It’s very easy to get destroyed by the world. That’s something that’s been bothering Pupil Slicer’s Kate Davies. On new album Fleshwork, they’re examining how easily people can be turned to hate, the uphill struggles for those with the least, and finding connection through music…
There are 434 unnamed audio clips buried deep in Kate Davies’ hard drive. They form a giant library of riffs, often jammed out in the dead time during soundcheck waiting for other people to do things.
Sometimes, when Kate trawls through that library, they stumble across great ideas they forget they even conceived. “We’re always cooking,” says Pupil Slicer's singer, guitarist and creative mastermind, dialling in on a Sunday afternoon in front of a Warhammer background – of course - after spending the day in their other job as a maths and physics tutor.
That creative fire burning away in the background helped to give them a more solid foundation for the Brit metallers' third album, Fleshwork. Kate notes that it was considerably easier to write than 2023’s 5/5-rated, genre-surfing epic Blossom, but then again, the bar was low. Thanks to Blossom’s intense, meticulous creative process, with the responsibilities of their then-job loaded on top, Kate consigned themself to bed for a month afterwards with autistic burnout. Meanwhile, while their previous era found them writing parts almost too hard to play, Fleshwork’s songs they find notably easier.
“There was a lot that there was jammed with just me and Josh [Andrews, drummer] trying out some riffs together in the practice room,” they say. “We go for a very vibe-based approach. We're writing the songs that we want to hear. We're not jamming something and then think, ‘Oh, we can't jam something like this, this doesn't fit.’ But at the same time, there is an element of trying to create a balanced album.”
Kate sees Fleshwork as Pupil Slicer’s most aggressive album yet, “more of a Converge record than a Dillinger record”, to quote their two most formative influences. It’s more streamlined than Blossom, thick with abyss-scraping riffs and the dread-inducing thrum of Luke Booth’s bass (which are a particular highlight), with plenty of the usual nerdy Easter eggs sprinkled in.
Opening track Heather nods to the character of the same name from the video game Silent Hill 3. There’s winks towards Final Fantasy and the manga Chainsaw Man. Listen closely to the first half of the chorus of Innocence, and you might even notice them tip their hat to Nine Inch Nails.
“Nothing exists that avoids having influences from other things,” points out Kate. “I used to be more self-conscious about it, but I'm like, ‘Well, it's still the art I'm making. I'm doing something different with those things, to make something that's completely different.’ I love finding things where I'm like, ‘Oh, this is what this other thing I liked was massively referencing!’”
Even more noticeable is their scalding sense of rage. This is, after all, the trio’s most unfiltered response to a world that seems truly fucked, where fascists grip the steering wheel and turn society in the opposite direction from progress. Kate took it as their opportunity to be more direct, partly because they now had the confidence to do so, and partly to meet fire with fire.
“There needs to be some kind of resistance against it, because the right-wing messaging is a lot more direct. There’s no subtlety around it,” they reason.
Fleshwork concerns itself, in unblinking fashion, with human cruelty. Within that, it studies the ways oppressive structures, from capitalism to government bodies, dehumanise people.
“Heather's about the authorities promising that they care about you as a human when they're really caring about you as a cog in their larger machine,” explains Kate. “Black Scrawl ended up being about humanity destroying itself. At the end of the day, it's just humans being cruel to other humans, seeing other humans as numbers. People die as a part of it.”
They also point to the insidious spread of misinformation that dehumanise marginalised groups: the myth of asylum seekers living it large in hotels, when they live off just £49 a week, and transphobia-fuelled moral panics paving the way for restrictive rules over public toilets.
The apex of this exploration is album closer Cenote, inspired by Kate helping a friend to appeal against the Department of Work & Pensions’ decision to cut their benefits, after incorrectly deeming them fit to work. Before this, they admit they were naive to the callousness of a system that shows little care for disabled people, with an extremely convoluted appeals process that seemed designed to make applicants give up.
“The thing that I find most upsetting about it is not that we've had to go through this process to try and sort it out, but the amount of people who also would have to go through the process that don't have anyone who can look into how it works,” they say. “If someone like that is completely alone and doesn't have the cognitive capacity or understanding to know what to do, they’re stuck. You look online and people are like, ‘I don't know what to do now. I can't work, I can't do these things. I can't leave the house, and I'm going to end up homeless, but I don't know what to do.’”
The least Kate can do through their music is provide a refuge from this hellishness.
“It's important to have stuff to bring people together and establish a community,” they say. “It’s a hard time being in the world for a lot of people, disabled people, neurodivergent people, people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community. If there’s something you can be hated for, someone's gonna hate you for it, it seems.”
Then again, they know some subsets of metal aren’t as safe as they could be.
“In the generic wider metal community, there is those racist, misogynist subcultures,” Kate says. “I want someone to feel comfortable listening to us if they're in a position where they’re like, ‘I don't know what bands I can listen to, because my favourite band might turn around and say something really bigoted.’ I like people to know they're in safe hands.”
Part of the reason they adopted the slogan Trans Inclusive Radical Hatred was that it was a way to turn away hateful people at the door. “I wanted a bolder statement that means if someone disagrees with being trans inclusive, they can then stop listening from that point.”
After all, Pupil Slicer are a band for whom like attracts like, their shows populated by a hugely queer, trans and neurodivergent audience, just like Kate. It means that they’ve come to be seen as someone those fans hugely identify with, a beacon of visibility in a world that otherwise can treat them with malice.
“I feel weird about it in that I don't really think about my position in the music industry,” they say, “or that I was being inspirational in any way to anyone. I don't like to think about myself that way. Someone came up to me at ArcTanGent and was like, ‘Thank you for championing non-binary hardcore, and being an inspiration.’ I didn't really know how to react to that, but I guess there aren't many bands with non-binary frontpeople.
“It’s nice to hear that it means stuff to people," they smile. "It’s cool to know that people are getting something like that from me, because I think that's why we do it. We make the music we want to make, and it seems like at least some people do really like it.”
Fleshwork is out now via Prosthetic. Pupil Slicer tour the UK with LLNN from Nov 25.
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