Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. This week, Joe and Dobbin spoke with Death Goals to discuss their upcoming record, influences, performances, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor-viewing mishaps.
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Dobbin: What messages you want to get across on this record?
Harry: I believe that with our first album, we never really had a specific goal in mind, it was more of an experiment to see if we could write a full album. Luckily, people enjoyed it, which was lovely. However, when Prosthetic [Records] contacted us, it was a great opportunity for us to write another album with a clear focus and mission. We had hinted at certain themes and explored our queerness in our previous work, so we decided to delve deeper into those aspects and fully embrace them in our new album.
We wanted to showcase the full range of emotions that come with being queer, rather than just focusing on the negative aspects. We intentionally wrote about the joy and melancholy that can come with being queer. While we didn’t necessarily set out to write happy or sad songs, we were deliberate in our focus on queerness and how it informs our perspectives and experiences.
George: Additionally, we felt that we had been given a platform to speak about what it’s like to be queer, and we wanted to take advantage of that opportunity. Rather than just skimming over the surface of the issues, we wanted to share our individual and collective experiences and opinions. It was important for us to have our own voices and not rely on an umbrella collective to speak for us. We recognize that everyone’s experience with queerness is different, and we wanted to share our unique perspectives and highlight the positives as well as the difficulties.
Dobbin: What you’re saying on this record is like, “Yeah, it sucks, but it’s great too.”
Harry: I’ve never more loudly and proudly declared that I am in this current form, which means that I am also very aware that we are living in one of the worst ongoing crises for queer and trans people. Almost on a daily basis, every paper I read has something about banning trans kids from schools or constantly going over trans people’s rights. It’s a fucking thing we’re having to fight over, and it’s constant. It’s not just in politics, but even within the queer community itself. I was thinking about this today – I’ve engaged with queer people who don’t have the same opinions as me on people or any part of the community, and it always baffles me. We should be a community who are so together. We’ve accomplished so much, and yet we’re still massively fighting and divided. But then there is joy, like, I’ve gone to so many amazing queer spaces currently, where there is always a sense of community.
George: I guess this kind of comes from a, not political, but kind of scene-driven movement of people who will only look at the negative things that are said about it; rather than going like us, talking about being queer does not mean that the only queer thing about us is battling for queer acceptance and things like that. Actually, we enjoy being queer. We enjoy being people who live within this space, and that needs to be spoken about, or in our case, sung about. It needs to be communicated in a way that’s like, “We’re not just fighting. We appreciate being part of a community, and we love being ourselves within that community.” That’s one of the massive things I think that this record really celebrates. We can be ourselves at the same time as fighting for those who do not get to be themselves on a daily basis.
Dobbin: From what you describe, it really sounds like you went all in on working on this record. And I think that shows not not just in what we were just discussing, but even in its length. Your first LP was 20 minutes. This one’s 30. And for a band like you that’s like, a prog album, you know.
Harry: I’ve lost all cred. We’re writing songs that are three or four minutes now – I’ve lost all powerviolence, all grind cred! We’re officially fake-grind. We’re gonna start writing seven minute long songs…
Dobbin: I’d love that, to be fair.
George: We’ll do it. I’d love that so much.
Harry: Grog has been campaigning for longer songs for ages now…
Dobbin: Well, even if people think you are slowing it down, you have another single out, right? “Year of the Guillotine” is a minute long. If anyone thinks that the stuff they’ve heard from this record is too melodic or something…
George: I think the thing that’s so important with this record is that I really wanted it to be something where people wouldn’t listen to the record and go, “Okay, that’s what they sound like.” I wanted people to be like, “This is what this album sounds like,” and they could go in any single direction, and people would really appreciate our work. At this point, it’s not a case of, for me anyway, joining Death Goals years after the band started. It’s more about joining the band, doing our first record, and then going into this record where we really worked together and brought the things that we both individually liked into one cohesive thing. I wanted to make sure that we always had a space to expand what we wanted to do. We could do anything after this for the first time as well.
Harry: The first album already explored lots of different sounds, even if it was within a hardcore realm. It all had that stamp on it, but now we feel more confident. We can push this even further. It still sounds like Death Goals, massively. Nothing is too far out, like, “Oh, there’s like a drip like house beat, whatever.” But it’s varied enough. It’s still exploring and enabling us to push into fields where we can go, “Okay, cool. We can go more heavy. We can explore different sounds.” I always get bored very easily.
George: I think it doesn’t make us an “insert genre here” band. It makes us Death Goals, and we could write an EP that is entirely a black metal record, and then we could write something else that sounds like a pop record. For us, it is so important to be within that realm, because at the end of the day, it will always be Death Goals. That comes from instrumentals, but also from a lyrical basis, talking a lot about our queer standpoint. We will always talk about that, it’s just up to us how we interpret that vibe. If we want to make something that sounds like Carly Rae Jepsen, why can’t we do that? That was really a massive part of writing this record, going, “Let’s make sure that we write something that is the blueprint of us as a band, as individuals, and as a duo.” Rather than being like, “Well, if you write something that has Knocked Loose riffs, we’re gonna get in with the hardcore crowd and the breakdown crowd, so we don’t want to do that.” We want to make sure that we are always able to just do what we want to do. And that is the forefront of everything.
Dobbin: I made a note of my favourite breakdown, which is “I Wouldn’t Be Caught Dead (Taking A Bullet For You)“.
Harry: Really, I’m so glad you chose a favorite breakdown. That’s possibly the best feedback we’ve had so far.
George: It was so funny because I remember we were doing pre-production and I was going through the track with Harry, and he was like, “Where’s the breakdown?” And I was like, “No, no, no. The chorus is one of the breakdowns, but then we’re going to get to the end of the song and do another one. How is that?” And that is again, one of my favorite breakdowns from the whole record. I listen to it and I’m like, ‘I wish I wasn’t having to play it. I wish I could be in the crowd and mosh.“
Harry: It’s also one of the most ignorant breakdowns, proper UK hardcore. This is a beatdown riff, we don’t get to do that often. Like maybe on, like, “Headache” from the first album. Like, “dun dun dun dun.” We don’t get to do that often.
Dobbin: Another one that I thought was fantastic was “Faux Macho”. You’ve got a really lovely video out for that which really captures that queer joy whilst being a fun bop.
George: It was really weird, wasn’t it? Like, I remember Harry and I talking and having a kind of idea of what we wanted the singles to be. There was almost a moment to take a step back and be like, ‘What are people thinking Death Goals is now, and what do we want? What do we want people to think Death Goals is going forward?” And “Faux Macho” really encapsulated all of that. And I think it was the single that was like, ‘Okay, we picked this song. What is the video going to be like?‘ Rather than being like, ‘Okay, how are people going to respond to this being a single?‘ So how do we really creatively show ourselves within a two and a half, three-minute-long window, where we’re on a metal label, and we’re gonna come forward with our first single on the label being this poppy, weird, very, very queer-centric track? Like, how do we almost allow ourselves to be ourselves? And I mean, I love it. I love the track. I love the video.
Harry: Even before we went to the label about singles, we were discussing what we’ve had for ages. I recall “…Bullet…” was going to be the single, but you wanted that one desperately. I was like, I don’t know, man. I’m not sure about it! But “Faux” made so much sense because it sounds like the album. This album is way more melodic, but it’s also way weirder. In songwriting as well, that song encapsulated everything I personally wanted to portray with this album and what I wanted. As for the video, David [Gregory] organized the whole thing, and everyone who was in the video, so many of our friends, and friends we’ve made from playing shows, just amazing people who gave up their time to come and dance and get covered in slime and whatever. Usually, we just have glossy little videos, so it was nice to have some budget to make a cool-looking poppy video, which is what the vibe wanted and needed.
Dobbin: So the other kind of Death Goals staple is funny track names. And I think the funniest track name is the first track, “Genderless Clones of Gameshow Hosts”. Can you give me the story behind that?
Harry: “I just love silly long emo song titles. I have a list on my phone, which is just full of them because you never know when you’re gonna need them. Some of them are truly ridiculous, and some of them are usable. There’s a good segmented portion of usable and silly ones. We needed a title for this song, and I thought the whole song is about gender dysphoria, and the whole album is going to be quite genderless and all about queerness. I was just walking home trying to figure out what is a good sentence to fit the word ‘genderless’ into, and ‘Genderless Clones of Gameshow Hosts‘ just came together and had a nice flow to it. Then I got imagery of the show Patti McGuinness did, ‘Take Me Out,’ with hairless, yucky clones of Patti McGuinness, all mannequin smooth. I was like, yeah, that’s fucking gross. Let’s do that.
Dobbin: You have both been doing vocals in Death Goals the whole time, but on this record you’re sharing the vocals much more. Is that right?
Harry: 100% – we wrote loads more with that in mind. On “The Horrible…” it was like “Harry is the singer and Grog will do some bits”, but then it came to “Exit Wounds“, and Grog was going to do more stuff, because those were your lyrics. And I love bands with multiple vocalists, especially when vocalists sound different, like Mastodon are a fucking amazing example. They all sound different but compliment each other perfectly. Or like Knocked Loose – Issac and Brian sound so different. On this one we had loads more songs where we could do that. So in P.A.N.S.Y., the whole back and forth section is a really cool way aid the narrative of the song, with these two people in a relationship. But also,it sounds cool, it’s nice to do live. There’s so many top tier Grog vocals on this one, just great ‘hard man’ voice. You really stepped up on the vocal front.
George: We used to play in a powerviolence band where Harry played drums and did a lot of backing vocals, and I was the main vocalist. Through that, we learned that we had very different vocal styles, which took us in to this record where I have a very deep and mundane voice, which works really great with Harry. Harry, being the incredible vocalist that they are, could do the highs, and I can do the lower, more “speaky” post punk vocals, so why don’t we juxtapose those vocals against one another? Frankly, nobody else is doing that.
Dobbin: Were there any new influences you brought in on this one? And was there anything that you haven’t been able to bring in yet? I mean this in a really wide sense, like any media such as movies, video games, books, etc. I would love to hear what a band’s favorite video game is, to be honest!
Harry: Is it bad that the last game I played was Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag? I just liked being a pirate.
George: Ocarina of Time is my through and through favourite. I’ve been playing Powerwash Simulator recently.
Harry: That’s a real hardcore gamer’s answer right there!
George: My all-time favorite band is Radiohead. I have to say that. But we both have a lot of influences. If you listen to “The Horrible and the Miserable,” you can hear our heavy influences. But on this record, you can hear that we both love post-punk. A lot of “The Horrible and the Miserable” was instrumentally written by Harry, and I wrote a large portion of the lyrics. But on this record, you can hear that we both really went in lyrically. A huge part of that is the fact that we both love Radiohead! Because it makes you think about every single line of every song being meaningful, not just on making the breakdown sick, or the section instrumentally sick, instead, does this set of words make sense with the guitar, or the drums here. Radiohead was a huge influence here.
Harry: Birds in Row were a huge influence on my guitar playing on this record, using the guitar in ways that it shouldn’t be used. For example, in “Death Goals In Cursive“, I put a ring modulator and a reverse delay on my Jazzmaster and played behind the bridge. I love being creative with sounds. I love that stuff. Also, I want to use those dance drums – last night, I saw God Alone, who are also on Prosthetic [Records], and they were unbelievable. They do dance drums so well. I would love to use a lot of dancey, fun, catchy drum hooks. And I love using drums as instruments, like in a lot of Idles‘ music, where the whole song is based on these rhythm. Obviously, George would hate that, because it’s really tiring, but we tried to do a little bit of that on “Loveless“. But I’d like to go further with that, and have more playing around with the drums musically, while guitars do not less, but more abstract sounds. We love post-rock and black metal stuff, like Portrayal of Guilt – their way of writing songs is really interesting, and I can see some of that leaking into our music. We also love hyper pop, and artists like 100 Gecs and Shygirl. We have a huge playlist of different genres when we’re writing an album, which includes some obvious stuff like Norma Jean. I would love to do more dancey and fun stuff, but still have that uncomfortable and gross feeling when listening to it. There’s a band called the Illuminati Hotties with a song that has discord stabs, and then goes into a Beach Boys-like chorus. We could do something like that. More silliness, experimentation, and not limiting ourselves. Maybe we’ll do a concept album about a play or something…
Dobbin: You do have an album release gig at New Cross on the 5th May. It’s going to be a stacked night because you’ve got four other bands – Shooting Daggers, Vicarage, Candescent AD, and Closed Hands. I haven’t done my homework yet…
Harry: Right, do you want me to give you a rundown on the bands? Closed Hands is dirty, rotten, screamo, with some hardcore-esque riffage in them, bangin’. Candescant AD are prime 2003 metalcore, gnarly…
George: They’re one of my fucking favorite UK bands at the moment. I love them so much. Our press agent is the vocalist, and every time I see him, it really pisses me off, man, because he plays in one of the hardest fucking bands. Every time I email him some stupid shit for us, I feel really bad because, like, I’m moshed to your band. It’s like Poison the Well, 18 Visions, dischords galore.
Harry: And then we have Vicarage. We met them at Loveday in Manchester, and they’re like British Gaza – Cult Leader-esque, super off-kilter mathcore. But then vocalist is doing Suicide Silence-like deathcore vocals. The range on the geez is unbelievable. So they’re bangin’, and they’re going to show us up every night of the tour. And then we have Shooting Daggers, in my view, they should be one of the next big breakout things coming out of the UK, like Heriot. They are so good. They write such fucking amazing hardcore, and they’re just the best bunch of them/they legends. We’ve been playing shows with them for fucking time, and they’re just the best. Real Life are putting on all the best hardcore shows in London right now, so shout out to Theo, shout out to New Cross. Buy a goddamn ticket, please.
Dobbin: What I like about your discography now is that you’ve got these two records that both sound like they’re brilliantly produced with loads of attention to detail. With bands, you can sometimes have production quality that gradually rises, but with “The Horrible and the Miserable,” you’re already at an amazing level. Now these two records sounds like they match. I think that’s really great because you can playlist everything in your own order.
Harry: It’s cohesive, that’s a great take. I’ve never heard that before. That’s all Tom Hill. He’s the reason we sound like a real band.
George: After we did “The Horrible and the Miserable” with him, and we knew we were doing a second record, it was kind of a no-brainer that we were gonna go to Tom. As two individuals, we are very scatty. Between the two of us, we always know what we’re doing, and as soon as you bring a third party into that, it’s very difficult to get involved in the process. Because the way that Harry and I communicate, it’s almost like another language, a mostly bullshit language. Having Tom in that process, he’s a rock. [We told him] “Okay, cool, do you want to make another record with us, but also this time around we have so much more pressure because we have a label now? Do you want to be a part of that?” And him coming on board and doing it just made the process of this whole record just, I think, really what it is. And the same thing of us doing pre-production for the first time ever. We did “The Horrible…” in our separate bedrooms, basically on the same road in our hometown because we live like five minutes from each other. But during lockdown, sending ideas to each other, not being able to see each other in person, and then going from that to being able to do pre-production with one of our very close friends, Kieran, and sitting in a studio together for five days, and writing a record and then taking it back to Tom and being like, “Hey, man, does this make sense? Like in a week?” It just really made this record what it is, because it made every weird, nonsense idea we had into cohesive “Death Goals“.
Harry: He’s very good at reining us in, without being a killjoy. He’s not cracking the whip so much. He’s like, “No, you can play that. But you don’t need to play that riff twice”, or “cut that section”,. And I think as a producer, he did a fucking amazing job with us. I couldn’t recommend him enough.
George: I think we’re very, I guess the word is, protective. We’re very protective over our ideas and what we want things to be like. And it was never a case of him having an idea and trying to put it into place as a producer.
Dobbin: You are playing at ArcTangent on Friday, how do you feel about that?
Harry: We just put out a tweet today because Yourcondenameis:milo are playing, which is one of Georg‘s favourite bands of all time. Deafheaven literally just liked that tweet. That’s one of our other favourite bands. Obviously, Converge is amazing. ’68 – I’m a huge Josh Scogin fanatic, so I’m gassed for them. And Devin just got announced. The lineup is so stacked and always is. This will be my first ArcTangent, and I’m so excited to go there.
George: My first ArcTangent I was 20, which was the Dillinger Escape Plan final year, the last UK show that they did, and I’ve gone ever since. Everyone has their festival and ArcTangent is mine. It’s awesome being on it this year with the lineup being just as amazing as it is. My favourite album is Sunbather by Deafheaven. It’s really funny looking at the lineup and being like: “who’s playing the day before us, so I can’t get too drunk, but I can enjoy”.
Harry: I’m going to have to behave so much during Converge! Then Birds in Row, Svalbard, A-Tota-So who are sick, Chalk Hands who are the homies… Chat Pile… Chinese Football; like Empire State Bastard. Great fun! Do you want to see Biffy Clyro with Dave Lombardo? Yes, please, I do, very much…
Many thanks to Death Goals for recording this with us on the eve of the Easter weekend. You can catch them on the upcoming UK tour at various dates and read our review of A Garden Of Dead Flowers here.