Lower Slaughter – Interview

The barnstorming noise rock four-piece, who have just released their third album on Human Worth, explore recording with their new lineup, the band’s history, and recommended listening from the first half of 2025.

Releasing two utterly visceral hardcore punk albums, starting with 2017’s What Big Eyes, the past five years have seen a period of upheaval for Lower Slaughter, amicably parting ways with vocalist Sinead Young and searching for a replacement before switching former bassist Barney Wakefield to vocal duties. As well as Wakefield’s varied and emotionally bracing vocals, this rearranged lineup – with new bassist James Gardiner – results in a leaner, often more experimental and hook-filled approach; a sturdy noise rock akin to genre classics like Flipper and contemporaries like Hey Colossus.

Their new album, Deep Living, evokes modern contemporaries of theirs such as Hey Colossus, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, and Part Chimp, smartly alternating between bludgeoning noise rock and smart post-punk. Their new vocalist and guitarist Jon Wood, discussed the writing and recording of their third album, settling into their new lineup.

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LTW: Are there any unreleased songs, secret or strange instruments, or covers which the average Lower Slaughter listener might be unaware of?

Barney: I don’t think we’ve ever done a cover version. With our second album, the last album we did with our previous singer, we tried an Aretha Franklin cover.

We did go to the studio thinking, “ah, we’ll do it anyway”. I’m quite into covers if there’s a theme – if there’s a tribute album compilation, or a gig that’s just covers. Chucking a cover into a setlist works for some bands, but I don’t think it would work for us. 

Jon: We managed to sneak a little bit of keyboard onto the new record, which I was about to say was the first time we’ve done so – but we actually got a Hammond organ on album two. Yeah, a little bit of Mellotron, a bit of Moog; producing the songs a bit more.

What stage of the band’s new incarnation were you at for last year’s Leeds gig, and was playing live a useful way to test the new lineup?

J: That was the first batch of gigs we did with James.

B: We were playing a mixture of songs we’d already played live, because that was the start of a three date tour. At that point they were still quite new, we hadn’t played lots of shows since James joined and I switched over to vocals. So when we played our first show with that lineup, they were all new songs, we didn’t keep any old songs from the previous records. In that sense, we were still road-testing the material at that time.

You also did an impression at that gig, where did that idea come from?

B: Unfortunately that wasn’t a one-off. My plan for that tour was to say that we’ve got merch for sale but offer it out to the audience by asking them “what celebrity voice would you like the merch described to you as?”, and see what happened each night. But I bottled it and went straight to my comfort blanket of Jools Holland, and I haven’t derailed from that since.

Did it take much trial and error to settle on your vocal style, or were there previous bands you drew from? 

B: I feel like I’m still working it out. I wasn’t doing vocals before this – I was just playing bass – so when I switched to vocals I decided that I wouldn’t write any lyrics until the music is complete. That’s the one main rule, because I’d rather be guided by what the other lads are bringing, rather than the other way around. 

Style-wise, I really tried to avoid shouting unless it’s actually necessary or complimenting the track. On the first track, there’s a part where it really builds and it makes sense to scream, and that particular song was influenced by recent things like Richard Dawson and a band called Owls. They formed from the ashes of another band called Cap ‘n’ Jazz, a pre-emo band – and one of their members went on to do American Football. The singer sort of screams, but in a way where it sounds like his voice his breaking. But it doesn’t sound like, ‘oh, my poor heart’, it’s more like he’s losing the will to keep talking. It’s this weird sort of careless scream, rather than emotional; it’s almost emotionless. 

With that opening song: there’s a song by Deftones called Hexagram, and it really does sound like his throat his throat is being pulled apart. It’s horrible. It’s really gross to listen to in a way, but it’s incredible. Every time we play that one, I try to go for that. You mentioned Pigs, who we played with about a month or two ago in Brighton, and one of my mates who was there said that particular song sounded like my voice was breaking, and I said, “great, that’s actually what I’m going for”. I actually want it to sound like it hurts. I don’t want it to hurt, I’m not seeking pain. It has to sound real, though. Suicide is a major influence: when he’s screaming, it’s not like a Nickelback song, ‘here’s the loud bit’; when he screams in Frankie Teardrop, you feel it and you believe it.

A 2017 interview with the band said that previous vocalist Sinead Young joined in 2016, shortly before your debut album’s release – who was on vocals before this?

J: Max Levy, who was great. Definitely had a scream. Quite a different vibe, really. It was similar musically, but also quite different – a bit sillier maybe.

B: When the band started it was just the three of us that it is now: me, Jon and Graham; it was a Pissed Jeans and Harvey Milk with AC/DC blueprint. Max was in the band for about a year and a half, and I don’t think we ever wrote any songs that were quiet or had any meandering bits, they were mostly just full-pelt bangers. 

When Sinead joined – and this isn’t a slight on Max – she had a wider range vocally, and I think we explored other sounds with that. We may well have done that anyway, but with Max leaving and Sinead joining we then evolved our sound naturally. Max joined six months into us being an instrumental band, and it was great, but it feels like so long ago now – it’s over a decade since then. When we started I honestly wouldn’t have thought we’d still be doing this band, mostly because we’ve all been in other bands before, played for a few years and petered out. You just play in different bands in a scene, so at the time it felt like another one of those. 

I’m guessing you didn’t imagine you’d become the singer either?

B: Initially, Jon asked me to be the singer, but I moved onto bass quite quickly. Me and Jon hadn’t played in a band together prior to that, but we’d been in bands separately that played a lot of shows together. Jon’s band before Slaughter was an instrumental band – we were on tour and I’d joined on vocals for a certain song each night where I’d improvise lyrics, just shout nonsense. It wasn’t that long after that, six months or so, that both our bands petered out around the same time. Jon said ‘I want to start a new band, but playing guitar, and you should sing’, because Jon was playing drums in that previous band. Then it changed to bass, probably because we just couldn’t find a bass player.

Even more than previous albums, there was a lot of variety in terms of the song lengths, keeping the album really well paced, especially with We Bring Power, The Bridge and The Shape of the Fire – what lead to this?

B: I think Graham, our drummer, decided on the final sequence. From those three particular songs, We Bring Power – which is a silly 30-second ditty with just myself and Graham, which we’ve never done before – was just a demo track Graham made and I recorded the vocals on my phone in my bedroom. Because of the way Wayne, who recorded the album, added this breakbeat drum at the end, it made sense for it to go immediately into another song, The Bridge, because it’s got a really quick start. And from that, quite full-throttle to go into a laidback one, Shape Of The Fire. I see that song as a palate cleanser. You wouldn’t put it on a mixtape to represent us, but it still serves the purpose of giving some breathing space, tempering the noise of it. 

Did the 7-minute closing track undergo much revision in the writing process?

J: That also that started with a riff idea. It was another one that took a while to find its feet. We left at least five minutes of outro on the cutting room floor, just from listening to it and figuring out where it should actually fade out.

B: With fade-outs – I think Ian MacKaye said this – the idea of a fade-out is whatever you’re hearing is meant to last forever, that’s the general notion of it. The solo, you came up with that the day of recording.

Have you written lyrics, or done any other form of writing, in the past?

B: I’ve written lyrics in other bands before. That was the part I was most excited about and less nervous about, when I became the vocalist. Because even when Sinead was close to leaving the band we had quite a lot of songs in the bag instrumentally, and I never thought I’d switch, but in the back of my head I had ideas of how certain songs would go lyrically. 

What was the process of forming a universal yet personal blend of lyrics from your own experiences alongside the topics such as political unrest?

That was the idea. A lyricist I love is Samuel Herring from Future Islands. His lyrics very much draw from personal feelings but he tries to translate them to a more universal state of mind, and that’s what I take inspiration from and try to do myself. There’s a couple of songs that are quite personal. But, generally speaking, if they start off personal they’ve morphed into ‘here’s how we might feel’. The last track, Deep Living, definitely started off as being about a personal experience. But the way it’s gone lyrically, it’s much more of an assessment on viewing life generally, rather than just me. What it is to be human, really, learning how to live. It doesn’t matter how old you get, we’re all still figuring that out. Things can be thrown at anyone, positive or negative, at any point and it can completely change your view or pace of life. 

What are your favourite recent releases from the UK underground?

B: Misha plays drums and they’re also in Pascagoula and Lambrini Girls, and they’ve released an album of really cool instrumental stuff. There’s another band called AAA Gripper, who released an album recently, and it’s members of Joey Fat, Sweet Williams, and Hey Colossus – they made a one-off album together, which was incredible.

Get your copy of Deep Living here.

Follow Lower Slaughter on social media.

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Interview by James Kilkenny. Read more of his Louder Than War articles here.