“It’s incredible, an incredible journey, and it totally blows my mind at every stage. It’s wild.” | MATT BATY OF PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS TALKS UPCOMING ALBUM, TOUR
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs
INTERVIEW | Matt Baty by Morris Shamah
Northern Exposure’s Morris Shamah talks to Matt Baty, lead vocalist and lyrcisist for Newcastle stoner-noise-sludge metal band Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, ahead of their upcoming fifth record Death Hilarious and subsequent tour.
The title, Death Hilarious, where did that come from?
It’s come from a Cormac McCarthy book called BLOOD MERIDIAN. We did have another title for the album, and then, Adam (Ian Sykes – lead guitar) was rereading BLOOD MERIDIAN. And, there’s a little passage in there describing a native American tribe kind of riding into battle. And there’s like a little paragraph about how they looked or how they seem “death hilarious” and he thought that was like a really cool kind of descriptive mechanism for our sound. So he put that forward after we’d kind of finalized the title of the album and to be honest, I can’t even remember what, what we’d settled on, at that point. We finally got there and then like a few days later, Adam might pops up with a, hey, uh, I know we’ve had this discussion, but what about “Death Hilarious“? And, we were like, yeah, that’s, that’s perfect. Yeah.
Speaking of the sound, in the press release Sam (Grant – guitar) talks about how you wanted the album to be a slap in the face, and – I’m going to quote you here – “directly hostile,” inspired by the live shows. So I kind of have two questions. One is what makes you think the other albums aren’t directly hostile?
Yeah. Yeah, fair enough.
But, but the real question is sort of how does that differ from the approach you took with the last two, with Land of Sleeper and Viscerals?
Sam does all of the production. So like when we’re going into the writing mode we’re just kind of focusing on purely on the songwriting, whereas Sam’s got another layer to this as well. As the songs are coming together as a more cohesive unit, you know across album length, he’s also thinking about well what direction do these songs favor in terms of what I can do production wise to give this album a different character, a different flavor from from the previous albums. I think Sam’s an amazing producer and that’s why every album we’ve stuck with him- because I think rock and metal is a genre where there can be quite formulaic ways of producing. I’m not criticizing it at all, but you know, if you travel down those paths constantly release on release I think each album kind of loses a bit of character, it loses a bit of mystique. We want each album to have its own kind of identity.
So with this one the songs were a little bit more immediate, maybe a little bit more aggressive and a little bit more pushy, so Sam lent into that in the production- just kind of pushed things a little bit harder in terms of the effects you might use, or the compression, or the EQing, just to kind of give it a bit more of a kind of a gnarlier sound. Whereas with Land of Sleeper it was more of a headphones listen, he was adding a lot of layers of things in there. Sometimes there were things that he added that I didn’t actually hear until he kind of pointed it out. He was “like oh there’s this extra layer of synth under that” and it was quite layered. But I suppose sound-wise and sonically [Land Of Sleeper is] quite introspective whereas the new album is kind of the opposite of that, it’s just kind of really straight ahead both in the songwriting and the production.
Talking about the songwriting, one of the things I wanted to talk about was a song like Death Hilarious track The Wyrm, which is just a multibeast. How does a composition like that kind of come to be?
We don’t have a main songwriter in the band. We all kind of squirrel stuff away, you never know when something might come to you, and you get like a riff and record it on a phone or just quickly on a computer or whatever, and then when we actually come round to writing – we generally don’t do any writing when we’re on the road. We’re just trying to protect our energy to do as much touring as we as we possibly can. But then when we convene for writing, everyone will kind of bring like bits and pieces of what they’ve been working on at home over the past however long it’s been. Sometimes there’s a fully formed song pretty much there and we’ll all add our own input on it- it’s quite a democratic process in a way.
I think we’re definitely the kind of band that all five of us have got to be all in on a song for it to be on the album, because then, you know, if it’s on the album, then there’s the intent of well this could be played live in front of people. Personally I think we’re more a live band, you know, I think certain people might maybe listen to some of our albums and not be fully sold on it or it might not be their type of music or whatever, but I think if you put us in front of people live that’s where we kind of we win a lot of people over. So we need to be all in on on a song regardless of who’s kind of cooked them up initially. We’ve been doing it for so long now – like five albums deep – that we all trust each other, we value each other’s opinions to the point where we will try and force things a little bit and and push things, if something’s not quite working we’ll try and reshape it or whatever we need to do to get it to a point where we’re all happy with it, but some ideas we’re not quite feeling for whatever reason- I think we’re all now confident enough to be able to go you know maybe not this one, let’s park this one for now, and let’s work on some more. I can’t even remember what your initial question was?
I was asking about The Wyrm.
Oh, yes, so The Wyrm in particular, that’s something that Adam brought in. And I remember because he did have quite a clear idea on how he wanted it to be- he had the riffs and kind of most of the composition of it down, the structure. Naturally, as you start throwing more things at it, things change and certain sections are like, oh, yeah, we can milk that because this is feeling really, really good, and you can get into a deep headspace in it. Or maybe let’s shorten this bit because it’s maybe dragging a little bit. His initial idea for it was, I want this to kind of start from silence and be like, up to 11 straight away from like the first note. I want it to just be a kind of a huge blast of sound. So yeah, that was that was the kind of the jump off point for that one.
It’s a weird process because you write the songs and then we go into the studio and record them quite shortly after, and then there’s a period of six months where we don’t play them again. So we’re relearning the songs now and that’s going to be one of the ones we play live and it’s mega, it’s really really fun to play.
So how do you go about deciding on the setlist for a tour like this now that you’re five albums in? I assume we’re going to be heavy on Death Hilarious. But as a group, how do you go about deciding the setlist?
I mean, to a degree, cause we get so hyped up about the new stuff, we all need to be like upper height playing them. And I think the best way of doing that, injecting some kind of new life into the set list, is playing as much from the latest releases as possible. But we do start to look at like, well, okay, so which songs from the new album do we want to play? And then obviously we’ve only really got like, we’re not arena level. So we’re not going to be kicking out like a two hour set anytime soon. And I think actually we’d probably lose people if we did. But from a sense of like structuring the set, we’ll kind of go, well, we want to play these ones from the new album. Is there anything that we currently play that’s maybe, you know, a little bit too closely matched? And then okay, well, these ones can make way for these cause they may be doing the same kind of thing dynamically, like mood wise.
But then once we’ve got the new stuff in from that sense, we start to structure things much in the same way as when we’ll put the album track listing orders together. We’re like, well, how do we create some sort of dynamic journey throughout the set in order to give, you know, ourselves sometimes a breather as well as the audience. And cause I think that’s important, it makes those higher points more impactful if you can hold the reins at certain points, then kind of release them – it is far more exciting for everyone, ourselves and the audience as well.
Talking about the album order- the album sequencing, it holds together so amazingly, but the back half of the record is relentless. It’s incredible. Was that intentional? Was it, you know, kind of, let’s just batter people’s faces in for the second half of the record?
Yeah, it was intentional. We’ll play around different [album seqeunces] and it’s quite chaotic by this point, because like I said all of the creative processes are quite like a democratic process, but when it comes to structure an album and you’ve got like 10 to 12 tracks or whatever – everyone’s got their own kind of “oh well this is how I’ve been listening to it and it’s sounding great.” But you do start to see little sections of like a common thread amongst all of us and then you kind of use those as the foundation to kind of put everything else around. But also, you know, the vinyl format is such a big thing for us, so all of a sudden you’re actually playing with two halves as well, rather than one whole. So you’re trying to make the journey of someone starting the record and then at the end of Side A, flicking it over- how do you restart Side B and take them on that journey again? It felt quite appropriate with this one to end on [final track] Toecurler because that’s just a huge destructive song and I think in terms some of the lyrical themes, having that kind of self-destruct button pressed at the end of the album made a lot of sense. So it was all pretty intentional.
I wanted to talk about Glib Tongued, obviously. You know El-P’s little jump on there. You sound particularly evil on that track. Is that like a sense, yeah, I need to level it up a little bit for El-P?
Well, at that point, there was no El-P! He wasn’t there at that point. The way the song came together was quite interesting. Johnny (John-Michael Joseph Hedley – bass), our bass player, he pretty much came in the room with all of these riffs and they were quite like, really quite sludgy, really dirgy, quite grindy. We love all of that stuff. But I think he was quite surprised by the direction it suddenly took. Because like I say, someone will bring these riffs in and then as we all start to put our layers on it, things can quite quickly change. And that one did, once Ewan (Mackenzie – drums) started playing. I think Johnny initially imagined it as being just a really full on apocalyptic song from start to finish, just really insane. But Ewan started playing this really tight, really groovy drum beat with closed high hats, which he hardly ever does. A lot of it’s quite sparse, but it’s quite tight, very rhythmic. And then Adam and Sam, guitar wise, played off the space that the drums were leaving by putting down quite ambient sounding guitar parts as well. And again, that was leaving a load of space.
Quite often, what we do, it’s just like big solid blocks of sound. And I’m quite aware of what I do vocally, you know, I know what lane I’m in. I know if I was to try and step out of that lane, I probably would make an idiot out myself. It was really exciting to kind of hear something coming together that was more uncharted territory for us, and it was quite exciting, so I started putting vocals to it. And I was like, well, I am obviously happy with these, but I think over the course of a full song, I’m very aware that what I’m doing might become quite monotonous. I think it would quite easily kill how unusual and unique this song is for us. And again, with the vocals, it sounded really gnarly. I think, you know, back to that point I made earlier about when you sometimes hold things back and then release them, those moments seem even more impactful. It’s not something we do quite often where we’re very, very controlled and almost quite calm, into chaos, and back into a verse and bringing it right down again. So it made those chorus moments seem quite impactful. I was aware that my vocals, I could only get so much out of them that would be of benefit for that song. So I was like, look, like there’s so much space here. It’s quite a cool rhythm and quite cool groove to it. Hear me out- we could get an emcee on this. And everyone was open to it.
So we put together a wish list – and you kind of start at the top, right? And like, you know, Run The Jewels are legitimately one of my favorite bands, if you want to call them a band. Every single one of their albums is 10 out of 10 for me. There’s not one song that I’ll skip through. They’re just all amazing from start to finish. So yeah, we put Run The Jewels at the top and then we realized that through a mutual friend, we might be able to reach El-P. And he just sent an email to Jamie’s personal email address with the link to the demo version. And I thought that would be it. Like we just wouldn’t get a response. But he got back pretty quick and he was like, “this is heavy as fuck, let’s do this.” And I was like, Jesus Christ. I couldn’t believe how easy the process was. It’s all you need to do. Just email, you know, Premier League status artists to collaborate with. Like, you know, maybe the next album will be emailing like, Miley Cyrus or someone. You just need to send an email, apparently! I was expecting like a load of industry people to be like jumping in on the chain and like, oh, this manager, this publisher, this mobile, whatever. But there was none of that. He was just like, right, okay, can you send me over the lyrics that you’ve got? And then he came back with a kind of, this is my interpretation of your lyrics, and, I’ll maybe go in this direction, are you cool with that? And I was like, you know, you fucking do what you want, mate (laughs).
When he sent back, like he did some demo vocals first before he recorded them properly, and by this point, we’d recorded the song properly and he sent back his vocals over the top. And it was just like an absolutely mind blowing thing to even just hear his voice on the next line on a song that we’d written. Absolutely insane.
Have you thought about how you’re going to approach that song live?
I mean knowing what lane I’m in, I’m not going to try and bust his verse. I think I would completely kill it and I would get like laughed at. So unless there’s any really special moments where we might be able to like, you know, get him involved, if we’re playing at the same festival or something like that… I think we we might have to skip over that one unfortunately.
Last time I saw you guys live on tour was at Kentish Town, and I remember you saying that you guys are this close to being taken seriously by the music industry. What does being taken seriously by the music industry mean to you and the band?
It was very, very much a sort of tongue-in-cheek comment. Because I think, there’s been so many twists and turns with these band, with this band, and like, so many unexpected moments, like having El-P on the album, or, during the last album campaign, we had a song license for the WWE computer game, and like, I’m a huge wrestling fan, and that was like something that came out of the blue. All the way, there’s been like, these little milestones, it feels like the universe has just thrown us something, or like somebody’s playing a computer game and found a new cheat code for us, and it’s a weird new prize. Also, you know, the sheer enthusiasm- when we started the band, we just wanted to go out and play shows, and have fun. We had no aspirations of we’re going to try and make it in the music industry, and we’re going to play these festivals or play in these venues, we were just like, oh, there’s a really cool scene of this kind of music happening in the UK at the moment, we want to experience that from a band side as well as, you know, going along and supporting our friends that were doing similar things. So we never really had many aspirations.
And obviously the band name itself- I think, like, from the starting point, we didn’t ever feel like it lent itself to be taken seriously, in any way. Actually, at certain points that we got to, we were like, well, this is going to be a hindrance. We had a radio plugger approach us after the first album and going into the second album, and we were like well, let’s work together, but, no self respecting BBC radio presenter is going to entertain this fucking name – and then, they did! And then from that point, when we start picking up a lot more radio play, the audience did grow quite quickly. And we were like, what the fuck’s going on? Like, we’re just like some daft band from Newcastle with a really stupid name, but people people are taking to it.
So yeah, I really don’t know what being taken seriously means. I don’t want to be taken seriously, really, I think that’s maybe my point, you know. I am, we all are, really, really proud of the albums that we put out, we don’t see the music element or the expression of what we’re doing as a joke at all. But there is also that element of like, our band name’s stupid as fuck. So, that kind of, in a weird way, shields us a little bit from ever becoming too pretentious, because look at our fucking band name!
So I don’t know what being taken seriously is. I’m just like, so thankful and feel so blessed that we are where we are. And we’re at a point we’d never known in our wildest dreams. Like we went to Australia on our last album tour, and we were like, what the fuck are we doing here? Why are there people here, like, listening to us and coming to our shows? It’s incredible, an incredible journey, and it totally blows my mind at every stage. It’s wild.
DEATH HILARIOUS is out 4th April on Rocket Recordings. You pre-order your copy HERE.
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs are touring the UK this Spring. Get your tickets HERE.
APRIL
2nd Portsmouth, GB The Wedgewood Rooms
3rd Brighton, GB CHALK
4th London, GB Koko
5th Bristol, GB SW
7th Nottingham, GB The Rescue Rooms
8th Birmingham, GB The Castle & Falcon
9th Birkenhead, GB Future Yard
11th Manchester, GB New Century Hall
12th Leeds, GB Brudenell Social Club
13th Leeds, GB Brudenell Social Club
15th Edinburgh, GB La Belle Angele
16th Glasgow, GB Saint Luke’s
25th Newcastle Upon Tyne, GB Star and Shadow Cinema
26th Newcastle Upon Tyne, GB Star and Shadow Cinema
27th Newcastle Upon Tyne, GB Star and Shadow Cinema
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