(((O))) Interview: Dimscûa

In the small world of post-metal it is fair to say that on Thursday 12th of June 2025, Berkshire four piece Dimscûa became the first band in the genre to go viral. When Gavin McInally of Damnation Festival proclaimed them as “the best extreme music to come out of the UK in 2025” on the Two Promoters One Pod podcast, there was an unequivocal shift in the band’s trajectory. Gary Davidson caught up with Lewis Pickering (drums), Sam Correa (guitars), Alex Rowlands (vocals) and Adam Campbell-Train (guitars, bass, recording, mixing, mastering, production) to discuss the foundations of the band and what occurred on that particular day.

On Tuesday 20th May two tracks from the Dust Eater album appeared on streaming services with the full four tracks being released two weeks later on Tuesday the 3rd of June. When I queried why it was released on a Tuesday rather than the traditional Friday the band’s answer also surmised the much discussed original band photo.

Sam: We just had zero expectations, we were super proud of this, we really liked it and we were sat on it and it was ready to go for months and months. The story with the photo is we needed to get in the room together to actually take a photo but we couldn’t find the time to actually do that so we were like stuff it this is the closest thing we’ve got. Our mate in the middle we scribbled him out.

The itch to get something released is explained when the band delves into the creation process of the band and album.

Adam: We just wanted to play something heavy, low and slow. I can’t play tech death anymore. It just started as hanging out, having a few beers, mostly in my spare room, and kicking a few riffs around.

Sam: This EP was about four years in the making on and off. We would just get together every couple of months and work on a song.

Alex: It’s not a case that we’ve been painstakingly working on this album for four years, I think ultimately if you put the amount of time together that we were all in a room writing and recording you probably condense it down into less than a month. We whacked out tracks pretty damn quickly in the time that we were actually together, It’s just life got in the way sort of thing.

Adam: Yeah, we would literally hang out, write half a song, go on hiatus for six months, come back together six months later write the other half of the song.

Lewis: Because we’ve known each other so long it’s very easy for us to get in a room and just bounce off each other. It just sort of works and if we have to go back and fiddle with things and make it work we can do. It didn’t take as long as it did because we were struggling. It was more of a time constraint.

Whilst Dimscûa has been the name pinned to those last four years the members have spent a lifetime as friends and bandmates.

Adam: We’ve been in bands together but don’t look them up.

Sam: Yeah we’ve been playing together in bands since we were about 14 on and off. Me and Lewis were in a band called Sibling and we did a couple of UK and European tours around 2017 and then that kind of disbanded.

Alex: When I was 10 I got my drum kit and Adam had his first guitar and my Dad taught Adam ‘Smoke on the Water’ and we were just in my parents’ house playing it for hours on end.

It was through a shared experience of recording in an old tech metal band that pushed Adam into the recording side, a move which would prove very beneficial for the sound of Dust Eater.

Adam: When we were teenagers we did a recording with a friend of a friend and it was an absolutely dreadful experience. We were in a shed on the hottest day of the year, our guitars were going out of tune and they misaligned one of the guitar solos, so the recording completely went out of time. It sounded like one of the worst things I’ve ever heard. It was just complete incompetence but we paid them probably like 250 quid or something, which, when you’re a kid and you have very limited access to funds, that’s not easy to come by. I think I sort of just arrogantly assumed it can’t be any worse than that and I’ve been doing it pretty much ever since.

With the background of multiple music endeavours and a wealth of recording experience the pieces started to fall into place for what would become the foundational characteristics of Dust Eater. Along with those painful experiences are also ingrained in the sound of the four tracks and the four years it took for its creation. Adam tells of his experiences which give the heart wrenching character to the second half of the release including the time around the tragic death of his daughter Rosemary.

Adam: The record is sequenced in the order that we wrote the songs. Alex had written the lyrics for the first couple of songs (‘Elder Bairn’ and ‘The Dusteater’) and they obviously deal with his own grief. The third song had sort of been written but we had not recorded the vocals. So the song ‘Existence/Futility’ is about, at the time, my apprehension about becoming a father as dementia runs in my family. My Nan can’t talk anymore, she doesn’t know who you are and doesn’t know where she is. So it was about the grief of losing my Nan even though she’s still here physically, the apprehension that that’s probably going to be me one day, and when my wife was pregnant with Rosemary, my apprehensions about passing that on to her. I guess between when we wrote that and then recorded the vocals Rosemary had then passed and I guess my relation to that song changed a lot because it was dealing with something I was apprehensive about and then something far worse had happened in the meantime.

Alex continues: It took me a long time to come around to being able to to listen to that song. And ‘On Being and Nothingness’ was the last thing we’d done, actually the night that Rosemary passed away that was the last thing that we were doing was writing the clean intro to that. It was originally intended as just an instrumental interlude and I remember being in the hospital and because we just literally finished writing it, the melody was going through my head. I don’t know, just as something to distract myself whilst we were just waiting and then obviously getting horrific news and experiencing the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. So the the second half of that song is basically about that experience because it was a thing that was rattling around my head and when we got the news and I remember my ears ringing, so the song goes to feedback at the end and it’s because my ears were fucking ringing, I couldn’t see, I was going to fucking vomit. So we had written everything but we hadn’t mixed it and I’m the mixing engineer, I’m the mastering engineer and I just couldn’t listen to any of the music. I just couldn’t listen to the pain in Alex’s voice talking about this stuff. So that period was about a year where we had three songs pretty much ready to go but I didn’t have it in me to touch the music

While the extremes of life feature heavily in the lyrical content the band share a collective laugh when asked for musical influences and mentioning the obvious “elephant in the room, Amenra”. Sam’s guitar ideas bring in influences of Alcest, while Adam references La Dispute. Vocally Alex, with Dimscûa as his first lead vocalist role, leans into the black metal realms of Peter Tägtgren from Hyprocasy as well as Julie Christmas and the Maniac era of Mayhem.

After a lifetime of experiences, influences and lessons Dust Eater is released on June 3rd without fanfare, no promotion and no expectation. What happened on the 12th of June is nothing short of insane. After Gav put the track ‘Elder Bairn’ on the Two Promotors One Pod “On The Record” spotify playlist and gave them a glowing review things started to get wild. In one day the last.fm listener numbers rose by 900%, Instagram followers up by 1000% and monthly Spotify listeners up by 5000%. They also received an offer to play the 2025 edition of Arctangent. For the band it all started the night before with an eager wait until the podcast dropped the following morning.

Sam: The day before the episode dropped they gave a quick summary rundown of the whole episode and there’s a bit where Gav is talking about a band called “Dim Skewer”. At that point I think it had only really been yourself who had kind of really gotten behind us and shouted about us, so when we saw that overview of the episode I messaged the guys I was like, is that us? Is there another band called Dimscûa? and we were all freaking out a bit. We had no idea what they were gonna say and I was like well shit I better get an email address together just in case. I am glad I did and had instagram up as when the episode dropped that morning my phone just absolutely exploded. It was crazy and I’d say every couple of hours we’d be messaging each other like “Oh my god have you seen this, oh my god have you seen what this person said, oh my god have you seen this?”

Adam: We’d seen the preview on the Facebook post and the two promoters one pod account had followed us on Instagram and we were like “Oh hang on a minute, they don’t follow very many people could that be us?”. So literally six o’clock in the morning I was up like a kid on Christmas like “I want to unwrap my presents, I want to listen to the podcast”. We went from like 40 streams a day or something like that to like 2,000 in a day. You can see live how many people were listening to it and I was watching it with my wife and the number was going up and up and up and up and up.

Lewis: We were all trying to work, we were trying to do our jobs but then all this stuff is happening in the background and I think all of us collectively said well we’re not getting any work done today. I think we all just sort of switched off and were looking at our phones all day which is just completely unheard of.

One aspect which seemed to take a strange amount of focus was the band’s original photo which included their friend Max but with his face scribbled out in red (I believe it may be the back of his head that adorns the cover as his fiance Becky provided the band with the photo). Gav messaged to pass on advice from an agent that they had to change the picture. After a quickly arranged evening photoshoot they got a new picture and changed it on social media. What was waiting for them in the fresh email inbox that night was the topping on the cake, although it came with a bit of panic for Adam.

Sam: That evening we all went and we had to quickly scramble together, get our mate there and we had to get these photos up and changed. It was crazy and just to end that day as well, it’s been a day of continuous disbelief and then we get back from the photoshoot and we check our band emails and this is when we all completely lost our minds. This was probably midnight so we’ve been on the go all day and that’s when we had the offer to play Arctangent in our inbox, and we lost our fucking minds, we lost our fucking minds. We called each other straight away but couldn’t get hold of Adam, you were cooking weren’t you Adam?

Adam: Yeah we had a baby shower on that Sunday so I was pulling pork in advance for the barbecue, I literally couldn’t answer my phone. All the boys were obviously messaging each other and I hadn’t noticed I was oblivious. Thankfully my wife came into the kitchen and she said Sam was ringing me and said “You need to check your phone, you need to check your phone right now.” I opened up the messages saw the offer and I’ve got a screenshot of us and our brains are melting like we cannot comprehend what is happening, the podcast came out in the morning and we got the offer that evening like it was absolutely fucking mental. My first response was my wife’s due on the 30th of July for baby number two! This is a once in a lifetime opportunity the stars have aligned, obviously Anciients unfortunately had to drop out but it means that we’ve been offered a slot that’s just way more than we would have ever been offered under any other circumstances, amazing opportunity. Fuck we can’t do it. Thank fuck that my wife was with me to answer the phone because I was on that phone call being like “Oh we can’t do it, we can’t do it.” Like you know we’re going to have a two week old baby, this isn’t happening and my wife just turned around went “You’ve got to fucking do it.”

Sam: Yeah it’s just been absolutely crazy and since then it’s just given us such a platform to jump off, we literally cannot thank, like sincerely from the bottom of our hearts, we cannot thank you and we cannot thank Gav enough and if you are reading and a band does drop out of Damnation, you know where to find us (laughter).

Dimscûa make their Arctangent debut on Friday 15th August 2025 at 14:00 on the Yohkai Stage.