Death Hilarious by Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs
Release date: April 4, 2025Label: Rocket Recordings
A strange feeling accompanies the idea of a fifth full-length release from Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. A belated acceptance that they’re a long term concern. A fifth album seems to naturally confirm that there will surely be a seventh, one for each iteration of the word pigs in their ridiculous name. Of course the name, and their decision to stick with it, is the primary source of any sense they might not be entirely serious. Once, you could be forgiven for having seen them as the runt of the UK psych doom litter and yet here they are, still vital, an unlikely success story.
Always deceptively dumb, Death Hilarious is a perfect Pigs title. Mortality and absurdity in the same over stuffed sandwich, provocative and yet tasty. Their fifth record is longer and has more tracks than their previous efforts but doesn’t feel like it, it absolutely zips along. If Land Of Sleeper leant a little more psychedelic and dreamy then this time out things are more rough and tumble. Pigs music has always been a blow to the body but they’ve turned up the distortion a notch here while finding new ways to explore their basic sound. The first we heard of this new material was ‘Detroit’ a grunting noise rock grind that I didn’t initially take to. It works better in the context of the album and fulfils Sam Grant’s assessment “We wanted it to be a slap in the face”.
Charging out of the gate they slap us in the face with the exhilarating blast of ‘Blockage’. Referring, I think, to Matt Baty’s anxieties over lyric writing. In its brief breakdown he offers the wish “may these words dissolve all negative thoughts” before the song races insanely upwards to its end. Rather than dissolving, said blockage appears have been cleared under considerable pressure. On the slower churn of ‘Collider’ he confesses “recently I’ve been thinking, I might not be so well”. Self doubt, frailty and existential dread fill the songs in contrast or counter balance to the thrilling potency of the music.
If ‘Detroit’ felt a little grimy and ill-tempered ‘Stitches’ is exactly what you want from Pigs, juggernaut bass and dunga dunga riffs, unstoppable forward motion, Filthy and fun. Baty’s imposter syndrome runs through it, in the repeated line “Can’t sing, can you?” It’s also the likely source of the album title as he pushes metaphors for amusement into the visceral “In stitches but bleeding out”.There’s even room for a twist or two on their usual recipe, guitarist Adam Sykes dodging metal leads to float chiming chords over the powerful chug and opting for a wild synth on the solo.
The album’s biggest curveball is El–P’s guest spot on ‘Glib Tongued’. Mercifully not Pigs going nu metal, as it builds to a huge roar of distortion you might question how they thought Johnny Hedley had written a hip hop tune here but it actually works really well. It’s not exactly a party jam, seemingly informed by the band’s time in the US and dismay at the retrogressive tide it’s currently enduring, as expressed in fully metal terms by Baty yelling “Necromance!” bang in the centre of the album El-P’s verse is fierce and corrosive “the open secret is that the oldest ways are in their prime”.
They follow that with ‘The Wyrm’, destined to be a mayhem causing highlight of the current sold-out tour, thundering out of huge speakers and crushing all before it. Starting on all out battery, after a couple of minutes a brutal descending riff shifts the pace and then it really kicks off, their gift for propulsion and the physicality of their sound becoming huge and primal. Baty’s voice is battered around in the slipstream as he says he’s sick of wasting time. It shifts down and dooms for a bit, the riff coming back slower and heavier before returning to the initial percussive assault.
‘Coyote Call’ is another foot down ripper and ‘Carousel’ does have a whirling circular thing going on, a lot of the record does. On lengthy closer ‘Toecurler’ it becomes a wild sea sick sway, demented hammering piano ringing out as the ship goes down in the storm, Baty howling like a pirate. Still finding new combinations for their energetic mix of Sabbath doom, noise rock and psych, Death Hilarious finds Pigs firing on all cylinders, cranking out the huge riffs and pile driver rhythms in a haze of noise and distortion. Still seriously fun.
