The new wave of new noise: 'Our music is the closest thing we have to a riot'
|
Version 0 of 1. Spectres stagger offstage as if they have all just seen a ghost. This band of mild-mannered Devonians have spent the previous hour at the Lexington in London excavating the darkest corners of their psyches via the medium of needling drone-rock and crushing white noise, culminating in a particularly blood-curdling freakout called Lump, in which singer Joe Hatt imagines “dragging a dead horse through the street” before “waltzing into a shallow grave”. For both audience and band, it has been a gruelling yet cathartic experience. “I do feel drained,” confirms guitarist Adrian Dutt in the sanctuary of the dressing room. “For most of the set, we’re in this weird, horrible place, but there’s elation at the end. The music is an outlet for all of us: we’re trying to push our instruments to the limit, channelling whatever shit is happening into the sound. Playing Lump is like therapy – it’s so abrasive, but it’s also a release.” Related: Viet Cong: we were naive choosing our band name This idea of music as catharsis is as old as music itself, but it has been a while since a new band from outside the worlds of extreme metal or experimental noise has dared to deliberately discomfit their audience in order to prompt them to dig deeper and see things differently. “We want it to be uncomfortable, so that people start to look inwards,” says Dutt. “We want to put people in a space that they’re not going to be in during their normal everyday existence.” Spectres are making inroads on the indie scene – they are signed to shoegazing’s inhouse label Sonic Cathedral and have been heavily championed by NME. And they are not alone: Viet Cong’s recent scouring, apocalyptic debut received across-the-board acclaim; Toronto trio Metz are gaining traction with their dissonant, dread-fuelled punk; while the most exciting new band of the year may well be Atlanta emigres Algiers, who combine no wave noise with roaring gospel soul, visceral imagery and righteous political rage. All these bands grew up on the punk scenes in their respective home towns, giving them both a sense of mission and a solid musical foundation from which they could push on and experiment. They all admit to loving pop, but have become frustrated with the contemporary music scene’s limited emotional palette and its habit for pumping out blandly inclusive anthems or solipsistic love songs, even in the face of harsher political realities. “Ear candy,” as Viet Cong’s Matt Flegel calls it, with barely concealed distaste. “Generally, people want something they don’t have to think about. That’s definitely not what I want.” Related: Metz: ‘If you can smother a melody in noise and grit, that’s perfect’ Spectres’ Hatt rails against “faux earnestness” and the fact that “most bands sound the same and there isn’t anyone willing to push anything. We were fed up with watching bands and not being able to take anything from it.” Ryan Mahan of Algiers goes even further: “There’s a lot of tame or safe music around right now, so our music, in some ways, is an indictment of the current popular commercial milieu.” Mahan has a suspicion that the way people share and consume music in the digital age tends to enforce boundaries rather than break them down, which is why Algiers’s music has “focused on intervening in spaces. We like to use words like trespassing – mixing gospel and protest soul music with more extreme sonics.” Likewise, Spectres talk about their use of disturbing sounds and images as a way of “disrupting the norm”. The band certainly seem to have a morbid fascination: the cover of their album Dying features what looks like a corpse frozen in an agonised grimace, while the lyrics are full of references to graves, autopsies and purgatory. The catchiest song, meanwhile, finds Hatt delving into his family’s history of addiction. “Every family has stuff that goes on behind closed doors that’s harrowing and traumatic,” he reasons. “If we were singing about our struggles growing up that would be false, because we grew up in a nice place. But that’s why I hope people can relate to the lyrics, because everyone has desperate, morbid thoughts from time to time. If anything, writing about death is more realistic than what most people sing about. Not everyone finds love, but death is one thing we all have in common.” Viet Cong’s album employs a similar lexicon of violation, repulsion and suffering. “A lot things were hitting the fan,” says Flegel of the period when he was writing the record. “Friends and family were dying, there was a lot of mental illness around … it was just a dark time. This record was an outlet for a lot of those things. But I have a dark sense of humour, too.” The song Death, he explains, is not really about death at all – it’s just the band amusing themselves by grinding out the most oppressively claustrophobic groove they can muster. Spectres are also keen to point out the undercurrent of mordant humour in their approach; they spent the journey to London circling every instance of the word “death” in a paperback philosophy book as a creepy gift for their label boss. As for Algiers, their quasi-biblical tide of blood and devils is largely intended as a metaphor for the “institutional violence” meted out by the establishment. “We see those symbols of blood and decay basically embedded in our current lives through the colonial and economic structures that we live in,” says Mahan, who draws a parallel with southern gothic literature: “Tennessee Williams talks about that sense of underlying dread in everyday experience.” Metz’s bleak imagery, too, on new songs such as Landfill and Kicking a Can of Worms, is fuelled by a simmering anger at the state of things. “Landfill is a pretty basic metaphor about how we are seemingly walking around the Earth without any real goal, blandly exploiting and destroying things,” says frontman Alex Gibney. “I look at the world and the society that we live in and I’m furious.” This rage and disaffection manifests itself not just lyrically, but in “how we perform, which is basically leaving everything up there – sweat, broken instruments … You can’t play our songs by hanging back and looking cool; it wouldn’t sound right. It’s about playing your instrument as hard as you can, twisting your body to force out the sound. It can be exhausting, but it’s also the best feeling in the world.” This idea of venting negative emotions through physically intense performance is a recurring theme – Viet Cong say they don’t feel like they have had a good show unless they wake up sore the next day. Whether exorcising grief or channelling anger, it’s clear that you get out what you put in. All of these bands have their own concepts of catharsis: for Metz and Viet Cong, it’s a raw, physical thing; for Spectres, it’s all about looking inward and confronting your own demons. Algiers, however, posit the the intriguing idea of collective catharsis. “The music that we make is the closest thing we have to a riot, an expression of collective frustration,” muses Mahan. “For a brief moment it provides a catharsis: that sense of throwing off the world. In doing so, we see that there are other people like us, that we’re not abnormal. And that’s quite powerful.” Viet Cong by Viet Cong, Dying by Spectres and II by Metz are out now; Algiers’ self-titled debut is out in June. |