“This once desperate plea… becomes a demand.“
Welcome to In Conversation, our interview column where we pick the brains of artists on the cutting edge of music. Jack CG and Dobbin had the opportunity to chat to Dani Nightingale of Conjurer (and Curse These Metal Hands, for those in the know) in the wake of the band’s impending new album Unself. In this session they discussed a wide array of themes and inclusions that orbit the upcoming record, as well as live performances, other projects and particularly prosperous shout-outs. Cover photo by Konstancja Szwed.
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Jack: It’s fairly clear that even from the two singles (“Hang Them In Your Head”, “Let Us Live”) that have come out, you guys have aimed to tackle some very ‘quintessential, current day, 2025’ topics for this era – I’m very curious as to what sort of headspace fuelled the perspective shift from your previous work into something a lot more targeted and direct.
Dani: Well, Brady (Deeprose, Vocals / Guitar) has been putting this very well in that this album is very much a reaction to the last one (Páthos) for a multitude of reasons. For one: that album was written and recorded during the pandemic, it was all done by sending guitar profiles back-and-forth to one another – we couldn’t get in a room to hash out the songs. We got maybe one or two very quick practises in before going into the studio. There was just no time to do anything, there were barely any resources – it was a very DIY project; And it gave us a hell of a lot of stress! Even though we were proud when we came out of the studio, that we had done it – it was very much a thing of “we are never doing an album like that again!” and I love that record for how unwelcoming and impenetrable it is, but with this record we really wanted to do a 180 on it – whether that is in a lyrical approach, everything.
The first thing that I said to the band was “I want to demo things a lot more” like, I don’t want to do this back-and-forth emailing thing, I just doesn’t feel natural – I know it’s what we had to do, considering the circumstances but I wanted to be actually recording in a room with each other, discussing the songs and giving ourselves plenty of time to try out anything and everything that we could come up with – that was a big deal. When it came to the subject matter I really didn’t wanna do an album that was very ‘me-me-me’ focused – Páthos was very much introspective and internal, and very “get the fuck away from me” and with this record it was more, as much as songs are based on personal experiences, feelings and views of the world – it’s not about me, it’s not about us: it’s about all the other people out there that feel exactly the same. It’s an album that’s much more focused on connection, whereas the last one was about pushing people away, essentially.
Jack: I’d like to particularly zone in on particular songs, just to get your take on them since not everything is 100% personal, there are parts of this album that come from personal revelation and experience in recent years, from you in particular. “Let Us Live” is a very important song for right now based on both the individual and as a wider society, would you be able to expand on what makes that song so important to the band as a band and as an individual?
Dani: Pretty much within a year or so of us finishing the last album (Páthos) I was going through a pretty hefty personal change in my life, in particular it was realising that I was autistic; And on that journey I realised that my gender identity didn’t fit with what I was assigned at birth. So learning more about that and that there was a word for how I was feeling (that being non-binary), even though it wasn’t as big a revelation as the autism thing, it was still kind-of like “wow, I know who I am now – I’ve figured it out!” to a certain degree, anyway. I’ve always been interested in trans-rights ever since I first heard Against Me!’s 2014 album Transgender Dysphoria Blues, that really opened the door to trans rights, trans issues, trans stories – it’s just something I really really felt close to but didn’t really know why. I guess it was just because this was someone telling the world who they were ‘like it or lump it’ essentially. I was just really, really invested in Against Me!, Laura Jane Grace and eventually I was making friends with trans people and all sorts of people from all sorts of walks of life. As time went on and I was going through this big, massive change I realised that I didn’t agree with the identity I was given at birth, especially after the last album being so internal, with this record it was like “I’m gonna be me now!” – I’ve spent thirty-odd years of my life not knowing who or what the hell I am and I finally got to the point where I’m gonna be me and I’m gonna say what I feel about all these issues and situations that are going on right now.
I essentially wanted to write an anthem for all my friends, all my trans and non-binary friends – just wanted to plant my flag in the ground. Brady (Deeprose), at one point during the writing process for the album came up to me and was like “yeah, I’m really fucking sick of all this anti-trans rhetoric – do you wanna write a song about it?” and I was like “yeah, I’m already doin’ it!” so we realised that we were on the same wavelength with it all, it all just snowballed from there. The song “Let Us Live” was technically the first thing that was written for the album, the introduction anyway – we were in Tasmania right as Páthos came out and it was Noah (See, Drums)’s first official gig with us. We were sharing a room together and I think because at that time he was like “right, I’m in the band now: I can ask this question… have you got any material for the new album?” and I was like “We’ve just put this one out! Like, can you just–” and I showed him the intro to “Let Us Live” and immediately we were just kind-of like “yeah, this is different”. I know we have soft, slow, clean stuff – we’ve had that kind-of thing before but it just had a very different tone to it, a very different vibe to it.
That intro to the song feels more like a midwest emo thing to me in a way. The more we worked on it, the more ideas were thrown around, it just became this grand, epic thing and we didn’t really plan for it to be like that: we knew we wanted the song to be a clarion-call for trans people, but it just snowballed and snowballed and by the end of it there arena-rock sections and it just became this thing that, five years ago we wouldn’t have been able to write – I don’t think we’d have had the courage for it, I don’t think we’d have had the musical vocabulary to do it… it’s plain and simple we just wouldn’t have had the balls to do it! But now we have such a newfound level of confidence within ourselves to say “hey, this is what we feel: we’re not holding it back” which is kind-of what the whole album is about.
Jack: Something I wanted to zoom-in a little further on is the intro track to “Let Us Live” – “A Plea”, more specifically the sampling of Spanish senate Carla Antonelli’s “we will not go back to the margins” speech. I’m curious as to how that came about.
Dani: The song was already being written, we had so many fucking lyrics for the song… there were so many things that me and Brady (Deeprose) wanted to say and whittling them down, trying to get a cohesive throughline with the lyrics was quite difficult. There were points where it was like “I don’t wanna get rid of this verse or this line because it means so much, it says so much” – and Carla’s speech was making the rounds on social media, again both me and Brady came across it. I can’t remember if I sent it to him and he’d already seen it or what, but we were both fully aware of it. Brady had the idea of “I think we should put that speech over this interlude that we’ve been working on” which for a while we weren’t sure if that interlude (“A Plea”) was gonna make it onto the album, there was conversation of “no, we need to stack it with complete songs” and I was like “No, I fucking love this interlude and I really want to put this speech over it” I think it adds so much not just to our sonic-palette, not just to the album but it adds so much context to the song “Let Us Live” as well and I knew from the get-go I wanted “Let Us Live” to be the centerpiece of the album.
When we got into the studio we sent Joe Clayton (Pijn / Curse These Metal Hands, producer of Unself) the videos of the speech without all of the extravagant music behind it, because you know what TikTok creators are like… and he fit it into the interlude, it was just perfect – the speech says more than our song could, y’know? That speech was so impactful and heartbreaking and… important, we just wanted to put it on there and let everyone hear it. Even if you’re not a Spanish speaking person, you can feel the emotion in her voice, you can feel that she’s desperately… not even begging but demanding for her people’s rights, it just made perfect sense.
Funnily enough, we played in Spain recently and she came out to the show. We met and had dinner with her even though we don’t speak a lick of Spanish and she doesn’t speak a lick of English, we were just using phone-translators back-and-forth just discussing trans issues. Unfortunately when we debuted both “A Plea” and “Let Us Live” at the show our in-ears fucked up so the backing-tracks weren’t available at all. She was there ready to film the song like “oh my god! This is the song my speech is on!” and then– no speech! After the show she was just like “where was my speech??” – “we’re really sorry…!” It was gutting but it was amazing to meet her, she’s an incredible, incredible person and she’s doing so much for the trans community, the left community – that’s the story I guess!
Jack: To perhaps zoom back out a little bit and aim in on another couple of songs, the intro and outro tracks (“Unself” and “This World Is Not My Home”) were partially adapted from an old gospel hymn if I’m correct in saying? I’d love to hear how that came about.
Dani: They were fairly late additions to the album, when we were writing it I realised that all the songs were based on the self and just how in this day in age there are so many things stacked against us that actively chip away at our sense of self. Whether you’re talking about data harvesting just reducing people’s personalities and traits down to stuff that can be bought so you can peddle more shit at them and they can just buy more and “stay plugged in” and all that kind of stuff. Speaking of unpeople, actually: we were talking to them about their band name and we were like “so what does the word unpeople mean?” and they explained it to us and we were like “ah, that’s pretty cool!” – it was maybe half-way, two-thirds into the whole process of this album that I was like “I wonder if you can put ‘un’ before self, I wonder if that’s an actual word” and turns out it was, not a very common one but it is! And the three definitions that came up all fit perfectly with everything, I think just the word ‘self’ would have been far too vague of a title for the album and ‘Unself’ just added a layer of “ooh, okay!” to it.
Even though all the songs were based on this stuff, they were all quite separate from one-another – it’s not like there’s a running concept so much, there’s a running theme but not so much a concept and I discovered the song– it’s got so many different titles because it’s a century old song, tonnes of people have covered it, changed the title around, changed the lyrics around… but I think the most common version known to people is by Jim Reeves and it’s just called “I Can’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore” and I heard a cover of that song on a YouTube essay, Jacob Geller had done a video on Fear Of Depths – it’s the first thing that you hear on the video and it was covered by this guy called Ben Babbitt who did the soundtrack to the game Kentucky Route Zero. I’ve always been in love with folk and bits of country music, I just adored the song and the more I listened to it, the more I dug into it and learned it and played it to myself. I got so much comfort from it because of how despondent it was. I think ultimately, as has been pointed out to me before, it’s meant to be a kind-of “it doesn’t matter if things are so bad on this Earth, ‘cause in the next life they’ll be so much better!” but y’know, you read the lyrics “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through: my treasures and my hopes are placed beyond the blue” like, it kind-of sounds like a suicide song to me, and being a neurodivergent and queer person living in this capitalist society: I very much related to not wanting to be here anymore and this song was just always in my head throughout the whole writing process.
Then I got to thinking about how we’re gonna open and close this record and I loved the idea of opening with a more quiet, hopeful rendition of the song – it’s very true to its roots, just playing simple chords and stuff– and then it all just comes crashing down. Then you get the rest of the album which details all the reasons why someone like me would not feel at home in this world and then by the end of the album you’re totally out of breath, you’re totally desperate, the song takes on a minor key and it’s just screaming to the heavens “what the hell do I do with myself?” sort of thing. Those two songs were things I had been working on in secret, because I knew that, especially the intro, sending the guys a GuitarPro of that was not gonna translate: it’s not really a song it’s just a cathartic release. So it got to the point where we’re in the studio for pre-production and the guys didn’t really know what the vision for this intro was, they were like “can you just go and lay down the vocals, teach us what we need to play and we can then hear it for ourselves” and once we’d put it all together and we sat in the control room, we put in the feedback and the low drone and everything – everyone just kind-of sat back and went “oh… I see what you’re getting at now…”. Even though it’s like, two and a half minutes long I’m so, so proud of it, I’m totally in love with it and I think there’s no other way that the record could be kicked off and there’s no other way that the record could end really, it’s just the perfect bookend to me.
Jack: To be honest, I thought I might know the answer to this next question, but actually given what we’ve talked about: it could go either way. What is your favourite or most personal track that you hold most dear from the album?
Dani: It’s really difficult because my favourites change all the time but for very different reasons. In particular the sections of the album that are closest to me, I would say are “Let Us Live” and the last third, the last half of “All Apart”: which was an especially difficult one to track because it was the culmination of years and years of isolation and alienation because of a condition that until a few years ago I didn’t know I had. There were so many instances throughout my life that had question marks over them like “why did that happen? Why did things turn out that way? Why did this person react in that way? Why did I react in that way?” just things like that and they were all rooted back to being autistic and not having any idea about it. The way that song is structured, it starts out kind-of whimsical: I imagined it kind-of being like you’re brought into the world, it’s a new place and it’s kind-of scary but you’re told by your parents and your teachers that you can be capable of great things, that we should all accept each other’s differences, we can all get along, all this ‘lah-dee-dah’ kind-of stuff and then in practise it’s a completely different thing. For me a lot of the authority figures that were essentially supposed to nurture us into the world that we live in, they were kind-of holding me and others back – with one hand they would preach about how diversity is a wonderful thing and people think and behave in different ways, it’s all about empathy and understanding yet I was constantly punished for being how I am. I was constantly punished for thinking differently or communicating differently or not being able to communicate at all. I was very scared of social situations, I didn’t want to participate in things and would get punished for that, there were just all these situations that as a kid they make you not wanna bother with anyone, they make you wanna completely retreat and just keep to yourself. When social situations just always end up with you being either insulted or attacked or ostracized, it’s like “this ain’t a great way to start this life off!” y’know?
That last third of the song is essentially, the way I write songs: the music says everything that I want it to say so writing lyrics almost feels superfluous, it feels like writing subtitles to a song. That last third was just really, really difficult and all those years of feeling cast-out and ‘othered’ all just kind-of came out and I remember when we were recording the song Joe (Clayton, producer) was like “so we know this is a really heavy one, and it’s gonna require you to go to some horrible places to get the kind of performance that the song needs: are you comfortable with doing that?” and I was like “well, I live it every day so yeah, sure.. Let’s go”. I just remember when it got to that last third of the song, I was away from the mic just wandering around the live room, my voice was completely shot and I was just getting all of this out and just screaming from the pit of my soul. The first two-thirds of the song to me aren’t a party but there’s riffs, you can throw down to it– but that last part of the song is just harrowing to me and recording that thing was pretty intense, but when I listen back to it – even though it does make me feel sad, I feel so proud that I was able to get all of that out there, I was so proud that the section just replicates exactly how I’ve felt all this time. I’m proud that for one I’m playing it with my three best mates, that’s fuckin’ awesome – and just making art out of such a fucking horrible situation to grow up in is the best result that one can get from that. In short: “Let Us Live” and the end of “All Apart”.
Dobbin: The performances on the record are just career-best across the whole thing, maybe it’s also the production you did with Joe (Clayton) but you just didn’t leave anything behind. Tell me a bit about the process by which it came to be such a heavy album.
Dani: I think we definitely wanted things to be vulnerable, me and Brady (Deeprose) have gone on for years about how with the bands that we like and that we model ourselves after it’s not so much ‘metal music’ in the sense of constant d-beats and blasts beats, breakdowns and stuff like that. We like stuff that is emotionally heavy and when it comes to sonic heaviness: when a band is playing a riff or a section and you can hear all these tactile things like the pick scraping against the strings, you can hear the air from the cabs and all this kind-of stuff… When heaviness is more natural and organic it’s heavier to me. There are so many bands now that will be in drop-Z and it’s all gated to fuck, there’s so much processing on it – it’s like, okay you’re tuned like five steps lower than Sunn (O)))) but you are nowhere near as heavy, what’s going on there? It’s because Sunn just get in a room and turn their amps all the way up, it’s all about the atmosphere and the vibe and the space and the breathing room. That is something that me and Brady really, really wanted to capture because we felt with Páthos, even though it’s fairly fitting for it, it was just far too claustrophobic. There were things about the album that we wanted to be more spacious and have a bigger stereo image but it was just all kind-of… [mimmicks blasting noises]… and we wanted to correct that.
In terms of how the album sounds so heavy that is all Joe Clayton, he’s our dearest, dearest friend: we’ve known him for years, we’ve toured with him for years, we’re in a band together… he’s just the guy, he totally understands Conjurer inside and out, he’s the closest to a fifth member as you can get. At first we wondered if having someone so close to the band would be a detriment or not, it was like either he’s gonna ‘hundred percent nail the assignment or he’s gonna be too friendly to us, he’s just gonna do whatever we want to do and he’s not gonna be ‘studio daddy’ with us like he’s just gonna be like “yeah, cool! Whatever you guys wanna do!” but no, he one hundred percent understood the assignment. He understands the musical references, even for tiny little things like at the end of “All Apart” there’s this lone guitar line and I wanted some pads behind it, but I wanted them really cold and glassy and like Have A Nice Life, without even needing to have a big conversation with him about that he just was like “oh, ‘Guggenheim Wax Museum’ by Have A Nice Life: that’s what you want?” and you’re like “Yeah! Thank you Joe!”.
In terms of guitar tones, we gave ourselves so much time to work on guitar tones because on the last record (Páthos) it was like, I have my EVH 5150 – Brady has his ENGL Powerball: let’s record. There were no other amps, there was no time, there was no money – it was just “this is our live rig, let’s go” and this time, even though we gave ourselves tons of time for tone-hunting, within like a day or two Joe just got it. We wanted to get that earthy, organic rumbling sound but we’re aware that some of our songs need a bit more of that razor-sharp attack, so finding that middle-ground between a more modern-metal sound and something like Thou– he was just able to do that because he just knows, he knows and loves all the same influences as me and Noah, and Brady like he just gets it all. The bass tone on that thing is ridiculous and we made that a point as well, so many metal albums are like guitar is way up and bass is there… I guess… but this time the bass was just as important as everything else, it adds so much.
Jack: Speaking of Joe (Clayton), you guys have a tour coming up with Pijn and Death Goals (A1 support choice, by the way!) – Are there any surprises, any hints, any deep cuts for that tour that you might be able to share with us?
Dani: Other than we’re gonna be playing (as far as I’m aware) the whole new album, which just feels right like I know so many bands now will do an album in-full set, but with this new record all of us were just like “I just wanna play the whole thing”. I know people will want this song or that song from Mire or Páthos or whatever, but I just wanna play the whole record and I guess that’s the only ‘deep-cut’ thing that we’ve got going on really, no other surprises… as far as you know… All I’ll say is if you can get to Damnation (Festival) and Night Of Salvation you might be interested… that’s all I can say.
Jack: The last time that I caught you guys was when you supported Make Them Suffer at the O2 Academy Islington, in which it’s safe to say you guys stood out a little bit. It was a bit of a mixed bill on account of your inclusion. Do you guys thrive in a mixed bill environment or is it a bit intimidating?
Dani: It was a bit of both with that tour, because ultimately we love a mixed lineup: I grew up going to gigs where it’s like you go and see Aborted and every band supporting has the same logo and the same sound, death metal squiggles all the way down the page and it’s like okay… great. We’ve always wanted more varied lineups, we’ve always wanted to pick bands that both make sense on the lineup but are also a bit of a surprise because ultimately mixed lineups aren’t gonna catch on unless people keep doing them. I remember going to see Clutch years and years and years ago, and the support band were just Baby-Clutch so it was just like “okay, I’m gonna go outside: I don’t need to see Clutch but not as good” so I’d much rather give bands that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be on the lineup a looking. We definitely wanted to make a point this time around because ultimately metal is saturated with (no offense to anyone) cis white guys. So we wanted to get some trans and non-binary people on there, some variety. We’ve wanted to tour with Pijn again ever since they took us out on our first European tour back in 2018, so it’s gonna be a proper mates-fest which I’m super excited about.
Jack: Now I’ve got a bit of a left-field one for you, but Curse These Metal Hands is a name that’s thrown around a little bit, especially since you guys come back every now and then to do an ArcTanGent set. As somebody who really likes that EP an unhealthy amount, I’m particularly curious to hear, even if it’s just a flat-out ‘no’ – is there a future in which Curse These Metal Hands puts out any more studio work?
Dani: Yes. There is new Curse These stuff, we’ve had this song called “Auburn” that I wrote years ago. When Jan (Krause, ex-drummer) left Conjurer I was somewhat terrified because as much as we all contribute to songwriting to varying degrees and in different arenas of songwriting: Jan was my songwriting partner, I’ve never felt like I was very good with arranging and structuring, and that’s where Jan would step in. So when he left I was pretty terrified and was like “oh god, we’ve gotta do another album… how the hell am I gonna approach this?” and it was actually writing this new Curse These song that helped me grow my confidence. It was the first song I had written all by myself with no input from anyone, it sounds like Christmas as Brady (Deeprose) always says.
We’ve played it at the last two ArcTanGents, we’ve opened with it so it’s been around for a fair few years now and we still haven’t recorded it. Admittedly I think Joe (Clayton) recorded the drum parts with Jon (Vernon) from Pijn a little while ago but getting us all up there to finish it has been a pain in the arse and there’s so much instrumentation on that song. There are jingle bells, there’s triangle, there’s banjo, there’s twelve-string, there’s all sorts of stuff… I just loaded it up. You can tell it was written by someone just sat on their laptop for years and years just going “what if we add harmonising harps to it?” so I’ve made that an issue for myself, getting the thing finished. It will be released, I promise it’ll be released, we never wanna promise that there’ll be an album or another EP because ultimately Curse These is like a holiday band. When Pijn and Conjurer aren’t doing anything it’s like “okay let’s see if we can get some Curse These stuff done” – and Joe is now super busy with Floodlit Recordings, we’re super busy with this new album coming out so people will have to wait a while for any Curse These stuff, but it will happen. I don’t think we’re ever gonna get to the point where we’re like “oh, we’re just not gonna bother with it anymore: it was a silly little thing” we love it and the band exists because we love it.
Jack: As we’re winding down things just a little bit here, we should ask: aside from the tour and the album coming out, is there anything coming up into the new year for you?
Dani: We’re just hoping to get the hell out there, we wanna see Australia again, we wanna see Japan and South America for the first time. We just wanna bring this album to as many people as possible because we’ve been playing “There Is No Warmth” from it since that Make Them Suffer tour earlier this year, we’ve started been playing “Hang Them In Your Head” since that came out – we played “A Plea” and “Let Us Live” for one gig, that’s in the set now. We’ve been eeking the songs out more than we expected, on the last album (Páthos) we started playing “It Dwells” live in 2021, it blows my mind that we finished recording Páthos at the end of 2020 and it didn’t come out until summer 2022. This time I’m itching way more to play these new songs and it’s only been five months since we finished recording it. Usually when you premiere a new song you feel a bit nervous but they’ve just felt so natural from the get-go.
I don’t think there’s anything fully locked in yet for next year, it’s very much just getting all the offers in and such. I’m super, super stoked to get out there and share this music with everyone because I’m tired of sitting on it now, I know it’s only been five months but I’m tired of sitting on it – I just want everyone else to have it now.
Jack: Is there anything, any band, anybody, any person, any conceivable thing in the known universe that you’d like to shout-out and give the spotlight to?
Dani: With being in the band, I end up missing out on a lot of very, very cool gigs because we’ll be out on tour. I managed to get up to Manchester at the beginning of this month to see Agriculture at the White Hotel and they were supported by a band called Machuka who are one of the most incredible live bands I’ve ever seen. I believe they’re from Berlin, the singer’s Ukrainian: they are beautiful, lovely, lovely people writing incredibly harrowing and affecting music. The way I described it to Brady (Deeprose) was that they are like black metal Pijn. They were just fuckin’ amazing so I really, really wanna shout out both those bands but especially Machuka.
Many thanks to Dani for chatting with us on Friday, September 25th. For the full conversation with more details on all of the above, check out the podcast on your favourite platform. Conjurer’s new album, Unself will be released through Nuclear Blast Records on October 24th and can be pre-ordered here. You can also check out our review of the album here.