British metallers Pupil Slicer have just dropped a scorching new banger and fired the starting gun on their next era. Kate Davies takes us inside the world of Fleshwork…
Pupil Slicer have returned with a killer new single, Fleshwork, and announced that their third album of the same name will be released on November 7.
Attendees at ArcTanGent a few weeks ago will have spotted a load of mysterious posters around the site, with a QR code, a date, and a big, fiery eyeball. Some may have guessed, from those clues, that it was the Brit metal crew up to something. Others may have just noticed the band taking pictures of themselves with them and spilling the beans there.
"I did have my mysterious posters up," says singer/guitarist Kate Davies. "I nicked them all at the end. I got some nail scissors off of one of the merch stands. One had been sick all over…"
Lovely. But feeling a little woozy is probably apt for the album. Kate calls it the heaviest and most aggressive they've made to date, rawer than the honed perfection of its 5/5-rated predecessor Blossom. And where that record often looked inward, Fleshwork is more an observation of the world itself, taking a look at how an individual fits into systems that are inherently designed to crush them, particularly those not completely calibrated to it.
With the title-track now out – as well as two previous singles Black Scrawl and Heather, remixed for the album – it's time to get the lowdown on Pupil Slicer's third chapter. Prepare your flesh.
Tell us about the new track, Fleshwork...
“There's a funny story. HEALTH were saying we should collab at some point, and to send over some riffs when we had something. So, me and Josh jammed out the main riff, sent it to HEALTH, and they were like, ‘Cool, but I don't think this will happen for a few years.’ So we just used it anyway, and I wrote some synths that I thought HEALTH would put on it, and bosh, job’s a good ’un.
“It’s a bit of an encapsulation of the attitude and the rage in the album and the general themes, but also sonically, it's pushing into us wanting a real fucking headbanger club tune, where everyone will be popping off. And to be fair, we've played it at four shows now, and each time someone's come up and gone, ‘What the fuck was that song?’ So it’s working. It’s a bit of a bopper.”
Where are you going lyrically?
“You know me, every song's gonna have some niche references on it somewhere. This one's got stuff from the anime Chainsaw Man. It’s about basically being turned into a monster against everyone around you, and how much of a responsibility you bear as part of a cog in a machine. Society is built to turn people against each other, because that's what generates ad revenue, that's what generates political traction: making everyone hate each other. At what point does your participation in that become too much? Where does your responsibility lie? How much do you give up and go with the flow? It's a lot of hard work keeping up with stuff, but then at some point you've you go, ‘Well, this chocolate I'm buying literally comes from child slaves in Africa.’ At what point are you going to decide: I'm going to try and not be a part of that system?’ It's an exploration of those thoughts, which fits into the overall scope of the album.
“I've got this running theme of fire throughout, and there's the samples of fire and stuff that builds and builds over the album. The idea is to burn away everything else to be left with something that's very personal by the end of it. Towards the start of the album the songs are a lot more me commenting on things abstractly. By the end of it, the last two songs very personal to me and my struggles as a disabled person, as a trans person in society. They’re about the weight of everything, and trying to persevere throughout it.”
It's pretty Warhammer, that title…
“I thought you were going to say Heartwork by Carcass! But yeah, I see the Warhammer. It gives the image of the industrial machinery that keeps society going, and the unstoppable behemoth of the system that crushes everyone beneath it. But then all the parts of it that keep it going are you, me, humans. It's the people in the grinder at the bottom, but then there's people at the top going, ‘Yeah, no problem. Sounds good to me.’ It's a human machine.”
The video ties in to that pretty heavily as well, right?
“Yeah, we've got a narrative going throughout the videos on this album, and it's something we came up with, came up with our director, David Gregory. Just for a bit more background on the whole theme, I think of the album overall as a whole as construing life in an industrial hellscape where the lives of everyone who's less fortunate – the poor, the disabled, the queer, the people of colour – are all used as tools for the political and ultimately financial gain, with no thought given to the human cost directly affecting them. It as an observation of the machinery of oppression, and that burns away as the album goes, until it leaves just the personal, human element at the end. The perspective shifts into the lived experiences in this society, and all the weight of that subjection on people.
“This first video has a featureless soldier in a war zone, maybe in the near future, using the film Warfare as a reference point. He's basically being hunted in this war zone, and gets into a one-on-one standoff with one of the other soldiers. He takes off this guy’s mask, and he realises that the other one is also him, a clone of the same person, also featureless. I'm using that as a metaphor for how we're all soldiers fighting each other, but we're all humans being pitted against each other by those higher up. They want us to not get along. But that hatred shouldn't be directed at each other, it should be directed upwards, at the people who are pitting us against each other.
“Cloney’s story – that’s what David calls him – will continue across the second and third music videos. It will be Cloney's adventure with coming to terms with being part of this system and trying to break free from it, and finding an individuality within a system that wants you to be a drone and hate others.”
It’s not a concept album about him, though, is it?
“No. I suppose it's a thematic and emotional concept, more than it is a storyline. It's a series of vignettes. The album isn't about a clone going on an adventure. The album is a bit more personal, especially by the time you get to White Noise near the end, which is very much about my own lived experiences.
“My memory’s not great, and I find it really upsetting that I’m losing my memories over time, and I find it hard to then connect with the experiences I've had. I can't really remember being onstage for any of the shows we've played. Those memories don't go in my brain. I don't register it when it's happening. It’s autopilot. It's really upsetting, because I wish I could connect to those moments and hold on to them, but they're just gone as they go by. I’ll look at videos afterwards be like, ‘I don't remember doing that onstage. I don't remember being there.’ And I find that quite upsetting. And just the whole thing of me wanting to connect. ‘Show me I'm alive. Give me anything. Why can't I feel this life passes by? What's it like to be there? I can't be anywhere.’
“Cenote is about the way that our society treats trans people and disabled people. It’s about experiences of people I know that are disabled who can't get the help they need. It's almost acceptable as a society to go after the disability stuff and say there’s loads of fraud. I have a friend who’s been disabled all their life and never been able to work, despite really wanting to. They got a review, and it came back saying, ‘Actually, you're fine. Get a job.’ I'm trying to help them at the moment, just to survive having everything cut off. But they still can't work. It didn't make them suddenly able to work. That’s really upsetting, and it’s part of what the album’s talking about.”
What was recording like?
“We did 16 days with Joe Clayton, in Manchester, and we had done four days last summer where we did Black Scrawl and Heather. They were remixed for the album. People can get angry at us all they want and go, ‘Oh, I prefer the original mix,’ but I think the new mixes are better. They sound more in-your-face and in the room and less overproduced. We've gone for more of a direct sound. From having our DIY first album, and then the really polished second one, I've realised that we're more of a Converge than we are a Dillinger Escape Plan. We're more raw and emotional and aggressive than sitting back and being technical and showing off wizardry. It still has funky, crazy bars of 15/16, and really weird mathy stuff. But there's also been a push into the raw aggression and trying to get something that sounds ferocious. I'll say the line that every band says: it's our heaviest album yet.”
You’re screaming a lot. More than normal, like…
“Yeah. On the song Sacrosanct, we’ve got the longest scream I've done. I didn’t count it ’til afterwards, but it starts with a 12-second scream, just in one. I thought that sounded cool. That’ll be fun to do on tour every night…‘’
Fleshwork is released on November 7. Pupil Slicer tour the UK with LLNN from November 25.
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