Andy: I had the riff before I was even part of the band. I'd written it, I think, when I was 16 or 17, on bass. In the various bands I'd been in I'd never had the chance to use it. When we wrote a song called SWT, it was a riff at the end. We recorded that in a studio in Lurgan. The guy had a Fender Twin and I was completely obsessed with Bob Mould's guitar tone. I said, 'Look: here's the closest I can get to Bob Mould. Can you help me out with this?' I always thought, 'This riff doesn't go on enough.' I'm a bit of a pop guy; I always think if you've got something really melodic it should feature prominently at least a couple of times.
Michael: Screamager was a case of just getting things a bit more direct, with the Helmet thing on the main chords. We loved Strap It On, and Meantime had just come out at that time, so it kind of made sense. But, the progression itself is a lot more melodic than maybe a Helmet track would have been. So it was a good happy medium, where we didn't just try to shoehorn a Helmet vibe onto what was a really good song. It kind of just toughened it up and made the chorus bigger and and sweeter-sounding and also kept the grit in the verse, which is exactly what we wanted.
Chris: When we did Screamager, a normal reel of tape was 24 tracks. I didn't even fill it up. It was it was just drums, bass and three tracks of guitar because we worked out a sound that we liked. Maybe there was a solo guitar, a lead vocal, and a harmony vocal. That was it. Boom. Done.
Andy: So the stabs; da da da, da da da, we got that from Helmet – we were huge fans – but we still needed something else. I remembered the SWT lead guitar track was over the same chord progression. So I just said, 'Can we try this?' And Fyfe Ewing [then-drummer] and Michael said, 'But that's SWT. That's another song.' And I said, yeah, but I think we could appropriate our own music for this track. We all said, 'Yep, that's fine: let's do it.' Chris loved the riff, and it ended up being the main thing about Screamager.