“None of this is contrived, or just bones from KFC”: How Abduction are facing down the horrors of reality

“It’s a taxidermied chick, dressed as an elf.”

The curious thing being held up for Kerrang! to get a proper look at is, indeed, as described. It was, explains its owner, Abduction leader A|V, a present from a “full-time artist weirdo” friend. “When we see each other we’ll exchange gifts, and she’ll usually have something like this.”

On another occasion, this friend presented A|V with “a 20-kilo carrier bag of bones”. It’s these that you see as part of his presentation to the world, hanging round his neck, beneath a face obscured by a mask also crafted of remains.

“They’re 200-year-old cow and sheep and pig bones dredged from the silt in the Thames, probably from a Victorian butcher’s shop waste pipe,” he elaborates. “I get asked if they're human bones regularly. They're not, sadly. But the human skull we occasionally bring out is real. It was in a science classroom being used as a paperweight. It was being sorely neglected, and I couldn't stand for that, so I liberated it.”

Said skull doesn’t have a nickname, because, our host explains, he doesn’t know what its owner’s name was and he doesn’t want to be disrespectful. But A|V does want his art to be serious, dignified, an expression of something real.

“None of this is contrived, or just bones from KFC,” he smiles. “Everything I’ve got has a reason and a purpose to it, and a story behind it.”

A|V has been thinking about this sort of thing a lot lately. On Abduction’s new, brilliant fifth album, Existentialismus, his lyrical pen and philosophical musings have turned more inward than previously. The band's storm of high-minded black metal, which has earned them a reputation as one of the finest operatives in the British underground, now comes with much more human themes: fear, emptiness, a worry for the future, and for a past that seems to be getting lost in a world in which nothing has a chance to take root.

“When we started, I didn't want Abduction to feel like it was human, like it was coming from a human person,” he says. “I wanted it to feel like it was coming from the aether somewhere, which is why my identity was pretty secret for a few years. I'm not really bothered by that now – things just evolve over time.”

Indeed, talking to K! today, A|V – Phil, as he is when he's in civvies – is a much more human presence than the faceless ghoul who first emerged in 2017 with the band's To Further Dreams Of Failure debut. Though he remains a shadowy, otherworldly figure onstage, recent evolution has also seen the mask showing the man’s mouth. Partly, this is down to bigger gigs and wanting something easier to sing in, not to mention more individual. But it’s also representative of the human edge coming through.

“It's got more of a face to it. It's still made up of lambs’ jaw bones, castings of bones, but there’s a little bit more human form there, too. That's where the music's coming from. The title Existentialismus represents a lot of ideas I was having – fear of existence, if you like.”

Previously, Phil lived in a city in the North of England. A couple of years ago, he moved back to the small village in which he grew up. “I'm surrounded by green and hills and drystone walls and mills and industrial revolution stuff near rivers. It's fucking beautiful.” This has, in part, precipitated this change in outlook and expression.

“There's a sort of a cycle,” he ponders, adding that this is coming up more on reflection than a conscious thing as he was writing. “I feel like I've got my wisdom now and I've come back home. When I was living in the city, the stuff I was writing was more, ‘What's out there?’ It was wanting to get out, reaching out from the fucking shithole city that so many of us live in. It's that change, simple English countryside and being away from all of that toxicity and degradation, choosing to be away from that. I think that's where the pissed-off, sardonic [element of the album] comes from.”

Take the video for new song Razors Of Occam. Exploring the idea that history was once alive, and that the hardships of older times were real, it features none other than Phil’s own grandmother on the very farm where she was raised.

“We kindly got permission to film on the farm where she grew up,” Phil reveals. “It’s the story of the hard labour of our grandparents, who had a much, much more difficult life than we had growing up. There's a mill over there that took four years to build, by people who were, like, nine years old. My nan had to go down the hill to the town with two pails of water to bring the water up just to wash her hands.

“I wanted to get that in the video. There's the city swine part of it that I'm pissed-off with, and then there's the other side of it, the rural side, which I'm proud of and want to celebrate. Which is, I know, quite a hard thing to get across in a black metal band…”

In conversation, it quickly becomes clear that as well as being a likeable man with a sharp wit, Phil is also an evidently intelligent one: a thinker, a reader and an observer. He says he’s “always had a spiritual, Satanic kind of streak since I got into heavy metal in my teens”, something that’s stuck with him to today, as a 37-year-old. The occult and esoterica has been a long-held interest, as has philosophy and simply trying to unknot the world. Existential author Nietzsche quickly comes up (“The obvious black metal stuff,” he says with a grin), as do the philosophical works of ancient Greece and Egypt. Where this ties with the music is their relevance to what Phil sees in the world in which he lives.

“Existentialist writers are kind of part of something that still seems recognisable today,” he explains. “Everything Nietzsche talked about is pretty much coming through in terms of the death of God and the backlash to that. We do find ourselves as a species that’s sort of bereft of any kind of compass, moral or otherwise. Where does that gap get filled? I’d say we're left without any higher power other than what appears to be digital. Social media is kind of our God now.”

As a teacher, and a father of a 10-year-old son, Phil’s concern is that it’s erasing a level of being human, and that a lot of the worries thrown up by the digital demigod are the wrong ones. In a generation, he wonders, where will that lead? Asked what he’d like a young listener to take away from Abduction’s music, he replies, “I'd like them to feel some sense of their place in the universe and realised that a lot of stuff that we worry about is inconsequential bullshit.

“There are much, much bigger, much more terrifying things around the corner that we should be worried about in terms of technology,” he says. “‘I'm going to lose my Snapchat streak if I don't reply to this thing right now.’ Okay, great. But how are you going to feed yourself when the internet goes down because of a fucking thermonuclear apocalypse?”

This, though, would depend on someone listening to something in the first place. On top of everything else, “I think that music as an art form for the popular, mainstream generation is pretty much dead.” When Phil talks about being a world without churches for most people, music might sadly be listed as one of them.

“It’s really quite tragic. If we've got a generation whose attention span is reduced to about 15 seconds, how on Earth are they going to get into the concepts behind a Pink Floyd album?” he questions. “For the Pink Floyd generation, music was their church. It was an escape. It was something to really engage with and get inspired by and have as an outlet. It had an importance.

“I don't know where it goes next. It's quite worrying, really. We're on the edge of a cliff. As a species, we seem to be stuck in this constant dopamine hit. We’re in a cycle of constant titillation and stimulation, and then wonder why when that stops, everything goes wrong. It's literally like fucking crack withdrawal.”

Which makes those artists who do their works as a more visceral, human endeavour increasingly more vital. Though Phil dons his mask and bones onstage, it’s part of getting himself into the zone, sharpening and focusing himself, the lijk between the man sat with us today, and the expression that is A|V.

“If you've ever done anything like a seance, or been in a Freemasons' club or something like that, you’ll know that you do feel different just putting your hood up,” he says. “There's an altering to your perception of how you feel about yourself and your being. I actually close my eyes most of the time when I perform, which is counter intuitive, but it feels like an extension. The mask feels like an extension of the mood I'm in and the thing I'm trying to create.”

Nietzsche warned that if you gaze into the abyss for too long, you’ll find the abyss gazing also into you. Bathing in negativity, such as doomscrolling, will soon turn to poison. For Phil, through A|V, the opposite seems true – Abduction is a way of getting in touch with your true self.

“It's a character, but it's also not. It's a part of me, you know, it really is,” he says. “For me, that's the truest black metal thing. It's got to be this beast from within. That’s when it’s real.”

Existentialismus is out now via Candlelight. Abduction tour the UK from March 7, and play Fortress Festival May 31 – June 1.

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