“It’s not a lecture, it’s an emotion. It’s doom and gloom you can dance to”: How Scorpion Milk are making music for increasingly interesting times

Mat McNerney has always been good at dancing in the darkness. Not so much looking on the bright side as feeling the energy and rush of trying times, he’s someone often pushed towards doing.

With his forest-y, otherworldly outfit Hexvessel, it’s exploring something more sylvaine and earthy, where he’s previously told K! of blood rituals at the end of recording sessions. Celebrated post-punk bands Grave Pleasures and Beastmilk, meanwhile, often relished the twin ideas of sex and death, shagging in the face of nuclear annihilation, once referring to his leather-trousered onstage persona as being like Nicolas Cage in Wild At Heart, or the actor’s infamously OTT, ‘refreshed’ appearance on Wogan. It’s something he dived into when he lent his vocals to the neon sleaze of Carpenter Brut’s Beware The Beast, in which he gleefully celebrated how ‘The night’s desire is burning with The Devil’s fire’.

With new project Scorpion Milk, some of that ‘fuck it’ rock’n’roll fun is gone. In its place, on their excellent Slime Of The Times debut, is a more direct, fighty vitality, post-punk with the cold anger and hard anxiety. Dark? Undoubtedly. But, as Johnny Rotten sang, anger is an energy.

“It’s defiantly alive. It's doom and gloom you can dance to,” Mat says with a sardonic smile. “There's something really beautiful about those early Killing Joke tracks. They have this protest feeling, but it's not about negative energy. It's about driving people to action.

“There’s an anger to this record, which I think is very befitting. I called it Slime Of The Times because it's a mirror on what's happening at the moment. It's not so fun, you know? There's less of the tongue-in-cheek aspect of Beastmilk, and less of the sex of Grave Pleasures. Scorpion milk is a poison. So it's a darker, more aggressive record. It's a darker, more aggressive project. I wanted to show that in the name, but also wanted a hint from the past.”

In ingredients, it’s not a million miles from Grave Pleasures, particularly not when Creeper frontman and longtime admirer William Von Ghould pops up on the sleazy She-Wolf Of London. But it’s also harder, more direct. This is partly the result of working on his own, in his own studio, with “no filter between me and the tape”, to get the rawness, the emotion down without interference. Even with guest musicians like Viagra Boys drummer Tor Sjödén and Converge bassist Nate Newton, Mat says there was no compromise with his vision. “I think I almost broke Nate’s arm, making him do downstrokes for everything,” he laughs. “But they had to be.

“With Grave Pleasures, if I think about things that went wrong, we maybe concentrated a bit too much on the pop side of things, without thinking about the primal feeling you want to emote. It's just straight from the heart. What happens when you've got so many cooks in the kitchen is you spend a lot more time sort of pontificating about things rather than just feeling them. The feeling of this record is much more confrontational. It has an agenda.”

This isn’t necessarily a political one. It is, Mat says, “more about tapping into the motions of that anxiety and fear”. He points to Thatcher-years originals like Killing Joke, Crass, Rudimentary Peni and Amebix, and how he wondered where the pissed-off verve of those bands had gone in the challenging modern age. He also references 1985 sci-fi movie The Stuff, in which a weird goop consumes everyone with whom it comes into contact.

“In that movie, The Stuff is taking over. People are eating it, and it’s consuming them. That's kind of the feeling of today. There’s so much manipulation, digital addiction, the pandemics, there’s this feeling of a Cold War era coming back. I really wanted to capture that, this radical, anarchic feeling, but still able to understand the surreal and almost ridiculous aspect of modern times.”

It’s a feeling exampled in the album’s title-track. Modern as it is, it’s a worried look at a grift as old as time in newer clothes, what Mat calls “the commodification and monetisation of fear”.

“We can look back and say that we’ve got some similarities with what was happening in the ’80s, but that was nothing like today, where you’re manipulated on a daily basis,” he explains. “It must be a terrible time to be a kid nowadays, because you can't escape. We used to worry about there being a surveillance society, but it's there now. We're in it, whether we like it or not. You can't escape from it. And in social media, there’s this other layer where every crisis and piece of news gets filtered through this online culture of outrage and virtue signalling, this sort of neurotic self-display. It becomes hard to tell what's genuine. Simulation theory becomes something that we want to subscribe to, because [everything we’re seeing] just feels too unreal.”

Its author is keen that this not be taken as anything too concrete. As an artist, Mat wants to simply get the feeling that pushes on his chest and his head onto tape, to express these anxieties as they are.

“It's not really a lecture, it's more like a pure emotion, a pure feeling. I don't want to give people the wrong idea that it's sort of political music, but it is very much a reflection of the world and living in it. It's all about being yourself, actually standing up for things you believe in, writing about angry things. That’s why early Sepultura still sounds so brutal, because the lyrics are so in your face. They’re about what he feels, and when he sings them, you believe him.”

It's this that makes Scorpion Milk its own thing in the rich and often varied Mat McNerney canon. Grave Pleasures are, he says, “kind of done, but we’re not done with it”. With this, he wanted to return to the very roots of that idea, get back in touch with what drove it in the first place, and from that create something that was his vision.

“I've got to the point where I'm not playing someone else's sandbox. I'm not trying to be someone else, or creating an album which I want to compete with anybody else's. It's not a genre album. It's just me. The raw version of me.”

And what would you like people to take from that?

“Let me think,” he says, staring into the distance, before delivering a sting. “If people feel unsettled and disturbed, or strangely uplifted, then I think I've done my job.”

Slime Of The Times is released on September 19 via Peaceville

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