Photos credit to Jonathan Dadds for ArcTanGent festival.
Dobbin: It’s been a couple months since you released Blossom. How you feeling about that record now?
Katie: I’m still pretty pleased with it. I tried not to listen to it too much before it came out, so I’m still pretty happy with it, and I’m really proud of it. Feedback has been really positive – critical acclaim, and as they like to say. Fans seem to be really into it. “Blossom” (the song) was a big risk when we put out first. And there’s a lot of people who were a bit, “Hmm, not sure about this”. Now it seems to be the song people enjoy the most live now, so that’s weird, but it’s really cool to see the people just enjoying all the Slice.
Dobbin: Earlier in the year you were touring with Boris. What was it like to meet them? Because they also one of my favourite bands.
Katie: They were legends. They were so nice. I’ve seen them a lot of times before – they were one of the first gigs me and Josh Andrews (Pupil Slicer drummer) went to see together. Touring with them was mad. They’re just so nice and down to earth and like, I don’t know, they’re legends of of the doom scene. If you “like drone metal” then it’s Sunn O))), Earth, and Boris, those are “the bands”. And yet they’re so nice, a massive laugh.
Dobbin: I also think that absolutely they’re fashion icons as well.
Katie: Oh, fashion icons. I met the guy that designs their clothes as well can see came in Stockholm. He was really nice. He plays in the band Toe, the Japanese post rock band. He’s the guy that designs their stage outfits. Everyone from that Japanese scene, seems just like an absolute legend. Atsuo is a legend every night, I’ve been learning new stage moves off him. He’s just doing vocals on that tour, just playing drums on one of the songs. And yet he’s one of the best frontmen alive.
Dobbin: I saw their sat at Desert Fest (2023) and they brought on a belly dancer, for this drone segment – it worked. Was she there at any other any of the other days?
Katie: She wasn’t there at any of the others. I think she’s Dylan from Earth’s ex-wife. It’s all interconnected… I’ve him before, and he was best friends with Kurt Cobain. The music scene is so small, you’re only one degree of separation away from anything. I’m friends with John from HEALTH, and he’s done a song with Trent Reznor. It’s weird, but it’s a really cool industry to be a part of – all the performers, musicians, PR people… everyone’s just so nice. The industry is just in a bad place because of streaming killing it. But you know, it do be like that.
Dobbin: We do “live in a society”.
Katie: We are “living in a society”, people.
Dobbin: Something else I see sometimes from Boris is that they are gamers, were they gaming on tour?
Katie: Wata had Switch out playing Splatoon every day up, up until Tears Of The Kingdom came out, then she was smashing that out. I didn’t download Tears Of The Kingdom on the way so I save it when I go home. I’ve got Wata’s friend code on Switch! And one of the guys from Frail Body, and someone from Chat Pile as well, not sure who. I’ve got John from HEALTH on Steam, and Backxwash. I need to get Sam from Palm Reader’s Steam.
Editors note: mild spoilers for Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye.
Dobbin: When you were doing interviews ahead of Blossom, you talk to a lot about how games had influenced it, as well as nihilist literature. One of the games you shouted out which was Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye – I had a very emotional response to that DLC.
Katie: You know that monologue on the song before “Dim Morning Light” (“Language of the Stars”)? That’s the dialogue from guy at the end of Echoes of the Eye. If you then complete the main game again, that’s what he says, about how our people could not deal with death and the unknown, I hope you’ll still accept me, and so on.
Dobbin: That’s blown my mind.
Katie: “No Temple” is a mostly a concept about Echoes of the Eye as well. “Flooded with light impure” – that’s the interloper coming. “There’s no temple any more”, that’s them burning the temples of the eyes.
Dobbin: Lore. When we did that music video, why didn’t we have antler outfits?
Katie: I don’t know. That would have been dope! There was no budget for any of that, so umbrella katana would have to do.
Editors note: spoiler free from now on.
Dobbin: You playing any games right now that you want to shout out?
Katie: Baldur’s Gate 3, of course, it’s fire. I’m replaying Dragon’s Dogma because I never finished the post game and DLC. Dragon’s Dogma goes hard, I needed to replay it before two comes out, and I’m having such a good time. It’s basically like the best game ever to wield, a great sword in. It just has one button, and you charge it up like 10 seconds, and then you go ba-doosh, and you kill everything in one hit.
Dobbin: There’s tough competition there.
Katie: I used to dual wield them in Dark Souls 2, with its dual wielding system. That was really good.
Dobbin: Your most viewed song on YouTube is “Wounds On My Skin”, 86,000 views, but you have another video with more views than that. Which is titled, “All Insanity moments in “SPEC OPS: THE LINE” (+Survival Ending)”, which has 312,000 views. How does it feel to have peaked so early?
Katie: I was 15 or 16 years old when I made that video. Yeah, basically, it’s over. And, because it has all the licenced songs in it is all, I can’t make any money off it. So, all those views for basically nothing, and then no one’s even watched any of the other things I’ve uploaded over time. I used to do “Let’s plays” without commentary, then I got bored of editing stuff, and got one or two parts in and just gave up and deleted them. So you know, I’ve basically ruined my career.
Dobbin: Oh well.
Katie: If you look at the streams, Mirrors is over a million, and Blossom is already over half million already. It’s doing numbers. I can’t wait for the second £500 from Spotify to come in.
Dobbin: Or, like, one plane ticket to America, or something
Katie: That’s not going to cover a plane ticket to America. It will cover one tour’s worth of strings. Pretty good.
Dobbin: You actually use fresh strings every performance? That’s so nice for your fans. They don’t know your sacrifices.
Katie: Yeah. It’s fucking effort to replace strings. If you don’t do that, you’ve got possibilities of string breaking which ruins a song, and it also just like it sounds a bit muddier. We struggle with muddy sound already because we’re tuned to A, so you need that brightness. Which is funny, given that Mirrors has a really dark guitar tone. The first mix we got back, the guitars sounded like Sectioned. I thought “This is sick, but it’s too much”. Then it ended up really fizzy, and the only thing they could do was to make it sound really dark. It was not perfect, but it was quite hard working remotely. It would be nice to do stuff with Pedram Valiani again in the future, now that he has a full studio up and running. For Blossom we went with Lewis Johns and we actually got to sit around with the tones. We managed to perfectly replicate tone from the Knocked Loose – A Tear in the Fabric of Life EP, it was so fun to play around with, but we needed to roll it back a bit as our stuff is more technical.
Dobbin: You had “Departure in Solitude” on the set list at ArcTanGent, was that your first performance of it?
Katie: No, we played it at Radar and Boomtown. We wanted to learn “The Song At Creation’s End” for this and we almost got there, but I wasn’t happy about where we got it to. I love that song and I really want it to be bang on when we do it, so hopefully it will be there for the Employed To Serve tour.
Pupil Slicer are joining Employed To Serve on their UK headline tour in October and November:
Wed, OCT 25: The Cluny 2, Newcastle Upon Tyne
Thu, OCT 26: Cathouse, Glasgow
Fri, OCT 27: The Key Club, Leeds
Sat, OCT 28: Gorilla, Manchester
Sun, OCT 29: The Craufurd Arms, Milton Keynes
Mon, OCT 30: Bodega, Nottingham
Tue, OCT 31: The Devil’s Dog Digbeth, Birmingham
Wed, NOV 1: Exchange, Bristol
Thu, NOV 2: Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff
Fri, NOV 3: Lafayette, London
Sat, NOV 4: Green Door Store, Brighton