** Plus ** THE BEST OF 2020 featuring... Poppy All Time Low Creeper Enter Shikari Code Orange + loads more
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The Dirty Nil Palm Reader Seahaven
T H E
S M A S H I N G
P U M P K I N S
PURENOISESTOREUK.COM
PURENOISE.NET
HALO OF HURT
NEW ALBUM OUT NOW
DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021 Issue 61 RIOT 4. THE DIRTY NIL 8. SEAHAVEN 10. PALM READER ABOUT TO BREAK 2021 16. KENNYHOOPLA 20. HOT MILK 22. MEET ME @ THE ALTAR 24. PHEM FEATURES 26. THE SMASHING PUMPKINS THE BEST OF 2020 36. POPPY 40. LOATHE 42. ENTER SHIKARI 44. ALL TIME LOW 48. CREEPER 52. STAND ATLANTIC 56. CODE ORANGE 60. NOVA TWINS 63. ALBUMS OF THE YEAR REVIEWS 64. YUNGBLUD 64. GRANDSON TEENAGE KICKS 66. YOURS TRULY
Upset Editor Stephen Ackroyd Deputy Editor Victoria Sinden Associate Editor Ali Shutler Scribblers Aleksandra Brzezicka, Alexander Bradley, Dan Harrison, Jessica Goodman, Kelsey McClure, Rob Mair, Sam Taylor, Steven Loftin, Tyler Damara Kelly Snappers Andy Ford, Dylan Caderao, Lindsey Byrnes, Sam Tomlinson, Sarah Louise Bennett, Tom Brooker P U B L I S H E D F RO M
W E LCO M E TOT H E B U N K E R.CO M U N I T 10, 23 G RA N G E RO A D, H A S T I N G S, T N34 2R L
All material copyright (c). All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of The Bunker Publishing Ltd. Disclaimer: While every effort is made to ensure the information in this magazine is correct, changes can occur which affect the accuracy of copy, for which The Bunker Publishing Ltd holds no responsibility. The opinions of the contributors do not necessarily bear a relation to those of Dork or its staff and we disclaim liability for those impressions. Distributed nationally.
HELLO. We’ve made it. All the trauma, the solitude, the loss of things we previously took for granted. Finally, 2020 is coming to a close - and while that’s just a number on a calendar, hope is also in sight that soon, maybe, life might return to normal. So, with that in mind, we’ve put together a year end issue that looks both backwards and forwards, celebrating rock music in all its forms. From our legendary cover stars - The Smashing Pumpkins (yes, that’s one off the bucket list right there), through
to a Best of list featuring so many of our favourite artists, it’s a star studded edition. More than that, though, we’ve also brought together some of our favourite new acts we think will make 2021 one of the brightest, most positive years in ages. Fingers crossed, eh?
S tephen
Editor / @stephenackroyd Upset 3
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THIS MONTH IN ROCK
Everything you need to know about Seahaven’s new album ‘Halo of Hurt’, from the band themselves. p.8
EVERYTHING HAPPENING IN ROCK
FUCK A Words: Steven Loftin. Photos: Sam Tomlinson.
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Palm Reader vocalist Josh Mckeown tells us about how their new record is geared towards trying to help those in need. p.10
ART
Recorded as the world went a little nuts, The Dirty Nil’s third album is a triumph against the odds. But then did we expect anything else? No. Not really. Vocalist Luke Bentham explains all. Upset 5
SLEEP
Photos: Andy Ford.
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PLESS Following a brief, unexpected delay after a last-minute label swap to Church Road Records - co-run by Sammy Urwin and Justine Jones from metal heavyweights Employed To Serve owing to Holy Roar’s implosion, Palm Reader’s new album ‘Sleepless’ has arrived. It’s an ambitious record that doesn’t shy away from hefty topics like loss and toxic masculinity, via the band’s unique brand of gutsy hardcore.
Vocalist Josh Mckeown tells us about how their new record is geared towards trying to help those in need... after he’s finished unloading the dishwasher, of course. Hi Josh, what are you up to today? Hey! It’s 6.48am, so far I’ve had a cup of tea, some breakfast, fed the dog and unloaded the dishwasher. I used to hate early mornings, but I’ve learnt to appreciate this part of my day. This year’s been a bit
much, hasn’t it - how are you all doing? A bit much? Yeah, I’d say it’s been exactly that and then the rest. Despite everything that’s been thrown at us as people and as a band, we’re all doing well. Thanks for asking. We’ve been lucky enough to have something to work towards, and I think that’s really helped. Have you picked up any new lockdown skills? Perfected the art of sourdough or banana bread, for example? I haven’t picked up any of the skills that seemed
to be particularly popular during lockdown earlier this year. But I did spend a lot of time teaching myself the intricacies of Logic and developing my songwriting skills. Also, day drinking. We all perfected that skill. Was the album created during the year, or was it all done and dusted before the mess of 2020 kicked in? The bulk of ‘Sleepless’ was written in the latter half of 2019, and we recorded it through January 2020. So we were fortunate enough to have it all recorded before ‘the mess’. We were Upset 11
ABOUT TO BREAK 2021
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ABOUT TO BREAK 2021
New year. New music. New names. After twelve weird, not so wonderful months, there’s a lot riding on 2021. Thankfully, there’s also a lot to get excited about. Over the next few pages, we’ll introduce you to some of them.
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COVER STORY
SMASHING HITS.
THE SMASHING PUMPKINS
THE SMASHING PUMPKINS ARE AN INSTITUTION. BACK WITH ‘CYR’ - THEIR FIRST ALBUM IN OVER TWENTY YEARS TO FEATURE ICONIC FRONTMAN BILLY CORGAN, GUITARIST JAMES IHA AND DRUMMER JIMMY CHAMBERLIN - THEY STILL HAVE SOMETHING TO PROVE. WORDS: ALI SHUTLER. PHOTOS: JONATHAN WEINER, LINDA STRAWBERRY
THE BEST OF 2020
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THE BEST OF 2020
2020 HAS BEEN A WEIRD YEAR. THAT DOESN’T MEAN IT’S BEEN WITHOUT HIGHLIGHTS, THOUGH. SOME OF OUR FAVOURITE ARTISTS HAVE RELEASED SOME AMAZING RECORDS, SO WE CALLED THEM UP TO CELEBRATE...
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THE BEST OF 2020
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Words: Aleksandra Brzezicka. Photos: Sarah Louise Bennett.
Before 2020 took its toll, highlighting the darkest spots in mindsets of modern societies and their governments, there was someone stockpiling anger - all to let it out in a fire-fuelled metal-pop hybrid. Welcome to the evolved Poppy. The rebel, the revenger and the mastermind behind one of the fiercest albums of the year, ‘I Disagree’. There’s no rest for the wicked, and if you’re gonna play games with the oppressor, play destroy. “My album came out at the beginning of the year so, it seemed to be an album that one can say predicted the future,” Poppy shares as if the world was subjected to her grander-than-life plan. As the parts of the puzzles were coming together, one by one. Perhaps they are. It’s Poppy, after all. An heiress of a creepy-met-kawaii viral YouTube past. A bubblegum pop cyborg-princess from the internet. Though she would rather stay on the surface than explain and dig in her heritage, the Poppy spectacle has always been a complex one, in a true Bowiesque fashion. “It’s an artist’s job to continue to reinvent themself with every release and every album,” she reasons. Now that ‘I Disagree’-era’s Poppy is almost one-year-old, it’s time to evaluate the progress and prepare for an update. “I feel that with the release of the album, it’s been a lot
more growth than just people that like my music and put up with me, and that’s exciting. You can only hope that your music, as an artist, reaches more and more people every time you’re releasing an album. I feel like I did that with ‘I Disagree’.” Poppy’s joining the dark side was long-awaited by fans as last album’s closing track ‘X’ and EP ‘Choke’, a final release on Mad Decent, foreshadowed her revamped Britney-falls-forManson kind of persona. “I suppose when thinking about the reaction, there was nothing too negative about their [fans’] response. But, you know, sometimes you feel like you need to do what you need to do. Even if they would’ve reacted poorly to it, I would’ve still done it anyway.” For Poppy, it’s not a matter of popularity but a personal vendetta against everyone in the music industry, and beyond, who’d done her wrong. In the video to ‘I Disagree’ she literally sets on fire an all-white male board of executives. Revenge might’ve tasted sweet, but the world has not stopped from going bad. Had her anger really shaken system then? “I don’t know. One can hope, but I think there’s a lot more burning down and arson that needs to happen before we start rebuilding the world,” she speaks like a true revolutionary, aware of the rotten reality we live in. Poppy blowedup her bubble a while ago and is ready to scream her mind once again. “There are still a lot of things that
“LIFE’S TOO SHORT TO STICK TO ONE THING” POPPY
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THE BEST OF 2020
Now, hundreds of hours on webcams, meet and greets, a charting album later All Time Low have indeed made the best of a bad situation. With their beaming smiles keeping not only the same positive enlightenment as their melodious and uplifting music, but also giving their fans a way through these darkened days. ‘Wake Up, Sunshine’ was already a beacon to a fresh chapter of All Time Low. It’s an album that amalgamates the pop-punkers past and future, but while this freshly turned page was ready to take the world on, having to adapt to the new circumstances means that “there’s still a lot of anticipation tied to it”, according to frontman Alex Gaskarth. “What’s so exciting about this record for us is that we’re eight months removed from putting the record out or whatever, and because we haven’t gotten to play any of these [songs] in front of an audience, there’s still this veil that hasn’t been able to be lifted yet. “It’s just an interesting place to be because usually, you put a record out, and then right now we’d be deep into touring on it, and it would lose
“FINDING THESE NEW WAYS TO CONNECT IS GIVING US PURPOSE” ALEX GASKARTH
that sort of lustre, and the shine of it feeling like new probably wouldn’t be there so much anymore, but it’s kind of holding true.” There are two factors at play in keeping the good ship All Time Low sailing through these choppy seas one of which is their work ethic. “For us, it’s like why not try to navigate the space, why not try to provide some kind of relief and entertainment joy?” Adapting to the new way of working, for Alex, came more easily than he anticipated thanks to the project he began with Mark Hoppus back in 2019. “What’s interesting is everything I learned doing my project Simple Creatures with Mark has informed how we’ve gone about doing All Time Low this year. “Simple Creatures was designed to be agile, and go with the flow, and whatever works, works, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll pivot and move on and do something else. The way that we launched that project has played a big part in informing how we’ve gone about making some decisions for All Time Low, which is
serendipitous in a lot of ways.” The second facet of All Time Low’s dealing with 2020 has been their fans. As with most, All Time Low have been getting their teeth stuck into the live streaming world, from various acoustic performances to a current set of full-band live shows dubbed the Basement Noise sessions. An integral part of this setup is the ability to meet the band, since All Time Low build that interaction with fans at shows, and have done throughout their career. “You know at first I thought I was gonna hate it,” Alex starts on the virtual meet and greets. “I thought it was gonna feel really unnatural and strange because we so enjoy meeting our fans face to face and being able to see and connect directly with the people who are listening to our music. But, the more we’ve done it, the more we’ve embraced it and realise that this is a really cool way to connect with people from all over the world. “It’s the same with the performances too. At first, I was really thrown by it, and I would get nervous and feel really strange performing that
Words: Steven Loftin. Photos: Sarah Louise Bennett.
Back in March, when All Time Low graced the cover of Upset to coincide with the release of their sixth album ‘Wake Up, Sunshine’, they couldn’t have guessed how different theirs, and everybody else’s, year was going to go.
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Words: Jessica Goodman. Photos: Sarah Louise Bennett.
“We took a voluntary year off from music,” Will Gould states, “then to have another one stolen from you by a virus?” When Creeper announced the release of their much anticipated second record just ten days into this year, it was met with a flurry of excitement for what lay ahead. What form would this new material take? What fantastical tale would these songs tell? What spectacular stage show would we get to see on tour? Twelve months on, the world was a vastly different place. The events industry is in a period of stasis, but despite this, Creeper have had their most productive year yet. In the past twelve months, the group have released their second album, a podcast documentary detailing the making of the record, an online point-and-click game telling the story of an angel who fell to earth, and a cover song and playlist series celebrating their inspirations. They’ve played arenas opening for BABYMETAL, held a virtual convention, and graced the covers of magazines (including this one). If that weren’t impressive enough, frontman Will Gould has even found the time to introduce the world to new side project Salem, hold a virtual prom night, release an EP, and play socially distanced
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shows to celebrate Halloween. “I didn’t realise I was going to go from putting nothing out to making a million things and putting them all out. I wasn’t really imagining that,” he laughs. “The nice takeaway is that despite everything that’s going on, we’ve managed to have a really productive time.” It was a difficult road that brought the band here. The group have openly discussed the struggles with love, loss, and mental health that shaped their newest record, the trials and tribulations that paved the steps of their new direction. “We’ve talked about it being the Creeper curse,” Will states. “It felt like we were letting an entity out into the world rather than a record.” It might have felt cursed to the band while they were making it, but from the moment it was released into the world, it’s felt like nothing short of magic. In a year that began
with a performance at the venue where David Bowie broke up with the Spiders From Mars (a concert they previously paid homage to with their own on-stage break-up at KOKO in 2018), the past twelve months also saw the group issuing challenges to former Boyzone star Ronan Keating in the charts. At the mention of the chart battle, Will starts to cackle. “That was very funny,” he declares. “When we started the band I never thought we’d be in that position.” ‘Sex, Death & The Infinite Void’ saw the group soar to new heights and reach Number 5 in the UK album charts. “I think it was a real victory for UK rock music,” the frontman enthuses. “It makes you so happy and so proud that there’s a community of rock music fans out there that are demanding that something really ridiculous like a rock opera be in the charts.”
“THE TOP 5 IS A VICTORY FOR OUR FAN BASE. THAT’S SOMETHING THEY DID, GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND” WILL GOULD
THE BEST OF 2020
THE BEST OF 2020
THE BEST OF 2020
“WE FEEL LIKE WE ACCOMPLISHED A HUGE THING” REBA MEYERS
But 2020 has been a year difficult to navigate ordinarily, let alone with any semblance of setting yourself apart. Since being reduced to images on a laptop or TV screen, choices have been limited for all bands, but Code Orange decided to dismantle this pixel-based world to offer a series of shows. The gigs delved deeper into their complex nature - including an acoustic show - and culminated in a Halloween set; an immersive display that the band are still “pretty beat down
from,” laughs vocalist and guitarist Reba Meyers. “But we’re hanging in there trying to get back to it.” For Code Orange, being stuck together for the best part of the year has been a blessing in disguise. It’s not just their music that has a behemoth weight behind it, even their attitude to the band and their career refuses to relent, which all comes from it being their obsession. “It kind of feels like we’re made to do this,” Reba says defiantly. “But it’s always challenging because it just takes so much work. I do feel like most bands nowadays, especially in the rock/metal world, aren’t doing it the way that we’re doing it - every day, like basically all day. “Each one of us does the band every single day, in different facets. We’re running our merch store, we’re setting up our live shows, or making our visuals, making our music videos, making our merch, writing songs. We’re always running the entire ship, basically, so it’s just how it’s always been, and it’s just evolved, more so lately because there’s nothing else to do.” Normally being on tour, playing a show is their respite from the day-to-day, and “always the fun part”, but in this new livestream world, “you don’t really get the fun part, except for that little piece where you are playing,” which is “a different level of pressure because it’s a one and done type of thing.”
Words: Steven Loftin.
Code Orange looked set to level the world when they released their critically acclaimed fourth album ‘Underneath’ back in March. A dark, sinister world, and unlike anything to come before it - darting feverishly between glitching electronics and brutal hardcore sounds - it also came with visuals that were a whole new cinematic experience for the band, filled with horrifying ‘mud men’ and Terminator-style creatures.
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