This is normal to me, in fact I like it
A chat with the closest thing noise rock has to its own @dril, Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe from the band Thank, plus my usual newsletter rambling at the end.
For the last few years, the rock band Thank from Leeds, UK has felt like a best-kept-secret just waiting to break through. After a handful of EPs, their 2022 debut LP Thoughtless Cruelty came crashing in as one of my favorites of the year. Their mix of clever wordplay and tense noise rock was exactly what I was looking for, feeling like the continuation of a lineage instead of merely nodding to those who came before. A couple years later, their sophomore album I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed is out and it takes everything that made the first album endearing and builds upon it beautifully. I reviewed it briefly in the debut edition of Trauma Angel, but when I contacted guitarist and singer Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe to ask if he’d let me interview him, he graciously accepted. What follows is the transcript of over an hour of conversation about the flourishing Leeds music scene, the importance of humor, and the joys and disruptions of the internet in how we engage with art and the world around us.
Trauma Angel: Hello and thanks for being here. Your new record has been out a few weeks now. You’ve survived the dreaded “sophomore album curse.” How does it feel having this out in the world? You’ve had lineup changes, label changes, you lost [community music space] CHUNK in that time. How has your experience been moving from [2022’s debut LP] Thoughtless Cruelty into the present with I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed? Who have you become in that time?
Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe: We actually lost CHUNK just before we recorded Thoughtless Cruelty. So that album was recorded during a period of time where we literally didn’t have a physical space to call home as a band. That particular aspect is actually quite positive when it comes to this album, because we do now have what feels like a long-term home. Our current practice space, which is a place called Damaged Goods, we’ve been there for about a year and a half. It kind of feels like a return to days of old. It’s quite similar to CHUNK in that it’s a place we’re sharing with several other bands who we’re largely sharing similar values with. There is this sense of community and it actually feels like a return to form in that regard. With Thoughtless Cruelty, it was mostly written and entirely recorded in a period where we didn’t have that physical home. We’d written like two of the songs before CHUNK ceased to exist, “Punching Bag” and “Good Boy.” Maybe an embryonic version of “No Funeral.” In that regard it feels like a return to form.
In terms of the lineup changes, this is the first time in a long time that we’ve released something and toured that release with the same lineup that recorded it. It seems ridiculous, but that was really nice as well. We recorded I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed last December and we’ve amazingly made it a year later having toured quite a bit with the same lineup, whereas with Thoughtless Cruelty we lost Rob [Slater], the drummer, immediately after we recorded. All the touring of that album as with a different lineup from what we recorded with. Similarly, Please, the 10” EP before that, our previous drummer Jack [Gordon] left just after we recorded that. So we seem to end up in this challenging situation where we’d record something and by the time it was released we’d be a different band. It was nice to still be the same band. As well, Theo [Gowans], our former noise maker guy contributed to this album though he’s no longer in the band, which was very nice. He was one of three guest musicians that appeared. He’s still around and we’ve shared bills. The new band I play bass in, Solderer, Theo plays guitar in. We’ve called it “the cabinet reshuffle,” since Beige Palace stopped being a band and Theo had quit Thank, so Solderer is essentially Beige Palace plus Theo with people playing slightly different instruments. It seems that I’m incapable of not playing music with this exact same group of people.
That sounds like a good problem to have. You’ve got strong friendships.
Absolutely, it’s definitely a positive thing.
With Theo’s departure, I’d wondered how the noise and synthesizer sounds worked. It’s distributed amongst the band for live shows now?
Previously we had kind of reached a point when we were touring Thoughtless Cruelty where the noise stuff was shared between Theo and Lewis [Millward], who plays guitar and synth. Since Theo left, Lewis is basically just doing the job of two people and he does it well. For a lot of the old material, obviously since we’re good friends with Theo, Lewis has an SP-404 sampler and I believe that they spent a day together just recording a lot of the kinds of sounds that Theo would make. So Lewis basically has a Theo In A Box, so we’re just able to essentially trigger samples of Theo. In some ways, as well, it has created more scope for the rest of us to do noisemaking stuff. Lewis has his sampler, but also all four of us will now do more abstract noisy stuff in the live show. So it was concerning. I remember the first show we did without Theo, I was quite nervous. He wasn’t originally in the band, we were a band for about a year before he joined and I can remember when he started playing with us it felt like “this is it, we’ve figured out the missing element.” So I was concerned that when he left, we’d go back to that feeling of missing something. I feel that we’ve come a long way in terms of songwriting and arrangements and filling things out, so I feel that the music is strong enough now. It’s still fun to have lots of horrendous noises, but it all stands on its own merit and the noise stuff is like window dressing. Whereas, with the early stuff, it would’ve sounded just a bit empty without that.
So after this time you’re all more comfortable playing with each other.
Yeah, I’d say so. I’d also say that Steve [Myles] is such a powerful presence as a drummer, which adds so much more breadth to the sound. It can’t be underestimated how much of an impact Steve’s involvement has had. He’s a powerhouse and just fills so much more sonic space than basically any drummer I’ve played with in any other project.
I noticed things were more playful on this album and a lot of it did seem to come from the rhythm section. It’s got funky elements and a looseness to it.
Yeah, that’s really good to hear. Steve basically listens to hip-hop and jungle, with a bit of grindcore, and you can really hear that he’s really into those. That has added a lot. And that playfulness was really there in the early EPs too where we were all writing it in the same room, while Thoughtless Cruelty was largely written remotely and a lot of those songs Rob was learning in the studio after the song had already been written. He was filling in gaps with drums, rather than the drums being initially part of the composition. Maybe it was just the first album where we lost the playfulness, and I’m glad it’s back.
I’ll say that the starkness of Thoughtless Cruelty was part of its appeal in a way, too. It’s not bad that it was so tense and tight. It was violent but also tongue-in-cheek.
I love it and this isn’t to put shade on Rob, and he even produced the new record as well. So that’s something we end up doing often, where we keep people around even when they’re not in the band anymore. I think you can just tell that, on Thoughtless Cruelty, it would’ve been cool to have that starkness paired with the feral energy. I don’t think there was any point with recording that album where all five of us were in the room at the same time.
Things can end up very strict and tight when one person writes to a drum machine rather than having many people writing and letting a rhythm unfold together.
This wasn’t the case in every song, but for quite a few of those songs I had a demo that I’d done on my laptop at home with programmed drums, and we recorded them with my demo in the session and layer everything over it before removing the demo.
You often create characters in your songs who narrate. You sing as “I” but it’s not typically coming from you personally. These people are very human and flawed. They’re either not terribly self-aware or sometimes painfully self-aware, somehow. I wonder where you are in these social constructs and people. These aren’t all condemnations, though some clearly are satirizing some of our modern ills, so where does it all come from and what do these characters mean to you?
I think part of it is that I enjoy blurring the lines between myself and the character. It depends on the song. In my mind, there is zero blurred line between myself and the narrator of “Woke Frasier,” although a few people seem to have misinterpreted that. But it’s funny, for like the song “Dead Dog in a Ditch,” when we released the 7” version of the song there was a review where someone suggested that it was written from the perspective of an angry incel. That song is one of the ones that’s kinda from my own perspective. It’s a really exaggerated version of me during quite a challenging time in my life, but it was interesting going with that reading of it. I would not have considered myself an angry incel, but it was an interesting interpretation of the lyric to that song and I wouldn’t have necessarily challenged that interpretation in the same way that I’ve challenged people who have suggested that “Woke Frasier” is from my perspective.
I’m not necessarily making a choice when I start writing the lyrics to a song. I don’t say “this one is my perspective” or “this one is a character.” It’s probably fair to say that a lot of these aren’t fully cut and dry. “Control” is largely written from my own perspective. “Woke Frasier” absolutely isn’t. “Do It Badly” pretty much is.
You want to become a CIA asset?
Maybe not that part. But this is the thing. It flits about so much. I guess “The Spores” is meant to be from the perspective of a malevolent spirit punishing landlords. I was imagining something like The Ring. Is it Samara? The demon from The Ring. I was imagining something akin to that hunting down shithead landlords. It was about a house that I lived in a few years ago where mushrooms started to grow on the ceiling of the kitchen.
It’s rare that I specifically decide that a song is going to be from my perspective or not, but I’ve mentioned this in interviews before. It’s often from the Jello Biafra sort of thing, singing from the perspective of your enemy.
I noticed you’d tried to get ahead of people misinterpreting this tendency and had to put out public disclaimers. I find it hard to see these things reading as a direct endorsement. It seems clear where you stand, that you aren’t trying to urge right-wing thought. Is this a growing issue for you?
People can have terrible media literacy. You know, Tom Morello was recently dealing with people publicly misunderstanding the values of Rage Against the Machine. I think to most people who are politically switched on, the values of Rage Against the Machine are quite apparent. There isn’t that much art that is sympathetic to cranked right-wing views, so maybe there’s an element of people clutching at straws? Maybe anything that appears to have a whiff of that, they cling to it and associate it as that. I spoke about Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys…a few months ago I was getting a coffee and wearing a big Dead Kennedys badge and had a cop in front of me in the queue. He turned around and said “nice badge, man.” And I’m thinking, what happened? You heard “Police Truck” and thought that sounded aspirational? It didn’t even say Dead Kennedys on it, it was the DK logo. It’s a slightly abstracted thing. It’s not the most cryptic logo in the world, but in order to recognize that as a Dead Kennedys badge you have to be slightly more than a casual fan. You’re not just someone who heard them on a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game. You’ve got to be a level above that in terms of being a fan. So it’s kinda strange. Maybe there’s so little art that caters to that perspective, so perhaps that means ignoring really obvious signposts then I guess that’s on you.
It's odd to me that it’s becoming harder to handle negative topics unless your lyrics are explicitly condemning rather than satirizing and mocking.
I do think that maybe 99% of people get it, but you can’t expect everyone to understand what you’re getting at with every song, but it has been interesting. Almost like “The Spores” and “Dread” off the prior album. It’s interesting imagining a landlord hearing those songs and not recognizing it’s about them. It’s another thing to imagine them hearing it and thinking it’s about them and identifying it in a positive way.
Another thing I saw online was that someone asked if your new album art was made by AI. The art is surely unconventional for some of the genres you’re associated with, but I thought it was clearly human-made. Are we so afraid of AI sneaking in that we’re doubting our own judgment?
The artwork is literally a painting. It’s a physical painting. Nick Sheehy, who painted it, a lot of his work does look like CGI and that’s kind of the appeal for us to some extent, that uncanniness. It’s unclear if it’s brushstrokes or computer-generated. I can see how someone might extrapolate from that that it might be AI. To me it’s clear it’s not because there’s a very particular style that AI imagery tends to have that I don’t think our album art shares, but I don’t necessarily blame someone for extrapolating it. It’s not unreasonable to say “it looks computer generated, therefore it must be AI.” I can also see why…we spent a lot of money on recording this album and I can see why people would assume that, as a broadly punk band, we wouldn’t have a lot of money to give to an artist. I can see why someone would assume that we wouldn’t be able to pay a painter and that it’s somewhere we might try to cut costs.
I do feel it’s something people would expect to be outside of the worldview of a punk band, but then again that band Mannequin Pussy caused some fuss with an AI music video this year and I know they’re broadly punk-adjacent.
And I don’t know. I’d say that I’m generally anti-AI, but I don’t know how helpful it is for people to be as dogmatic as they are about it. I’ve been intrigued, at points, by AI. I generally wouldn’t touch it, for example, but there was a point where I considered feeding a bunch of Thank lyrics into an AI and telling it to write me a Thank song. I haven’t done that, but I thought it would be interesting. Especially considering how a lot of our lyrics touch on humanity’s relationship with technology and a deliberately clumsy sort of interfacing with that. Generally speaking, in 99% of cases, I think it’s a shite thing to do, but I do wonder if it’s limiting in some ways to completely write it off and be as dogmatic as people are. Clearly there are so many lazy, horrendous, exploitative ways to use it. I haven’t seen that Mannequin Pussy video, but there’s a band from Detroit called Prostitute. I only heard them for the first time about a week or so ago, but the album they released is really cool. One of the music videos for that is AI generated and I shared it in a noise rock group on Facebook. A few people said they weren’t going to listen to it purely based on the AI imagery. I don’t know a lot about that band but it seems to me that they’re extremely politically switched on. I can’t speak for them, I don’t necessarily know what they were trying to say by using AI for the video, but it seems very unlikely to me that there wasn’t some kind of statement intended by that. It doesn’t seem it’d be done without intent. I feel that the blanket thing where any use of it being a reason for immediate dismissal feels a bit short-sighted, even though, I want to be clear, I am almost entirely not a fan.
It's not a viewpoint that I’ll be the first or last to share, but obviously I take the environmental repercussions seriously and find them quite concerning. However, when I dream of some sort of technological utopia where we have a better future that is aided by our technical advances, I imagine us automating labor. We automate things that cause human suffering or have great risk for harm. Art should be part of our leisure and our joy. Automating the joy of creation strikes me as such a depressing and backwards way of subverting something we could be using to make life better.
I agree entirely with that. Part of my day job is writing creative copy about audio software. I really enjoy it, as much as it’s possible to enjoy a 9-5 job. I enjoy coming up with creative ways to talk about it. My manager at work has previously suggested that I could try using ChatGPT to help me with that and I’ve directly said “no, this is part of the job that I enjoy doing. If you can suggest ways I can use AI to do the less interesting aspects of the job I’d consider it” But it’s a creative thing I enjoy. To me that’s the reason I enjoy being on this earth. 99% of life is about creating and being creative, why would I spend less time on that so I can spend more time looking at spreadsheets or something? That doesn’t compute for me.
Obviously it’s a topic away from Thank, but it’s a growing conversation these days especially since folks online had questioned it.
In my opinion, it still is a running theme throughout our discography. There’s maybe not any songs that are directly solely about this, but there are so many songs that talk about the relationship between humans and machines. It’s something that’s on my mind a lot, so it makes sense for us to discuss it.
You’re something of an industrial band at heart.
Maybe not purely, but you know when someone asks you what kind of music you make and you don’t know them so you’re trying to gauge their frame of reference? For a lot of people who won’t get it, I’ll just say “oh it’s rock music,” and for people who are more on my wavelength I wouldn’t make this comparison, but for a lot of people who are in-between, a useful comparison has been saying that we largely play the same kind of music as Nine Inch Nails. I feel it’s not really that we play music like that, but it’s a useful reference point.
I understand. I wouldn’t recommend Thank to someone in a Nine Inch Nails shirt on the street, but I’m a lifelong fan of them and I see why you’d use it as a reference point.
One of the coolest mid-sized venues in Leeds is the Brudenell Social Club. You’d probably see it on tour posters regular. It’s where a medium-sized band would play if they’re touring and playing in Leeds. On New Year’s Eve every year they’ve got a thing with local bands doing cover sets. Some friends of mine used to be in a band called Post War Glamour Girls and they played it three years in a row. They did The Pixies one year, Talking Heads another, and a slightly augmented lineup did The Flaming Lips another year. We barely have enough time to practice our own songs so it’s not something I think we’d necessarily do, but we’ve all talked about what things we’d cover if we did it and Nine Inch Nails has come up as a strong possibility.
You should do a Static-X covers set.
I know you’re taking the piss but I don’t really know them that well.
I am being silly, but I do really like them. I think it’s largely in context of being twelve when they showed up, but they’re that slick sort of turbo-charged industrial rock that comes with being heavily inspired by Ministry. Fast drums, big guitars, lots of computer sounds, and music videos with little machine guys getting crushed by bigger machines sort of thing.
I mean, I kind of love that. I really want to have more Ministry-styled guitar riffs in Thank but I’ve yet to find many places that it works. There’s kind of a Ministry style guitar part buried in the mix of “Plausible Deniability” on Thoughtless Cruelty and you can’t hear it so well but I know it’s there.
Speaking of guitar riffs, you’re playing guitar much more now in Thank. How has that changed things for you? I know you’ve been writing a lot on the guitar.
To be honest, it hasn’t impacted the process of writing, but it has impacted the pace of writing. It’s always been the case that most Thank songs either start with a riff written by me or a riff written by Lewis. That’s not every song, but like ninety percent of the songs start with a riff written by one of us. So until Thoughtless Cruelty, I didn’t play guitar at all in the band.
So you’d write, but for performance purposes, it was a single guitar in the band.
Right, so it’d slow things down because mine and Lewis’s style of playing guitar are so different. It always was quite unnatural for us to jam with me playing guitar at the time. So when we wrote Thoughtless Cruelty, I ended up playing guitar on a bunch of the demos, which had never happened, and the process of us writing became way faster. It was no longer me writing and being translated into how the other guys would have to play, it was just me playing it. The process isn’t that different, it’s just meant that we’ve been able to write a lot quicker. Prior to Thoughtless Cruelty we’d keep trying to write an album until we’d say “we should probably just record the songs that we’ve got” and we kept just releasing EPs because we weren’t writing quick enough to make an album. That’s why we kept releasing EPs to start with.
But that’s great. It gave you a larger body of work and time as a band before you released your first album. Speaking of, because I found this interesting, you released a 7” with the song “Torture Cube” and a different version of “Dead Dog in a Ditch” from the one that ended up on I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed. Was “Torture Cube” considered for this album and left off or was it always meant to be a separate release?
We were given the opportunity to release a 7” through the Zen F.C. label. Both songs were, at the time, intended for the next album and they were the only two new songs we’d written at the time, so we said “let’s just record them for this.” After that, we didn’t want to reuse a recording from the 7” for the album since the sound was quite different, and our approach has always been that we’ll re-record a song if there’s a specific artistic reason to do so. If the reason is just “we should re-record it to put it on the album,” that’s not a good enough reason. So if we have a creative reason, it’ll be worth it. For example, “Punching Bag” on the EP and the album were much different. The structure of the song changed. With “Dead Dog in a Ditch” on this album, there was a real disagreement on the 7” over what the tempo should be. After we’d recorded that version, the fast version that we put on the album won for us, so we recorded it for the album. It was never like “Torture Cube” was intended to be its own thing, it was just that those were the two we’d written at the time and we haven’t subsequently found a reason to record it again just for the sake of the album. I can see why it felt like it might be an album single rather than a standalone, but we like to keep people on their toes.
I am a fellow chronically online person, but even then I had to research some of the things you mention in your lyrics. Catching the @dril reference on the last LP was an immediate thing for me, especially since Thank in many ways feels like a sonic equivalent to @dril.
I can see that and I appreciate that. It’s a big compliment for me.
But I had to look up what a “burger and car moment” was and it’s just a single funny image online. What are your hopes when you have these incredibly niche references hidden alongside broader commentary on social and global issues that even people who aren’t using social media constantly can understand? You’ll have Simpsons references and tweets thrown in there—is it mostly just born out of your love of comedy?
Sometimes it’s just honestly that I want the lyrics to make me laugh. I want to find my own lyrics funny. There’s a selfishness to that where I’m honestly not that bothered whether or not the joke translates. I think it’s partly just getting fixated on phrases. When I saw that “burger and car moment” meme I was really charmed by it. I just wanted to include it.
I saw it for the first time two days ago and I get it.
It’s just so charming. I like combining high culture and low culture. There’s often a lot of references to books and stuff as well, so I like the idea of holding those two things at the same value. Having something that references Ursula K. Le Guin and holding it to the same importance as someone’s throwaway tweet is somehow appealing to me. I can’t necessarily articulate why, but it does.
Is there a lyric on this record you’re especially proud of or amused by?
I think that in “Writing Out a List of All The Names of God” and “Down With The Sickness” have two of my favorites. I really liked making up all the names for diseases that I might have in “Down With The Sickness.” Sad Little Guy’s Disease. Never Ever Learning From One’s Past Mistakes Disease. Being Very Handsome And A Very Skilled Lover With A Good Credit Rating Disease. And on “Writing Out A List Of All the Names of God” I really liked the Sandra, Rita Mambo Number 666 bit, and of course “listen up because this is important, we’re the headliners Sheer Mag is supporting.”
I wanted to ask you more about your favorite band Sleaford Mods. Do they know much about you? Have you interacted with each other?
Yeah, because of all our posts of “Congrats to the Sleaford Mods on their MBE” we are now blocked by them on twitter and Instagram. But also there’s like that app called “Festify” or whatever that looks at your spotify listening and makes a fake festival poster for you. Jason Williamson from the Sleaford Mods did one of those and Thank were really high up on it.
Do you think he enjoys you or was he trying to scout out the enemy?
Who’s to say, but I think that’s what got us blocked was when I quote tweeted that one saying “Congratulations!”
I’ve heard very little of their music but for a band whose thing is meant to be an everyman scenario, “sharing a stage” is such a common phrase it just means you’re both playing. It wasn’t meant to take away from them.
I think they were upset about it being referred to as a “coheadline.” I’m sure that yeah maybe they were headlining, but if someone considers another band on the same level as us and called it that I’d just think “cool.” Fine, it’s not important to me. My one hope is that if Sheer Mag has caught wind of that lyric that they know it isn’t a swipe at them. I like that band and as far as I know they’re good people.
Would you like to headline over them?
I’d like to play on a bill with them. Where we play on it is immaterial to me.
We’ve talked about a lot of humorous things, but obviously a lot of the conversation and your art exists in the context of an incredibly dark and challenging world. You’ve been in DIY and punk and otherwise radical communities for quite some time, so what do you to continue finding and creating hope in spite of the bleak state of things?
Humor is, to some extent, just a way of dealing with it. So many of history’s best comedians have been cripplingly depressed. It’s a coping mechanism. If you believe in any kind of emancipatory politics, if you don’t have at least some hope, it’s like what’s even the point? If you’re completely defeatist about it and you’re at a point where you don’t like the way things are but you see it as a foregone conclusion, then that is quite alien to me. If you think it’s a foregone conclusion then what’s even the point in any of your values or beliefs? If you’re going to act on your belief that something should be changed, it only makes sense if you believe that it can be changed.
In addition to being in bands, you are deeply involved in the music community in Leeds. You put on shows for others, you help record albums. If you were given a chance to make your own list of unsung artists special to you that you’d wish to shine light on, who would you include?
I guess I’ve got to go with DIY bands that never really made it out of their local scenes. Even within Leeds itself there’s plenty of bands that either fizzled out or split up who’ve had huge impacts on me. So Cattle were an amazing band who were around for about ten years but only released one album during that time. They operated kind of at a snail’s pace but were amazing and really blew my mind the first time I saw them ten years ago. Magnapinna, another Leeds band. The first time I saw Magnapinna I had something to latch onto, because at the time I was a big fan of Slint and I could see they were coming from a similar place to that, but Magnapinna had such a peculiar approach to rhythm, counting, and meter. They were a band who didn’t really have a frontperson. It seemed that whoever made sense to have do the vocal at that point in the song would just do it and it was more like a matter of practicality. Like “the part I’m playing here is easiest so I’ll do the vocal here,” and the egalitarian nature of that was great. Famine, an amazing grindcore band from Leeds who had a few different lineups but they released one album called Razzin’ that I think was with their best lineup and it’s just brilliant. The members of that band have gone on to be in more successful things, but there was something about that album that I don’t know if it’s been recaptured. God, so much. Weaponess. A lot of these are bands that I’ve later ended up being in other projects with members of. I think what we’re realizing here is that I’ll see a cool band and be like [drops voice to a devious tone] “oh, I want some of that.” Cameron who plays bass in Thank, when I first knew him he played guitar in a sort of prog rock band called Weaponess who were amazing. I feel if I had time to sit down and write a list there’d be so many more but those are the first few that come to mind.
Then who’s the future of music locally?
I think that, like as individuals even, there’s a guy called Freddy Newton who is just doing lots of really cool stuff. He plays in Fuck About Find Out, which is a really cool grindcore band with Steve from Thank, but he also does loads of stuff. He does a destruction noise project called Dreadful Monkey Machine. He’s got like a goregrind project called Cobblestoning which is a concept band about his Crohn’s disease. I’m actually wearing their t-shirt today. I bought it because it’s the most illegible thing, I’m actually a big fan of that. But yeah, I think he’s like 22 and he’s just doing cool shit and it feels like he’s gonna keep doing more and more cool shit. He recently had a friend of ours make a custom guitar that has like three different outputs on it, and you can set the switches to have different sounds coming out. One of them is a contact mic. He’s just doing loads of cool shit.
As a band, these guys are cool, there’s a band called The Oidz who are new in Leeds. They’re just a very fun band. I think the members of that band individually just feel like very switched on people who will continue to do weird and wonderful things as time goes on. I feel their capacity as individuals is even greater than I’ve seen so far. I think there’s a lot of stuff to be excited about.
Finally, you’ve just played the last Thank show of the year. What plans can you share for 2025?
I think we’re mainly focusing on festivals next year. We’re playing 2000 Trees, but there’s gonna be a bunch more. That’s gonna be our main focus. Even though we’ve been a band for nearly nine years, we’ve never really done that much in the way of festivals. We’re also going on tour with Kal Marks from the US. We’re doing a UK tour with them in March. I think there’s a chance we might play some shows in Eastern Europe for the first time ever. It’s exciting, really.
[for a continuation of this interview in which we discussed Freddy’s love for the band Xiu Xiu, please tune in for the second newsletter coming later today. This would usually be a paid feature, but this first edition is being sent to all subscribers as a public offering]
REVIEWS
Skafreningur- Himneskr Tárabrunnr
I fucking love raw black metal. I love when it feels thin and simple like a practice demo, sure, but I especially love when it is thick and textured more than anything. Skafreningur’s music comes across as something that I can decipher through the murk, but it also works beautifully as a wall of noise and atmosphere. Albums like this are a testament to music’s capacity to sound massive without being clean and large in terms of production. These songs feel like they would stand the test of clearer production and retain their value and dynamic nature, yet I love them exactly as they are. Triumphant, cold, and cutting. Exactly the stark feelings I want as we head towards shorter days and harsher weather.
Xiu Xiu- 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips
Xiu Xiu’s back with their most accessible new record in many years, which might be why it has the most challenging title to remember. Last year’s Ignore Grief felt almost antagonistic. It was beautiful and endearing to me, but this seems like a fantastic sampler of everything that makes Xiu Xiu such a wonderful band. It’s got painfully sincere lyrics, random stylistic cuts that deliberately make it all harsher, and yet remains shockingly catchy and almost fun to listen to. We explore this at much greater length in conversation with Freddy in the second part of the newsletter coming in just a couple hours, so if you’d like to read his thoughts on this album and the Xiu Xiu catalogue as a whole, please read on.
Christoph de Babalon- No Favours
I am not versed enough to differentiate the many subgenres of underground dance music and therefore can’t tell breakcore from jungle from drum’n’bass, although I’d sure like to get to a place where I can speak with greater authority on these matters. What I do know is that veteran noisemaker Christoph de Babalon just dropped an EP that is dark and noisy, balancing constant motion with ominous atmosphere and just enough beauty to still tickle the imagination. I love it and wish I had the vocabulary to explain exactly how and why. Just listen, you’ll get it.
GENDERISTHEBASTARD- Depressed, Disabled, Powerless & Poor
A dear friend put me onto this last week and it’s the right kind of harsh for my poisoned little brain. It’s the sort of power electronics that lashes out and overwhelms in beautiful ways. A struggle against futility in a crushing world. Violent and mangled, with just enough human element pushing through. This is unpretentious and in your face noise, a brilliant channel of painfully raw emotion.
Rod Modell- Music for Bus Stations
The internet has grown maybe a bit too fascinated by the concept of “liminal spaces.” Perhaps it makes people feel intelligent. Perhaps people yearn for something less cluttered and overstimulating in a world that is increasingly loud and busy. Much like ambient music’s ground zero album, this is designed specifically to be played in bus stations and seems as though it’d lend itself wonderfully, although I can’t help but wonder if we simply live in too distracted of a world for it to work. Imagine this haunting beauty stomped out by the sound of a dozen people watching Instagram Reels without headphones. I think often about regaining a center, a focus. This album may be designed for a more temporary audience, but I’m finding a little focus and grounding in sitting with the full seventy-five minute experience myself. Perhaps you’ll do the same.
RECENT JOYS
LISTENING
Hole- Celebrity Skin
While not nearly as venomous as its predecessor, Hole’s Celebrity Skin has been one of my constant go-to albums the last few years. Perhaps I simply worked my way through needing Live Through This all the time, but I just never gave this record the love it deserved until I had a summerlong nostalgic obsession with “Malibu” in 2021 and realized I’d never heard the album beyond its singles. Not every song’s a hit for me and I’m not as in love with the title track as the rest of the world seems to be, but it still works best as a whole experience. I love when people who can write pure filth choose to write pop-friendly songs. It always turns out interesting and unconventional, even when the surface seems to shine. I just wish I’d listened to this in 1998 when I was a preteen, because it would’ve hit even harder.
Sparklehorse- It’s A Wonderful Life
My recent listening stuff seems to be dominated by stuff that’s 20+ years old. I guess that checks out, but damn if listening to Sparklehorse on repeat isn’t just an exercise in hurting your own feelings. I guess it’s alt-rock. I guess it’s Americana. I guess it’s maybe grunge? I don’t even know anymore, I just know Sparklehorse has this earthen sort of sadness to it that appeals to the parts of my soul that feel like they’re more dust than light. I don’t know why I enjoy this so much when it makes me so sad, but I guess that’s what art has been doing to humans for as long as the two have existed.
READING
Nothing new to say here, but I’m absolutely grinding myself to dust with The Artist’s Way. I am not doing as great of a job as I’d like with the tasks beyond the Morning Pages exercise, in which I write three pages by hand every morning just dumping the funk out of my brain. I’ve not yet taken myself out for The Artist Date where I’m meant to enrich myself, and I’ve done a relatively poor job of journaling and addressing the other exercises, but I’m doing this at my own pace and building one habit at a time. I still have faith that I’ll get where I need to go. Life’s been very busy and stressful, so I’m just proud I’ve retained the discipline to do my daily pages.
WATCHING
I was meant to go see a movie about a week ago, but life did what life does and my dog ate part of a stick and then breathed funny for a bit, which scared me. I decided to not go out that night and kept my little clown company instead. In a sense, having pets has become my greatest form of entertainment in spite of how many other things I try to fill my life with. Between the unpredictable nature of our puppy’s many moods and the alternately sweet and mischievous behavior of the cats, our home is never a dull place.
PLAYING
Roman Sands RE:Build Demo (Steam)
A friend reposted a friend’s post about working on this game and I thought the art design looked charming enough. Within the first few moments of the intro, it’s established that the sun is growing larger by the day, yet nobody seems to care much. Then my character shows up and is thrust into this glowing neon euphoric hell of providing customer service to bizarrely entitled guests at some sort of resort. It had me immediately stressed out but engaged and intrigued, especially once I figured out the simple yet easily overlooked puzzle that led me to the game’s second chapter. This demo is a great experience in letting the game unfold intuitively with very little overt hand-holding or direction and I’m frothing at the mouth waiting for the whole thing to come out. I can tell it’s going to make my head spin.
Control (Steam)
This game stressed me out and excited me in equal parts. Initially I was ready to turn the game off immediately due to motion blur making me ill, so I’d highly recommend playing it with a few tweaks if you’re prone to motion sickness the way I am. Still, this game’s mix of supernatural horror with charming wit kept me engaged the whole way through instead of leaving me in a lag the way this sort of game often does once its schtick is established. As a third-person shooter/action game, a genre I don’t really engage with much, Control had a grip on me that was stunning. I felt compelled to collect all the little secrets not for a sense of completion but because the game’s worldbuilding and lore were so fun to dig through. Felt like a charming mix of that ‘90s X-Files/Twin Peaks/Coast to Coast AM energy with more modern touches from the SCP Foundation and creepypasta. Apparently it’s a distant relative to the Alan Wake games, so perhaps I’ve got another series to dig into soon.
EATING
Mud/wtr
I’m a big fan of taking something that’s advertised in one fashion and using it in a way that’s only slightly related to its intended purpose. This stuff’s meant to increase mental clarity and replace coffee with its blend of chai and useful fungus. Naturally, I just sprinkle like a third of a serving on top of the coffee in my French press before I add water so that I get whatever clarity or focus it takes and I still have my coffee. I honestly can’t tell if it does anything but it feels nice to have. I know it has a negative impact on the flavor of my coffee. My mental clarity comes and goes with no real correlation to anything. It was a free sample left at my work and I took it home after nobody else used it for like two months. When it runs out I’ll probably stop using it, but for now I can pretend it’s making me a better writer.
Senkin Snowman Nigori Sake
Visited a charming, well-curated small wine and spirits shop and found this little treat. On the hazier, creamier side, this was a nice little effervescent treat. I almost didn’t buy it because the guy on the bottle gave me big “hello mister police” energy, but I’m glad I tried it in spite of my uncertainty. Light, tasty, and not too much alcoholic bitterness. It’s a rather affordable drink, so if you’re like me and want to feel classy on a budget, it’s a nice way to go.
In summary
Usually this would be the end of the newsletter for free subscribers, but as part of the whole newness, we’re giving you all the paid edition on the house later today. You can ignore or indulge as you see fit. I know this free one ran quite long as it is. In the “paid section” this time we’re gonna include a fun little radio-style playlist I made, along with an extension of our conversation with Freddy from Thank. We discussed the catalog of the band Xiu Xiu and it felt right to set aside as a teaser/treat rather than an equal component of our main interview.
For the playlist, it’ll be absent my voice and simply be a flowing mix of music. I selected thirteen songs that I thought could work together and just let them bleed into each other. I’m saving up my cash so that I can buy a microphone again and make proper radio format mixes in the future, complete with airbreaks, but for now I hope you’ll understand why the mix is moodier and more ambient.
For those who aren’t going to check out today’s bonus newsletter but are looking forward to the next edition on Friday the 13th, you’ve got a real treat coming up. Anyone who’s known me for long at all knows that I’m a lifelong fan of The Cure. I decided that, instead of simply throwing a brief Cure review in with my reviews section, I needed to really attack my feelings on The Cure from every angle. The new record exists both as its own entity and in the greater context of the band and my decades-long relationship with them and their music. It’s just as much an autobiographical set of writing as it is an attempt to review a late-career album. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I’m enjoying exploring it. And if that’s not quite your speed, there’ll always be the selection of shorter reviews and thoughts. You can always drop me a line at trauma.angel666@gmail.com if you’d like to chat or give me feedback and don’t feel so comfortable commenting on this.
Thanks for your time. Catch you in a couple hours with part two of today’s newsletter.