about Brexit and Trumpism, perhaps feeling there wasn’t much to add that hadn’t already been said a hundred times. Rou jokes that he probably won’t be invited back onto BBC’s Match of the Day after using a half-time interview at a St Albans FC game (‘Enter Shikari’ adorns the team’s shirts as their main sponsor) to take aim at the government’s pathetic gestures towards dealing with climate breakdown.

It’s a pleasant relief then, but perhaps unsurprising, that ‘A Kiss For The Whole World’ dodges obvious ruminations on isolation or sideways glances at frothing anti-vaxxers; this band is too effervescent to derive any inspiration from the torpor of 2020, and it’s indicative of his restless urge for connection that Rou’s writing block didn’t come as a result of burnout from touring but in a period where time and opportunity to write were abundant, but a sense of purpose was totally absent. What the

new record celebrates is the rush of communing at rock shows, while questioning the idea of identity when that purpose and routine are torn away. Rather than explicit references to bigpicture problems, Rou’s playful metaphors often look inward, examining our own confidence in defining who we truly are.

“I’m a chameleon. No, that’s a bit pedestrian,” Rou sings on the album closer. “I’m more like a giant pacific octopus, coming in for the kill.” It’s a line that encapsulates what fans love about Shikari’s writing, using the natural world to probe our own experiences in a society that is increasingly dominated by the digital, and delivered with a wink towards the more cliched lyrical metaphors that their contemporaries might settle for. The uber-intelligent, shape-shifting, colourchanging eponymous cephalopod represents the ever-changing nature of our identities as we move through different social circles, adapting to changes in our environments.

“In that year and a half where I didn’t write anything, so much had happened,” Rou explains of the shift in his writing. “That’s a lot of emotion and experiences that

are sitting dormant inside me, waiting to be written about.

During that [time], there was a lot of introverted, inwardlooking soul searching. The band was essentially dead.

We weren’t playing shows, and I wasn’t writing music and Enter Shikari didn’t exist for a year and a half. So there was a [feeling of] ‘Who am I?’ Because I’ve always been Rou from Enter Shikari, that takes up like 90% of my life and my soul. There was this very strange emptiness suddenly, which was bewildering and sort of frightening. So [on the album], there is a lot of trying to work out who I am. Or coming to the realisation that perhaps nobody really knows who they are.”

“We know what we want to change about ourselves, what we wanna work towards, what we wanna get rid of and ourselves,” Rou continues.

“But we’re just these fluid beings that are just floating through life, evolving all the time. I went on a journey in terms of looking inwards.

‘Giant Pacific Octopus’ is about not really knowing who you are because you change so much. It’s definitely more personal [than ‘Nothing is True’].”

Album highlight (and one of Rou’s personal favourites) ‘Jailbreak’ expands on this theme, taking the walls constructed around your sense of self and then busting out in an explosion of sound. “It’s trying to convince myself and anyone else that perhaps needs to hear it, that you can change. Sometimes you can feel trapped in who you are. People often think about knowing who you are as a positive thing, about someone who’s comfortable and got themselves together and knows what they want from life. But sometimes I think it’s actually good to not feel too limited.”

If the approach to composing was purposely different this time, still Shikari are a band to leave Easter eggs for the hardcore fans. Second single ‘It

Hurts’ borrows a vocal chant from ‘Search Party’, while the closing ‘Giant Pacific Octopus’ flips ‘Live Outside’s verse on its head.

The title track sees them still “standing like a statue”, before wishing they were “back at the Dreamer’s Hotel” on ‘Jailbreak’.

Once they’ve done a short run through Europe, all that’s left before unleashing ‘A Kiss For The Whole World’ is wrapping up the final round of ‘residency’ shows back home in the UK, visiting some intimate venues for the third time in as many months. Repeat attendees will be treated to another new setlist, getting to hear some deep cuts before the new songs slot in to do the heavy lifting for the year ahead. Then the small matter of headlining Slam Dunk over the May bank holiday weekend, with Rou promising “a completely new set, with new production. I think it’s gonna be our most ambitious show ever.”

After a few years of wondering when they’d ever be able to get on back onstage, worrying that they might lose Enter Shikari entirely, Rou, Chris, Rory and Rob are taking nothing for granted any more.

“I think when we say ‘Shikari 2.0’, it’s almost like we’ve been given a new lease of life after fearing that we may never get to do it again, after worrying if the band is still relevant when we can’t be out playing shows,” explains Chris. “It was a long time, and all these gremlins start to get into your mind… when we get a chance to do it again, is it gonna be too late? Have we wasted too much time, or will people not care, and we’re not current anymore. So after writing this record and getting back on the road, it feels like this is our second innings, and it’s just about to take off.”

■ Enter Shikari’s album ‘A Kiss For The Whole World’ is out 21st April.

Upset 25

HOLD ’ve become acquainted with the dead,” Dallas Green cries on the opening line to ‘Hard, Hard Time’ from his latest City and Colour album ‘The Love Still Held Me Near’.

Accompanied by a blindingly bright guitar and Stoneschannelling, woozy backing vocals, musically it’s a stark contrast to the heartbreak Dallas is recalling after a brutal few years for him personally. His experience could make for an extremely bleak album.

It has every right to be. But it isn’t.

The next line rings out: “And the gratitude I owe to them I could never comprehend.” This is an album that has something to live for.

“You just have to live with it,” he laughs, aware of both the poetry and irony of the sentiment of “living” with death. But it’s what he has become accustomed to in the last few years.

“It’s not singular to you; it’s this thing you have to reckon with,” he continues.

“It does make it mildly easier.”

Dallas has been living with death for a long time. It’s been with him during every step of his musical career.

The teacher that first supported and believed in his music when he was just “a lost little punk skateboard kid” (his words) died shortly after he graduated.

In 2010, Dan Achen, who co-produced ‘Bring Me Your Love’, died at 51. Gord Downie, the legendary Canadian rock singer, died in 2017 after a two-year

26 Upset

CITY AND COLOUR has returned with an album about holding onto the light.

Words: Alexander Bradley.

Photos: Vanessa Heins.

ON Upset 27

battle with cancer. Mimi Parker, the Low drummer and singer, died late last year from ovarian cancer too. Dallas had released ‘Low Songs’, a pair of covers from the band, back in 2020.

But when City and Colour producer Karl Bareham died tragically while on tour with the band in 2019, it was a loss like no other. “Losing Karl was the hardest version of this I have ever gone through. It was just tragic. And immediate. And very severe,” Dallas admits.

Less than a year later, Dallas’s cousin and drummer in his first band Helicon Blue, Nicholas Osczypko died suddenly too.

Throw in an enforced global hiatus for the best part of a year, Dallas had a lot of time to process both tragedies and out of it came a pair of albums. Recorded just three months apart, Alexisonfire came together for ‘Otherness’ before Dallas went into the studio for ‘The Love Still Held Me Near.’

“I think they both exist because of one another. After the year I had spent in 2019, having a difficult relationship with everything in my life, a lot of these songs are birthed out of finding my way out of the disastrous relationship I had built with myself, and part of that was coming to terms with how I needed to clear the air with my relationship to Alexisonfire,” he explains.

“When I started playing with those guys in that band, I never thought anything would come of anything, so for that to have built itself into two simultaneous careers that created this really giant divide between myself and those guys and even people that like my music for Christ’s sake!

“So finding my way back to a place where I could just write music and feel like I had the outlet with Alexis but also comfortable to make my own music too, and be really proud of both things for the first time in my life, [was special].

“This is the most cohesive I have ever felt as a creative person since I left my parents’ house at 21 to go and tour with Alexisonfire.”

Stepping back into the studio with Alexis, it became apparent that Dallas wasn’t the only one that had been having a tough time. Wade MacNeil came with ‘Sans Soleil’, a song which struck the same chords as ‘Begin Again’ that Dallas had been writing. Chris Steele brought ‘Blue Spade’. George Pettit penned ‘Survivor’s Guilt’. They all had their own problems and had come through the other side. “We were able to realise how safe of a place we have with 28 Upset

one another, and that wasn’t lost on us when we started jamming,” Dallas says.

“We were jamming and it was this total love of one another. Just the ability to create with one another still was fuelling that. But I would get home from those jams and just feel so inspired to create that it really let me take a magnifying glass to my own personal turmoil that I had been going through and start writing these other songs too.

I just felt so comfortable and so open to creating and making music as this beautiful cathartic process that I had always done in the past. It was really beautiful.”

The positivity that radiated from the Alexis sessions sparked the hope and joy that decorates ‘The Love Still Held Me Near’. What once was a chasm between Alexisonfire and City and Colour has grown much smaller. In fact, the guitars on the new C&C were a carry over from getting in the Alexis groove.

“The best part of Wade and mine’s relationship is when we play guitar together. We are at odds a lot of the other times in our relationship but when we play guitar together, we are one. It’s a really special thing you can do when you’re close with somebody,” he smiles.

Inspired by that relationship, the

THE GOAL WAS ALWAYS FOR IT TO BE AS HUMANSOUNDING AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE"

DA L L AS G R E E N City and Colour record leans heavily on layering guitars rather than filling the sound with other instruments, which was more common on the latest albums.

The opener, ‘Meant to Be’, kicks in with a trio of lush, warm guitars which envelope the listener like an embrace.

That approach allows for a lot of space within this album. There isn’t the same experimentation that its predecessor, ‘A Pill for Loneliness’, enjoyed. Instead, this is an album you can hear the skin and bones of. It’s more akin to those earlier records like ‘Little Hell’ and ‘Bring Me Your Love’ that were born out of Dallas laying himself bare. “I don’t think I’ve mixed my voice this loud and this upfront since ‘Sometimes’. In the same way, I was trying to be raw and emotional; I felt as far as my capability in making a record this way, more confident that I could just be a human being and put some microphones in front of me and my band and we will record. No funny business,” he says.

He adds, “The goal was always for it to be as human-sounding as humanly possible.”

It’s down to Earth with a bump from the psychedelia-tinged explorations on ‘Astronaut’ or the synth-soaked stylings that expanded the scope of City and Colour on ‘A Pill for Loneliness’; an album with so much promise that now feels married to tragedy.

“When I was making that record, I was in a completely different place.

Karl and I were crafting this really observational view of the world and what I was reading about and thinking about and making this insanely vibrant soundscape of a record that we crafted over a year. We were just making music,” he remembers.

“Me and Karl spent so much time

making it, and he died a week before it came out. We did a tour and a half, and I don’t really think I was there for it. To then have the pandemic unfold. It’s a shame because I would like to go back and relieve it or give it a place in my mind, but I don’t even think about it at this juncture. Not even when I’m playing songs off of it,” he concedes.

Fittingly, the run-up to ‘The Love Still Held Me Near’ was spent back in Australia with a run of C&C shows running straight into an Alexis tour which is something that hasn’t happened for a long time (“there was a time in my life when that was part of the problem so that, for me personally, I felt very grateful,” he mentions.)

Throughout the time back in Australia at the start of the year, Karl was there every step of the way.

“There was no way we weren’t ever going to go back. I don’t think that would do anybody any service by avoiding it. Enough time had passed. It had been three and a half years since we lost Karl; obviously other circumstances for why we weren’t able to go back. I think enough time had passed and the place where most of us were with our grief where we could go back and create new memories but we also went back to the town where it all happened and we were able to - closure is not the word but able to have a full circle mourning moment. We structured it so the City and Colour tour ended in Brisbane and the Alexis tour started there, so it was this really face it head-on and celebrate.

We talked about Karl all the time,” he says but admits it was “a bit strange” opening every show with ‘Meant to Be’, his tribute to Karl.

In those circumstances, many would just power through it without thinking.

But not for Dallas. Rather than switching off, “I switch on,” he shares.

“Playing live is just as connected to me as writing the song. It’s where I feel most alive, in that moment. I’m playing in that moment with my band, and it’s happening in real-time. As this could be a brand new journey of playing emotional songs, but I’ve been doing that forever. Maybe nothing as heavy as these will be, but I’ve created this place for myself that when I go up there, I get to work through it. Whatever ‘it’ may be.”

“To me, I’ve made it so much a part of my life; I don’t mean just singing personal songs, but this idea of having to perform and find that other place.

George [Pettit] likes to refer to it as going to ‘that other place’, and I believe that. There is so much of me that was there every night appreciating how lucky I felt to be standing there eulogising my friend every night. I could see people in the crowd having their own moment with it and, to me, that’s special too. It’s not lost on me.”

And it’s not just Karl and ‘Meant to Be’ but in all those songs for all those friends down the years. He continues, “There are so many people connected to my musical journey that are gone, and I’m singing these songs every night with them in mind. They’re all connected to it.”

‘The Love Still Held Me Near’ is the defiance to keep living in the face of so much death. As the euphoric and lifeaffirming ‘Underground’ puts it, “So let’s just forget the unforgiving presence of death / And live wild and free / Godless or not, you can’t let the fear control your body.”

There are some detours but not many. ‘Things We Choose to Care About’ is a deeply personal moment about his own relationships. ‘Bow Down To Love’ is a song “rooted in compassion” written in response to the George Floyd murder in the style of a Helicon Blue number. ‘The Water Is Coming’ is the bottled frustration of the growing societal divisions we face.

For the large part, however, this is an album for Karl Bareham, Nicholas Osczypko and all the other people who came and went on the journey of Dallas Green. It’s about celebrating them and keeping going. “It’s not about succumbing to it but about holding onto the light,” Dallas professes. Death will come one day, and we don’t know what happens after that, but we do know that the grass isn’t always greener. ■ City and Colour’s album ‘The Love Still Held Me Near’ is out now.

Upset 29

DA

DANCE 30 Upset

ANCE

E

Santa Cruz, CA newcomers SCOWL are one of the hottest up-and-coming bands around.

Words: Linsey Teggert. Photos: Alice Baxley.

D Upset 31

To say the last few years have been a whirlwind for California’s Scowl would be something of an understatement. From playing their first-ever show in May 2019 to standing on stage at Madison Square Garden in support of Limp Bizkit in May 2022, with two EPs and a debut album in between, the rise of the Santa Cruz hardcore band has been unstoppable.

At the centre of the storm is formidable frontwoman Kat Moss, delivering short, sharp bursts of rage with a fearsome growl in a flurry of neon hair and gogo boots; a feminine force of nature in what has traditionally been an environment associated with hyper-masculine conventions. It’s hard to believe that Kat had never even dabbled in music before forming Scowl.

“I know it sounds a little corny, but growing up, I always had an interest in being a little bit different,” explains Kat. “I felt really attracted to subcultures but also really intimidated. I remember being 11 and walking past Hot Topic at the mall and wanting so badly to have the guts to go in but being too scared,” she laughs.

“It took me a while to start to discover that there was a DIY scene and that it was even a reality for me to participate. I was attracted to the energy: I wanted to mosh, I wanted to grab the mic and sing. So, I started out going to shows alone, driving myself a couple of hours to San Francisco or the Bay Area to see a band, drive home the same night and open up at my grocery store job the next day, being exhausted but so pumped to start making these connections.”

After moving to Santa Cruz and meeting her fellow band members, guitarist Malachi Greene, bassist Bailey Lupo and drummer Cole Gilbert, Kat began to feel a sense of community she’d never felt before. “I’d talked briefly about starting a band with Malachi, and I brought it up a couple of times, but I was terrified and not sure I could actually do it - I wasn’t necessarily a super musical kid growing up, I was very shy. But Malachi is very driven, and he called me on my bluff!”

After releasing their second EP, ‘Reality After Reality’ at the end of 2019 and heading out on a bunch of tours, unfortunately, the pandemic hit. Rather than let it stop their momentum, Scowl wrote their ferocious debut album ‘How

32 Upset

Flowers Grow’ and signed to rising hardcore label Flatspot Records.

“We submitted to a lot of hardcore labels but couldn’t seem to get many bites,” Kat recalls. “Flatspot took a chance on us, and that truly changed the trajectory of our band. Once ‘How Flowers Grow’ came out in November 2021, that was my first real experience of growing an audience as a band at that level. That record started to reach a lot of people I never expected and people I looked up to, and we got offered a lot more show opportunities.

We even got offered Sound and Fury, which is my favourite hardcore festival ever - that was one of my goals for the band from the jump, so to check that off the list so quickly is surreal.”

With ten tracks clocking in at just over 15 minutes, ‘How Flowers Grow’ is a sucker punch of pissed-off, snotty hardcore punk, pioneered by the likes of Negative Approach and Circle Jerks in the 80s and followed by a resurgence of popularity in the noughties due to the impressive roster of hardcore labels such as Bridge 9 and Deathwish Records.

Scowl are now one of the bands leading the charge when it comes to the new wave of hardcore, alongside bands such as Zulu, Drain, Gel and Jesus Piece, to name a few, and to officially kick off what will be an insanely busy 2023, the band are about to release their third EP, ‘Psychic Dance Routine’.

“It was a deliberate decision to release another EP for now, rather than go straight into a second album. We wanted to allow ourselves to transition into a window of what will be next for Scowl creatively and artistically.

We’re also so busy and on the road a lot - we only had one week to record with Will Yip [the production wizard behind some of the biggest alt-records in recent years], so we didn’t want to over-commit and burn ourselves out.

I admit I was a bit headstrong about the decision at first and didn’t want to release just an EP, but in hindsight, I think taking on more would have been a huge challenge, and I’m proud of what we pulled off with this EP in very little time.”

The creative transition Kat is referring to was first hinted at on the track ‘Seeds to Sow’ from their debut album, a softer, more melodic sound that’s more garage-pop than hardcore.

‘Psychic Dance Routine’ continues to explore this direction, with Kat’s bloodthirsty roar sitting comfortably next to hooky, clean-sung vocals on

I WAS ATTRACTED TO THE ENERGY: I WANTED TO MOSH, I WANTED TO GRAB THE MIC AND SING" K AT M O S S opening track ‘Shot Down.’

Title-track ‘Psychic Dance Routine’ is straight-up grungy pop with zero growls, but it moves seamlessly into the mosh-pit-ready aggression of ‘Wired.’

“We’re committed to this band, but we’re not committed to any specific idea of what this band is yet: we want to experiment,” says Kat of the crossover sonics of ‘Psychic Dance Routine’.

“The people who love Scowl will be there for it, and the right people are going to find it. It’s exciting to think that someone like my sister, who isn’t someone who would naturally listen to hardcore, can now blast Scowl songs in her car. I want to grow as an artist and push myself further to write music that’s different than what we did on our last record.”

Despite the softer sound, Scowl’s new EP is still very much a vehicle for Kat to thrash out a lot of anger lyrically. “This band opened me up to being a much more creative person than I thought I had the ability to be, and now I can’t stop writing,” laughs Kat. “It feels good to get it out: here’s something that’s really vulnerable and vital to who I am, and I get to cement it into this little timestamp.”

One of the main themes explored in ‘Psychic Dance Routine’, is the dichotomy of performance versus daily life and the pressure of trying to balance who you truly are with what people perceive you as. It’s something Kat

is familiar with, being a woman in a very maledominated scene. “You have no choice to be consumed and objectified at times, especially as a feminine person. It can feel awfully dehumanising.”

Though things have come a long way in recent years, it can still sometimes feel that the hardcore scene is somewhat behind other musical genres when it comes to acceptance and progression. “I’m grateful and thankful for the women who stuck around in such dark times in hardcore where even just being a woman at a show you would be prosecuted for being there and people would question what your intentions were.

There’s so much more acceptance and more allowance for a platform for people who aren’t just white dudes on the scene now. I’m so grateful that I could find a platform and work hard for it and not put up with some of the shit that women or trans people in bands, or people of colour in bands had to put up with just five or ten years before me.”

There is absolutely still a lot of work to be done to make hardcore a more progressive scene, and Kat admits that there is still a presence of people who tend to be disrespectful and prejudiced, but she makes a conscious decision not to pay too much mind to it.

“There are still people who hate on Scowl because I’m super feminine on stage or whatever stupid reasons they hate on us, but I don’t let that hold power. If I quit because people are mean to me sometimes, I’d be letting the people who need to see Scowl down. I don’t mean to be a martyr about it at all, that’s not my goal by any means, but I try to keep a thick skin and continue doing what I love. This is my community, and I belong here.” ■ Scowl’s EP ‘Psychic Dance Routine’ is out now.

Upset 33

PR

100% 34 Upset

ROOF With their Epitaph debut, DRAIN are pushing the boundaries of hardcore.

Words: Steven Loftin. Photos: Julian Berman, Eli Rae.

% Upset 35

ften at hardcore shows, limbs will be flying, and bodies will be contorting and writhing about the stage, while a band thrashes out their tunes. The only difference at a DRAIN show is you’ll also find front person Sammy Ciaramitaro’s beaming smile through the darkness.

A trio who clearly knows when and how to have a good time, they’re a sight to behold. This physically propelled positivity is as infectious as their tunes are gnarled with hardcore’s attitude.

Formed in Santa Cruz back in 2014, DRAIN have been the same three faces Sammy, along with Cody Chavez (guitar) and Tim Flegal (drums) - but beyond their gloriously loyal take on hardcore, there’s more to the band that’s meant their stock has been rising and rising since the release of their debut ‘California Cursed’ back in 2020.

“DRAIN is really good at being a relatable group of people,” Sammy starts.

“I think we’re really good at just being people that people can find a little piece of themselves in, you know, because we just wear our hearts on our sleeves.”

Album two comes a little more charged up. ‘LIVING PROOF’ expels even more of that fired-up energy, just with a little twist and turn here and there. Featuring a couple of interludes, including an appearance of Soundcloud rapper Shakewell, it’s the band stretching their chops while remaining excellently true to form.

“When it comes to music, man, I don’t know, I feel like we’re almost good at writing….” Sammy takes a smirking pause, before digging into what it is that DRAIN excels at. “I guess everyone else does really say we’re good at it. I think we’re a little bias, but we’re good at writing good songs - just good songs in general, that are hardcore songs.”

Expanding further, he says, “I’m not saying we’re trying to write pop music, but we take the aspects that we love about pop songs that are memorable, [and] it’s not the same thing all the time.

Even on songs, where it’s like we just write a part that has a big, a big part or the song has a really cool riff that we’re driven on. Or maybe it’s a vocal melody that is a big sing-along for everybody.

That’s cool.”

As well as entering a few new territories for the trio, ‘LIVING PROOF’ also includes a cover of Descendents’ ‘Good Good Thing’ - clean vocals and all.

Clearly, this is DRAIN expanding out of their hardcore box and into something 36 Upset

that might end up fitting them a bit better. “We were like, can we pull this off?

I don’t know. Let’s figure it out.”

Those four words are the heart of DRAIN. Having formed almost a decade ago, and only just now being on album number two, there’s no doubt that they have put the time into becoming a studiously toured and experienced band off the back of one thing, and one thing only - good vibes.

“We’ve worked so hard as a band. I think just now we’ve probably evened out the good show to bad show ratio. You know what I mean?” Sammy laughs. “Do you know how tough it is to fucking run the show to four kids in a big room. It’s tough. It’s tough to do. So you [then] get in front of 500-1000 kids, and they’re all stoked and wild, they’re excited to see what you’re doing [and then] I’m stoked - let’s go! - that’s why we do this shit. I never thought we’d ever get here, but it’s like, yo, I’m having fun with my friends.”

Reflecting on a time when there were just as many kids in the crowd as there were band members on stage, “we were still having fun,” he smiles. “We still had a good time. It’s obviously a lot more fun now, but that’s what kept us going. It just slowly was like, oh, damn, this is getting better. There’s 10 kids, and then it’s 30 kids - and now we’re dropping this tour tomorrow, and LA is a 2000 cap venue.”

The whole DRAIN idea is built from the ground up by the hands of its three members. Everything has been by their design; even touring was just the three of them hurling all their gear into the back of a van and hitting the road to see what adventures awaited. Seeing how far they could take this idea of theirs allowed them to properly appreciate just how hard it is, but also how easy things could often be when you’re with your best friends and nothing else matters but laying the groundwork for your future.

It’s only recently that they’ve even had a hand with merch, also getting one of their mates on board. It used to be the guys hitting the table, and meeting and greeting fans. But as the tours became longer, and the shows more punishing in a good way, of course - Sammy had to take a step back as his hoarse voice was doing nobody any favours. Now a team of four, there’s no stopping this rag-tag group of pals.

It’s personality that glues DRAIN together. Each member is as carefree and understanding as the last, which is why when they see other hardcore acts posturing with furrowed brows and acting like the weight of the world is on their shoulders, it doesn’t quite sit right.

THIS SHIT IS A PRIVILEGE, AN CAN GET TAK AWAY ANY SE

SA M M Y C I A R A M I TA R DRAIN is about truth, not this facsimile attitude. “What’s worse than fake angry is fake nice,” Sammy reckons. “Those are both equally bad. You get a bunch of dickheads that want to be like, ‘I’m Mr. Cool guy’, and then they act like they’re too cool to talk to anybody, and they’re dickheads like, kick rocks, dude. Anyone that’s up there and that’s not stoked to be there - kick rocks!”

Striking to the crux of why Sammy always seems to be - even in the most charged up and buzzing of rooms - the person having the best time, he defiantly says, “It is a privilege. This shit is a privilege, and it can get taken away any second.” Referring to the band’s debut, which was released just before the Covid outbreak happened, it would seem the space this fired upon them, and the album, allowed ‘California Cursed’ time to breathe. People had the chance to absorb just what DRAIN were serving up, exploring live clips and seeing the energy, before wanting that experience in real life.

Certainly, the hardcore scene is supposed to be a place where those flying limbs and contorting bodies can safely work through their shit. That’s all DRAIN cares about providing, and noting that “maybe I don’t agree with every single person’s every view of every person in this room. We’ve got a lot more in common than the outside, you know?

Yeah, that’s the real enemy.”

Whatever happens with DRAIN post’LIVING PROOF’’s release, Sammy knows he’s living the dream. “I’ve loved every minute of it. Man, I had more fun than anybody.” It’s hard to see why anyone would give this up when he’s so enthused by it all. But now is the time for them to hit the road, album two in tow, with more songs “that we wrote in our little dingy practice spot that we never thought would ever translate into anything.” He mentions before signing off with a swift hang-loose. ■ DRAIN’s album ‘LIVING PROOF’ is out 5th May.

A ND IT KEN ECOND"

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Upset 37

38 Upset

NOTHING, NOWHERE. is looking back to his roots for an evolution in sound.

Words: Steven Loftin.

Photos: Jonathan Weiner.

Upset 39

his is not a drill.

Those crushing sounds that erupt the moment you hit play on nothing,nowhere.’s new album ‘VOID ETERNAL’ are for real. And, in the most sincere way possible, nu-metal is back. So grab those chain wallets, and get excited.

It would seem that nothing,nowhere.’s Joe Mulherin is finally where he belongs. “I haven’t been this excited about music since I started nothing,nowhere.,” he opens joyfully. “I know that because I feel that way, I’m doing something right.”

Now toting the same crushing and bruising sounds that captured a generation in the early-00s, his new armoury is a far cry from the sparse, emotive sounds of his earlier works.

Where the lo-fi Soundcloud emo rap of 2015 established Joe’s ability to dig around into his inner workings to present them as gut-spilling confessionals, this time, the search was on to figure out where he could go next.

“I had songs on ‘Trauma Factory’, like ‘Fake Friend’, get to, I think it was like No. 9 or something on the Billboard alternative charts,” he says. “It was being played on the radio, being played in grocery stores and gyms across the US. And I sort of was like, ‘Okay, I did it… now what?’”

That was the question which hung thick in the air. With his fourth album ‘Trauma Factory’ dropping just before the pandemic struck, it would inevitably offer up the space required to answer it. The reply came in the form of regression, in the best way possible. “That didn’t bring me the peace that I thought it would,” he says of the success from 40 Upset

‘Trauma Factory’. “What does bring me peace is to just be doing exactly what I want to do and making the music that I grew up on… All I really want to do at the end of the day is make music that I would listen to,” admits Joe, and it was during livestreamed sessions during this period that he would end up sketching out the ideas for ‘VOID ETERNAL’.

A brutal slab of numetal which relishes in its dark undertones, there’s a reason it sounds like a joyous homage rather than a derivative throwback. This is music Joe has been making his whole life. “I’ve just never released it. I’m not really sure why...” he sits pondering for a moment, before offering up: “I think I probably fell victim to the marketability of my music. I had a lot of people whispering in my ear [and] putting thoughts in my head that alternative music or heavier music, there’s no longevity in that. I [also] think I never released any of this stuff because I was just afraid of what would happen, or what people would think, and I think I just got to a point in my life where I just like, oh, fuck it, this is what I like. Either you like it, or you don’t.”

A reaction to this screaming sonic gearchange is to be expected; after all, Joe’s emo rapper lane is one that has its own gatekeeper ideologies kicking around. But, as he forewarns with a smirk, “If anyone ever tried to gatekeep me from heavy music, they don’t know my credentials. I grew up in hardcore bands, and I grew up going to shows at the local VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars] halls, and that’s the music that made me; that’s who I am.”

It would seem that Joe is teeming with defiance this time around. This is music he believes in. That’s not to undercut his previous releases. But it’s material

I HAVEN’T BEEN THIS EXCITED ABOUT MUSIC SINCE I STARTED NOTHING, NOWHERE."

JOE MULHERIN

like ‘VOID ETERNAL’ - with its crushing, curb-stomp of an opener ‘ANX13TY’, to its plentiful breakdowns and wild-eyed fury - which runs within his blood. “It’s the first music that I fell in love with, and it just feels real to me,” he grins.

Not alone in this endeavour, there’s a whole heap of collaborations too.

From mainstream icons (Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz), to newcomers (Static Dress), scene mainstays (Underoath, Silverstein), and many more, ‘VOID ETERNAL’ is a fullcircle moment for Joe. “A lot of the influences are on the record,” he beams. “Which is crazy to think they’re all my biggest influences growing up, or why I learned how to play music.”

This joyous essence lies deep in the heart of ‘VOID ETERNAL’. “I just wanted to make a nu-metal record that was different, and that felt right for 2023. And I think the result is some weird posthardcore, nu-metal mash-up and to be able to actually just let go and fully embrace my influences feels like a rebirth in a great way.”

Really, nothing,nowhere. was always supposed to be a chameleonic undertaking for Joe. “I’ve never been tied to a genre; I’ve never been involved in one singular scene,” he says. “And that’s sort of true throughout my entire life. I’ve never belonged to a certain social group; I’ve always floated in the space in between things,” he says. “And I just think that nothing,nowhere. is about pure expression, without any filter, or without any expectations.”

“I made that clear when I started that this is never going to be the same thing.”

Joe explains, “It’s constantly changing. It’s constantly evolving like I am as a human being. It would be crazy for me to think that I’m making the same music as I did eight years ago, because I’m an entirely different person, you Upset 41

42 Upset

I JUST GOT TO A POINT IN MY LIFE WHERE I WAS LIKE - FUCK IT, THIS IS WHAT I LIKE" JOE MULHERIN

know, mentally, physically, spiritually.”

It’s these last few facets that ‘VOID ETERNAL’ strikes deeply into. While the songs are thick, cacophonous brutes, Joe admits these are “even more cathartic for me because what started it all was the live aspect.”

Really, it’s all about being able to explode onto a stage, feeling the audience whip up the dust through each power-hungry chord and tonsil-rupturing scream.

“When you look out in the crowd, you know everyone’s going through something, and this is their chance to let it out,” he smiles. “And letting it out in a positive way, not a self-destructive, harmful way.

That’s the beauty of it.”

Continuing, he says, “It’s an outlet. I think a lot of - especially the younger kids - they need a positive outlet. I was that kid who needed a positive outlet for my frustration and my anger and a lot of these emotions, so I’m happy to continue to be a part of that scene.”

There’s certainly a case to be made for any iteration of nothing,nowhere. not particularly dealing with the happier side of life but being able to be this conduit for his listeners; Joe knows it’s serving a higher purpose. “My music has been really sad and downtrodden for a long time,” he says. “This is exploring the anger that’s associated with

struggles with mental health, cultural isolation, things like that, and getting it out in a positive way.”

While this is all well and good, apparently, there’s also a physical toll that this change-up in sound brings.

“The breath control is crazy!” laughs Joe. “And I have to really pace myself. It’s a completely different beast.

I’ve learned to not get overly excited on stage and run out of breath or lose my voice. A lot of it is technique. That’s the difference with metal, heavy music, and rock music - these are true professional musicians, and technique is everything. And that’s something that I really admire and appreciate.”

While ‘VOID ETERNAL’ was born out of Joe’s desire to dig back into what it was he loved about music, the challenge it now presents is a welcome bonus. “I don’t have any interest in feeling complacent, at least right now. I feel like that’s for later in life,” he says. “So I need something to keep me going, and to keep me waking up every morning feeling like I have a purpose.”

As for if there was ever any consideration of branching away from the nothing,nowhere. moniker to release this new material, Joe ponders for a moment.

“The more I thought about it, the more I realised that nothing,nowhere. has never

‘VOID ETERNAL’ is a love-in of some of nu-metal and posthardcore’s best and brightest names bringing their A-game.

Joe explains the purpose behind this move - beyond getting some of his idols on his record, of course.

“I wanted to marry the veterans of the scene with the new up-andcoming artists. I think the thesis behind ‘VOID ETERNAL’ was, I listen to rap and I listen to metal.

Something that I think rap music does really well is they embrace collaboration, and you don’t see collaboration within rock music; you just don’t see it as much as you do in rap music.

“I’ve often joked to friends about this record that it feels like a DJ Khaled album but for rock music, because it’s just a bunch of different features. I saw a space and an opening, and I took it because I don’t see people doing this.

“When it came down to whom I wanted to choose, I just chose people that I admire and that I listened to. I just love these bands.

I’m always a fan before anything else. It’s cool that a lot of these people that I listened to and I admire were, without thinking, down and excited to be on ‘VOID ETERNAL’.

“It was really organic.

I just reached out to each individual and was like, ‘Hey, you want to be in on the record?’ And thankfully, they were like, hell yeah, let’s do it!” stuck to a certain genre as it is, and my fans are here no matter what I do, it seems, so I just was like, ‘Nah, this is me’.

I can’t hide this from people. I gotta show this to the world...

It’s nothing,nowhere..” ■ nothing,nowehere.’s album ‘VOID ETERNAL’ is out now.

Upset 43

U LEVEL COVET escape into fantasy with their new album ‘catharsis’, and they hope you will too.

Words: Jack Press. Photos: Eli Chavez.

44 Upset

UP L

obody wants to hear about a pandemic that imprisoned music for two years.

We’ve heard the same old story six-hundred and sixty-six times. But, the artists we love are still getting their lockdown projects out into the wild. For instrumental trio Covet, Covid-19 changed everything.

“Excuse my French, but we hauled ass to get that record done,” declares Covet composer-musician mastermind Yvette Young, revisiting a time that painted their 2019 album ‘Technicolor’ in darker shades.

“We had all these things lined up for it, and then bam, nothing we worked for matters because the world’s shut down for two years”.

Sat backstage at L&M in Toronto before delivering one of her coveted guitar clinics, we find Yvette in a joyously reflective mood. With Covet’s third album ‘Catharsis’ ready for lift-off, she “needed those two years off”. Whereas some of us burrowed ourselves into wormholes, Yvette blossomed by simply having “some time to just work on creative things and acquire new skills.”

Two years can feel like forever, but time flies when you’re having fun. And that’s exactly what Yvette found in the mundanity of life in lockdown. It’s where ‘Catharsis’ separates itself from what comes before; it’s sonic evolution even Darwin could admire.

Unlike ‘Technicolor’, which “was a difficult time”, Yvette’s “really excited about this new album because it really showcases my guitar evolution; I feel like if I’m just doing the same thing in touring, I don’t get a chance to experiment or do anything different than what I normally do, so two years off let me take a creative breather. I got better at guitar, I honed in on songwriting, and I started learning how to record.”

Funnily enough, it wasn’t finding time to flick through her favourite records that drove ‘Catharsis’ creative evolution; it was painting. “The first thing I did when everything shut down was I just started painting; it had been years since I did something creative for leisure.” Like a flame igniting inside her, she came to the conclusion that “when you start equating this creative thing that you cherish and love with purely a way to make money, it poisons your relationship with it”, so she sat down to paint for pure experimentation.

Freeing herself from the music

industry’s infinite hamster wheel, she suddenly “wanted to just record for fun”.

Whereas ‘Technicolor’ felt like “every single hour of my day mattered, I had to use it to do something productive for the record”, with the world shut down for days on end, she could “make recordings for fun” where “they don’t have to be good, I can record the same thing like six times just to see if I can improve each time.”

It wasn’t only musically that Covet benefitted from Yvette’s new-found freedom; it stretches deeper than that. “I feel guilty being stoked on shutting down for two years because a lot of people did struggle, and I don’t want to discount that.

However, my personal experience was that of joy.” She found the time to finally heal from the toll life takes as a touring musician. “I needed this so bad to deal with mental health stuff. I feel like I wasn’t really able to deal with much of it because I was so busy on the road, but when things shut down, I finally could heal and work on myself. If you neglect that portion of yourself, you creatively suffer because you’re stifling stuff that wants to come out, so it was a very healing and uplifting and empowering time for me.”

In fact, taking the time to heal led to Yvette nearly burning Covet down to the ground, only to raise it like a phoenix and rebuild it with new members - bassist Brandon Dove and drummer Jessica Burdeaux - replacing David Adamiak and Forrest Rice. “I think this has been a big lesson for me and what I needed to do to creatively nurture myself,” she says, her eyes lighting up at her own transformation.

“If you’re in a toxic environment, where you feel afraid and stifled, it’s just a shame.”

Having self-taught herself guitar after an eating disorder left her hospitalised in high school, music became “the biggest source of my own self-esteem. I’m not the most outspoken; I’m a little more reserved with words, but with music, I can actually express myself, and I feel really fluent in it as a language.” But when the band she’d built from the ground up began suffocating her in every way, it led to some difficult conversations with herself.

“For me to suddenly have this thing that means so much to me, that literally saved my life when I was in the hospital, usurped by a situation in which I didn’t feel safe or creatively fulfilled or even just happy, I was like, this is not sustainable, and if I keep going on this way, I’m going to just want to quit,” she says emphatically, empowered by the experience. “So I need to either quit or do something crazy and blow up the whole operation, try to surround myself with people who don’t Upset 45

make me feel afraid, who nurtured me creatively, who I feel are on the same page - and it did a world of difference.”

Despite “a lot of people being very critical, and a little misogynistic about it”, Yvette “super owns” her decision.

In fact, the joy she now feels can be felt radiating from every second of ‘catharsis’’ 29-minute runtime. Even though every song was written during quarantine, they were written in bursts of creative experimentation, where rather than “trying to superimpose a melody on top of sound, I’d be like, what could I write to help this sound come to life and make this pedal look cool?”

In many ways, it’s that joy that helped spur Covet’s lineup change. As crazy as it seems, it took nurturing herself and new music for Yvette to come to terms with her unhappiness. “These songs mean so much to me, and they make me so happy, and I don’t want to have to play them under any context other than being stoked.”

“I remember having a few shows playing these songs, and I was crying after the set because I was so unhappy on stage in that situation. I remember feeling like I was a being a performer, not only in the sense of a musician, but I was also being performative, having to smile through it. I called my manager and was like, I can’t do this anymore; I feel like I’m a hypocrite, like I’m lying to everyone.”

Armed with a whiteboard, some pedal demos, and a bag of working titles ready for a nineties sitcom like ‘Stinky Riff’, Yvette crafted ‘catharsis’ like she was spending her days gaming. “I demoed all of it so I could go back and listen, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I didn’t learn how to record during quarantine; sometimes life feels like a video game, doesn’t it? Like you get these level-ups and these bonuses, and then you can access the next level. For me, learning to record is next level.”

Not only have Covet levelled up sonically, but thematically, too. In many ways, its eight tracks are eight levels unlocking listen-by-listen. “Every song is a story. I don’t think everyone has to hear the story that I hear, but that’s where my inspiration comes from.”

Disillusioned by “ADHD listening”, she “didn’t want it to be track, track, track, track” and have “them all live in separate worlds”, so from the moment the shoegaze sunrise of ‘Coronal’ loads you into ‘catharsis’, it’s a “fantasy story where you jump into this void, and go immediately into this happy world, and it takes you through all these different characters and their stories and then 46 Upset

SOMETIMES LIFE FEELS LIKE A VIDEO GAME, DOESN’T IT? YOU GET THESE LEVEL-UPS"

Y V E T T E YO U N G ends on a really uplifting note; I thought that the saxophone solo was a good way to end it.”

Crafting a concept album out of instrumental music is a challenge few envy, but it’s one Covet take on and then some. While ‘Coronal’ slips into nineties dream-pop and shoegaze with Yvette’s vocals, and the honey-drenched harmonies that paint the pitter-patter of raindrop piano on ‘Interlude’ utilise vocals, it’s an abstract sandbox for you to play in however you want.

“That’s the beauty of it to me. I always equate instrumental music with abstraction because music with lyrics feels more literal like you’re telling someone how to feel, like if you look at a still life painting, it’s telling you what to look at: this is real life. But with instrumental music, it’s really exciting because you get to influence and colour what someone sees and feels with textures, with melodies, with all these musical tools.”

Feeling, whether you’re embracing it or running away from it, is at the heart of ‘Catharsis’, an album embedded in escapism. When songs like ‘Vanquish’ exist to make you feel “almost triumphant, like you’re swimming, like you’re flowing and just pushing forward”, it’s no wonder Covet create safe spaces within their music for their fans to find themselves and to heal.

“I feel like art should be open to any purpose, so if you have negative things to say, I think it’s important to be able to say that. I don’t believe in censoring music. I think the most effective art is real, even if it’s not meant to uplift, if it’s meant to just tear an establishment down, or tear a person down, that is still valid.”

Of course, music is subjective. And for Yvette, when she’s writing for Covet, she feels “like I’m trying to write music

that makes me feel the way I wish I felt, so when I’m down, a lot of the most joyful songs I’ve written have been written when I was really sad because it’s me trying to hold on to this little slice of hope.

“Sometimes I’ll sit down, and I’ll

write something that makes me want to dance, and at the end, I’ll be smiling, and I’ll want to dance. It’s such a cool superpower that you can have when you start making music - to transform how someone feels.”

Transformation is at the core of

‘catharsis’. It’s what the album lives and breathes. It’s the blood rushing through its musical veins, flowing freer and faster with every listen. While Covet, and Yvette, underwent their own transformation making it, they hope you listening to it will too. “I want people to love guitar and showcase it in an exciting way where you don’t have to be shredding to be valid; you can have moments of technicality. Ultimately, I would hope that the emotion and the emphasis on melodies inspires someone to want to write music of their own on guitar.”

The want for that drive and ambition for more people to pick up guitar extends beyond ‘catharsis’, and beyond Covet. In many ways, it’s what Yvette is here to do. As a guitar teacher that want to inspire comes naturally, but as a female with Chinese heritage in a white male-dominated genre, she feels it’s right to use her platform to promote diversity of all kinds.

“I like that you use the word diversity because that’s what I see at my shows; people of all backgrounds, all walks of life, all ages, all genders, all orientations, it’s the most hodgepodge random crowd of people,” she laughs, smiling at the thought. “I don’t feel the responsibility because when I put that pressure on myself, I get afraid. However, I feel excitement thinking about getting people to pick up the guitar.

“I want other people to know it can have that effect on someone, that it can really empower you and make you feel like you have a voice. I’m very anti-elitism; I think a lot of the rock star attitudes of the 80s are kind of funny, because why would you want to have this thing where you’re like, you can’t sit with us? You’ll just make a scene die.”

However, as much as erasing the rock star attitudes of yesteryear has always been a mission for Covet, it’s something that took making ‘catharsis’ for Yvette to truly understand her purpose as a musician. It’s the eureka moment that made the pandemic worth it.

“I’m just a girl who found an instrument that I ended up really developing a connection to, and it ended up being like a wonderful outlet for me, and it took me out of a really dark place. I don’t think I’m anyone special. I think anyone can come and pick up this instrument and have this experience, and I invite you to do so with music because it’s such a wonderful, powerful thing; I like inclusivity.” ■ Covet’s album ‘catharsis’ is out now.

Upset 47

Covet

CATHARSIS

★★★★

→ Covet are back with ‘catharsis’, a record showcasing their endless pursuit of new heights Yvette Young’s complex guitar work leading us through diverse sonic realms. From the ethereal ‘Coronal’ to the dynamic ‘Bronco’, the band fearlessly experiments with various melodies and tones.

This daring approach succeeds in immersing listeners in Covet’s enchanting universe.

A resounding success, ‘catharsis’ demonstrates a band at their peak, making it a must-listen for instrumental music enthusiasts. Dan

Harrison

Drain

LIVING PROOF

★★★★

Waterparks

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ★★★★★

→ Waterparks are never, ever boring. So much, so fucking obvious. But even for a band so day-glo and saturated in nonsense, ‘INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY’ is a new high point.

48 Upset

A constantly shifting, hyperactive genre flip, it bounces off the walls of the tired and overdone - the best sonic representation of Awsten Knight’s chaotic mischief yet. From the acerbic bite of ‘REAL SUPER DARK’ to the bubbling bop of ‘BRAINWASHED’, it’s a constant stream of near-consciousness, every admission or observation strapped tightly to another new ear-worm. ‘2 BEST FRIENDS’ is like a nursery rhyme in its innocence, while ‘SELF SABOTAGE’ pulls vocal gymnastics that audibly sparkle.

To be a unique voice in a time where an infinite number of bands smash their fists against an infinite number of typewriters is as much a testament to Waterparks’ raw attitude as it is their doubtless talent.

Like a fizzy drink shaken hard and left to explode in an unsuspecting face, they’re a band that move fast and break things, hoping to keep two wheels on the road as they go.

Quite probably the most consistently exciting rock band on the planet, let’s hope they never change.

Stephen Ackroyd

→ Brutal yet undeniably infectious, DRAIN’s second album is nothing if not a howling joyride into the chaos.

Described by the band as “the soundtrack of perseverance and people overcoming the naysayers in their world and inside themselves”, it’s an undeniably propulsive influence.

From the opening blast of ‘Run Your Luck’, that relentless wide awake rattle quite simply refuses to pack up. ‘Devil’s Itch’ pummels, and while the brief switch up of ‘Intermission’ at least switches lanes, it isn’t long before it bounces back to a riff the size of a mountain. Quite simply glorious. Alex Ingle

RATED

thrash metal phase, folksy stylings, industrial rocks numbers or covering pop stars of his youth, Jamie Lenman has always wholeheartedly embraced and faithfully honoured the musical direction he has chosen to embrace.

That’s no different with this EP. It’s a cheery, upbeat, companion to last year’s ‘The Atheist’ and if you digged that then you’ll dig this. For the most part, this EP has this mid-noughties indie-rock feel and this subsequent, unshakeable, feeling that it’s soundtracking an episode of Gavin & Stacey. That said, ‘I Done Things I Ain’t Proud Of’ is an unexpected, vulnerable, detour down a country road that serves only as proof Jamie Lenman can turn his hand to almost anything. Alex Bradley

an album of few lows.

Happenstance is funny, but in style, scope and delivery, ‘Elysian Skies’ is remarkably similar to Hundred Reasons’ ‘Glorious Sunset’. It’s not surprising, given that the reference points for the two emo acts are comparable, but it does highlight the cyclical nature of music as the gap between emo’s second wave and revival closes. It’s perhaps too much of a stretch to say the apprentice has become the master, but ‘Elysian Skies’ is of the level that you could call the two acts peers and easily justify the comparison. UK emo’s back, baby! Rob Mair

Spanish Love Songs

Enter Shikari

A KISS FOR THE WHOLE WORLD

★★★★★

→ Written and recorded after an unfamiliar bout of writer’s block, on ‘A Kiss for the Whole World’ Enter Shikari reassert their credentials as one of the UK’s most important rock bands. Harnessing the energy of the sun to record in a converted barn running purely on solar panels, the album is an all-out assault, not pausing for breath across nine thumping tracks and their associated electronic interludes.

The opening title track is a contemporary ode to joy, with classical references beefed up by hardcore guitar chugs. ‘Deadwood’ is the closest we come to slowing things down, lamenting loneliness in a hyper connected digital

world, before album highlight ‘Jailbreak’ picks up the pace, singer Rou Reynolds questioning the fluidity of identity via an unrelenting instrumental.

After the uncertainty of having live shows temporarily taken away from them and the loss of purpose that came with it, this is an album that doesn’t overcomplicate things and is built to be enjoyed in the sweat of a sold out show.

Dillon Eastoe

they occupy an incredibly specific niche. To elevate the already iconic work of composer John Williams is a tremendous task. Yet it is one they excel in, creating an album of astronomical proportions. Remaining instantly recognisable with a complexity that makes the five-man-band feel as full as an orchestra; it’s difficult to identify just one standout track. From the rousing bass of ‘The Battle of Hoth’ to the facemelting riffs on ‘Attack Position’, each song is more electrifying than the last. Galactic Empire have produced a spectacular homage to the beloved franchise. Kelsey McClure

Galactic Empire

SPECIAL EDITION

★★★★

→ A long time ago (2015) in a galaxy far, far away (Pennsylvania), Galactic Empire were formed.

Reimagining soundtracks from across the Star Wars universe into metal epics (all whilst wearing full cosplay), it’s safe to say

Jamie Lenman

IKNOWYOUKNOW IKNOW EP

★★★★

→ Whether it was his

Lakes

ELYSIAN SKIES

★★★★

→ The return of stalwarts Hundred Reasons and Hell Is For Heroes has meant the UK’s emo scene is under more scrutiny than it has been for years – and for those tuning back in, they’ll no doubt be delighted to find the current crop of bands have kept things in good order. Watford’s Lakes are at the top of the tree after two stellar albums – 2019’s ‘Constance’ and 2021’s ‘Start Again’.

‘Elysian Skies’ follows on strongly from these two efforts.

Opener ’Deep End’ might be their finest song to date, while ‘Leap’ and ‘Our Fine Arrangement’ find the group delving deep into their post-rock and slowcore influences.

It’s in this broadening scope that Lakes strike real gold. It’s not all new ground, however. ‘Joker’, ‘Cut and Run’ and ‘TLC’ are all Lakes at their indie/emo best, the latter being a real standout in

DOOM & GLOOM SESSIONS

★★★

→ Anyone who’s seen Spanish Love Songs live might have been lucky enough to see them tackle Phoebe Bridger’s astonishingly beautiful ‘Funeral’ with surprising gusto and pathos. And, while they’ve not been ones to rely too heavily on cover songs, ‘Doom & Gloom Sessions’ is a suitably enjoyable stopgap as we await another twelve rounds of existential dread from the Californian punks.

Drawing from their lockdown endeavour, which saw them record a cover a month, ‘Doom & Gloom Sessions’ is wide-ranging, featuring three largely faithful takes on The Killers’ stomping ‘Smile Like You Mean It’, Rilo Kiley’s brilliant ‘Portions For Foxes’ and Jimmy Eat World’s wildly underrated ‘Futures’, while a fourth – a stripped-back version of Grandaddy’s sleeper hit, ‘Now It’s On’ – is more of a departure from the original, but just as enjoyable. Rob Mair

Upset 49

Sleeping With Sirens Postcards and Polaroids

Devin: This song “scratched my brain” before that was a thing people said. My infatuation with Sleeping With Sirens took over a large portion of my high school years; I’d never listened to music with screaming in it before, and I thought I was so tough.

You Me At Six The Dilemma

Devin: I discovered YMAS in the winter of my sophomore year. I distinctly remember because now, whenever it starts to get cold, I feel compelled to listen to them.

There was something about the ‘Sinners Never Sleep’ record as a whole that rewired my brain.

Chiodos

Expensive Conversations In Cheap Motels

Devin: Now, THIS song made me feel edgy. I would walk to my classes, glaring at everyone

HONEY REVENGE

to the songs on ‘Devil’. I worked at Hot Topic and got a sweet deal on the vinyl, and I still have it to this day. I swear, when I listened to this track, I had steam coming out of my ears and nose; it was so aggressive to me.

Paramore Turn It Off

Devin: I didn’t really understand the concept of albums until high school; I had mostly been listening to individual songs.

Don’t get me wrong, I listened to most of their songs. I just hadn’t heard ALL of them until I got control over my mom’s iTunes account. ‘Turn It Off’ was one of the songs I missed out on. The first lyric, “I scraped my knees while I was praying”, messed me up so bad.

Buckethead Soothsayer

Donny: Like a lot of kids my age, I originally started playing guitar because of Guitar Hero.

EVERYONE HAS THOSE FORMATIVE BANDS AND TRACKS THAT FIRST GOT THEM INTO MUSIC AND HELPED SHAPE THEIR VERY BEING. THIS MONTH, DEVIN AND DONNY OF HONEY REVENGE TAKES US THROUGH SOME OF THE SONGS THAT MEANT THE MOST TO THEM DURING THEIR TEENAGE YEARS.

I remember playing one day and coming across this song called ‘Jordan’, and it blew my mind. So naturally, I looked up the artist and found more!

‘Soothsayer’ was the second Buckethead song I listened to, and it immediately inspired me.

State Champs Mine is Gold

Donny: Okay, so I joined my

first band in high school. I was a freshman, a group of seniors needed a guitar player, and I was the only candidate. We start practising together, and the drummer starts harping on us about this thing called ‘stage presence’. I wasn’t comprehending, so he brought me to a State Champs show.

Chunk! No Captain Chunk Twist the Knife

Donny: My homies and I used to share earbuds on the bus, and this song was everything I was looking for.

Born of Osiris Machine

Donny: All of my teachers were telling me that I could go after music; I just needed to make sure I had a backup plan! So I joined robotics, I didn’t learn much, but I did see someone walking around at a competition wearing a Carnifex hoodie. They gave me some bands to check out, and first up was Born of Osiris.

Infectious Grooves

Violent and Funky

Donny: My uncle and I are into a lot of the same music, so we became pretty loyal concert buddies. On one of our many adventures, he told me to check this out, that he had something I had never heard before, and he was right! This song is a trip.

Honey Revenge’s debut album ‘Retrovision’ is out 23rd June.

50 Upset

SPOTLIGHT SHOW

SPOTLIGHT SHOW

SATURDAY 13TH MAY

FRIDAY 12TH MAY

ARLO PARKS

MAISIE PETERS

BRIGHTON DOME

BRIGHTON DOME

SOLD OUT CONCERT HALL

CONCERT HALL SOLD OUT CORE PROGRAMME

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