Conjurer’s brilliant new album Unself unpacks the idea of identity, your place in the world, and the reduction of humans to consumers. It’s also been a personal journey of learning. Dani Nightingale and Brady Deeprose take us deep to find the answers…
“I always have to say the really sad stuff,” sighs Dani Nightingale. “But that’s all my fault.”
Dani’s Conjurer bandmate, Brady Deeprose, is discussing the musical genesis of All Apart, the evolving, epic second song on the band’s third album, Unself. It begins quietly, almost whimsically, putting the listener off-kilter, unsure of what’s coming. Then the considerable bile explodes forth.
“There’s always one track on every record that we colloquially refer to as ‘band in a song’, which is everything we do in one neat little package,” explains Brady, citing Choke from 2018’s Mire and It Dwells from 2022’s Páthos as previous examples, before deferring to Dani to explain All Apart’s lyrical significance, which is just as sad as they suggest.
For Dani, who in recent years has been diagnosed with autism, aged 31, and come out as non-binary, feelings of isolation and loss of identity date back to their school days, despite the teachers waxing lyrical about accepting one another’s differences.
“In actuality, for me and many other people, neurodivergent or otherwise, being yourself or being different was often met with punishment and estrangement,” recalls Dani. “That tied into the whole notion of not really knowing who you are and not knowing what to do. Yes, there’s a process of assimilation, but when it’s stuff that’s completely inconsequential, like how you communicate, how you think and how you present yourself, being punished and ostracised for that is very, very difficult.”
Dani’s school years, they explain, were spent alone, wandering the playground, spurned and bullied but unable to work out how to fit in.
“It lays a very weak foundation for working out who you are,” says Dani, who wrote All Apart to channel that anger towards authority figures who preach one thing, but practice another. “They hold back and keep aside anyone who doesn’t follow these unwritten rules and unspoken laws and guidelines of being a person.”
Despite this painful subject matter, Dani and Brady are on verbose form as they prepare to host an online playback of Unself, hurriedly checking that the tech will hold up for the task at hand that immediately follows this chat. Yesterday, they did one in person at The Royal Society For The Arts (RSA) in London, founded in 1754 and where, according to their website, ‘world-leading ideas are turned into world-changing actions’.
Special spaces necessitate special events, so yesterday’s playback was accompanied by visuals to give proceedings a cinematic feel, an exhibition of artworks, a Q&A with radio presenter Sophie K, and the launch of the beer Conjurer have created in collaboration with Queer Brewing – the first queer and trans-owned brewery in the UK. The results, handily called Unself, is a gluten-free Raspberry & Blackberry Fruited Pale that, according to Brady, somehow managed to suit the “wildly variable palettes” of Conjurer’s four members – Dani and Brady, bassist Conor Marshall and drummer Noah See.
When it came time to listen to said record at the event, the only seats available in the space were at the very front, so the band had to make their way to the first row as the acoustic strum of Unself’s opening title-track began. There were some nerves, Brady and Dani admit, with the latter pulling their hood up to hide from the glare of the congregated metalheads, members of the press and personnel from their label Nuclear Blast. Those fears were soon allayed, though, when during a moment of silence between tracks, a guttural ‘Fuck yeah!’ sounded out from the back of the room.
The overall experience left Dani “elated” as they drove home to Rugby in Warwickshire, where Conjurer started out – a route that inspired the incandescently furious track The Searing Glow. Its genesis came from Dani constantly driving past the aggressively bright billboards that flank the roads in the capital – not just because they can present a dangerous and overstimulating distraction, but because they’re a reminder of the toxicity of advertising and marketing strategies in late stage capitalistic societies.
“It used to be about products that will better your life and make them more convenient, which I don’t have a problem with, as there’s nothing wrong with trying to elevate or help your fellow man,” explains Dani. “But now it’s not really about something you need, but about instilling insecurities in you to make you think you need a thing. I saw an interview with [Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos talking about how Amazon’s entire model is about whatever the customer wants – whatever [they] can do to keep a customer essentially subservient to them. Capitalist society commodifies people, reducing them to the number in their bank account or data that can be harvested.”
The human cost of this greed, and the inspiration for looming penultimate track Foreclosure, came when Dani watched Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore’s 2009 documentary, in which we learn about a sign making business booming in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis due to the overwhelming need for ‘Foreclosure’ signs. It also includes the story of a family that had lost their home, only to be employed at a greatly reduced fee to clear their possessions from the property.
“The bank gave them a pittance to clear their stuff, and essentially destroy the rest of their lives,” recalls Dani in disbelief. “It just fucking killed me.”
While The Searing Glow and Foreclosure are two of Unself’s less personal entries, certainly when compared to those that deal with Dani’s trauma, they’re similar in that they examine the ills of a world its authors want little to do with. But how do Conjurer reconcile that despondency with the need to be proactive in a craft they clearly have fun with? Their rationale, it turns out, comes from a seemingly unlikely source…
“There was something that [comedian] James Acaster said in one of his stand-up specials, about when people ask him if it’s hard to talk about awful personal stuff every night. He said, ‘If I'm talking to you about it, I’m good,’” explains Brady. “He was saying that the audience wasn’t his first port of call in a crisis – he’s worked through that stuff by writing the material.
“It can be intense for us in the studio and sometimes it gets emotional live, but for the most part, I don’t think any part of our process is to dredge up the trauma every night to give an authentic performance. It’s to take that music we’ve created through whatever we were feeling, then lean into connecting with people who have maybe been through some of that stuff, or at least understand where we were at that time. If we were in that same headspace, we probably wouldn’t be capable of playing a full set. The really negative, personal stuff is not flowing through my veins. When I’m playing live, I’m really just enjoying playing music with my friends.”
At various points today, both Brady and Dani describe Unself as a ‘transitional’ record. If Mire was about formalising Conjurer’s early songs, then Páthos was the definition of the difficult second album, made during COVID. Unself, meanwhile, is the sound of a band working more effectively to future-proof themselves.
“This is the first time I’ve enjoyed the studio experience, front to back,” admits Brady. “There were tough days and there were disagreements, but it was the most productive and together we’ve felt as a unit. We prioritise our own physical and mental health throughout the process, which helped us foster an environment in which we felt we could just focus on the music, which we’ve always said we’re about.”
Dani agrees. During the first few days in the studio, they recall a feeling of discomfort, so took Brady to one side to ask if he was feeling the same.
“It felt too easy,” recalls Dani. “Brady reminded me that we’d been about for 10 years so we know what we’re doing and are more confident and comfortable than ever, and suggested that I was freaking out about the fact I had nothing to freak out about.
“And that was very, very true.”
Unself is out now via Nuclear Blast. Conjurer play Damnation Festival on November 9 and tour the UK from November 11.
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