Interview: Endless Swarm
I sat in my house and just watched, pretty much all of Shinya Tsukamoto’s films from Tetsuo, the full trilogy to his other films, like Bullet Ballet. I was really inspired by the visuals as well as the composition and the soundtracks.
Endless Swarm have just brought out their new album The Body Hammer and it sees the Scottish powerviolence band on stunningly intense form on one of the albums of the year so far. The album is inspired by classic Japanese film Tetsuo II: Body Hammer and body horror cinema. Gavin Brown caught up with the band’s vocalist Gray Caldwell to get an insight into the record as well as discussing Endless Swarm’s live shows and overseas tours and what they have planned next.
E&D: Your new album The Body Hammer has just come out. Can you tell us about the release of the album?
Gray: The CD and the digital version are out now and the vinyl is away in the pressing plant at the moment, and we’re hoping probably about a week or two after the release. We’ve got this boat show coming up on 7th of September, so everything crossed, it’ll be round about early September.
E&D: Is the album inspired by Tetsuo: The Iron Man and is it a concept album at all?
Gray: Absolutely. Basically, last year, I broke my collarbone skateboarding, and I had to get some surgery on it, so I had to take a month off of work because I wasn’t allowed to work with it. I sat in my house and just watched, pretty much all of Shinya Tsukamoto’s films from Tetsuo, the full trilogy to his other films, like Bullet Ballet. I was really inspired by the visuals as well as the composition and the soundtracks. I started writing the record during that downtime and after I watched The Body Hammer, I couldn’t shake how good the title it was. At the time I was trying to come up with a title for our new LP, I was trying to build it around The Body Hammer, and I was like, I actually can’t think of anything better, so I just think we should call the album that. So, yes, it’s directly inspired by those films, for sure.
E&D: Are the band big fans of body horror films?
Gray: Yeah, there’s a couple tracks on it inspired by David Cronenberg’s work as well.
E&D: The album’s sound is very intense, even by your standards, was the recording of the album an intense experience?
Gray: It was, yeah. We did it again ourselves, I think pretty much other than a couple of splits that we did in 2017 we recorded everything by ourselves as well. The way that we wrote it was similar style as to how we normally do it, we write independently. So by time we got to the actual process of recording the album, we hadn’t played any of the songs as a band. We closed the studio, which is our drummer’s, and Dave went in by himself and did all the drums for a whole week, so we didn’t know what they’re going to sound like. I just loved that process. It was intense. Individually, there were overlaps, where there were more of us in the studio, but we were all going in and contributing our own to the album. We had deadlines for the labels and for wanting to get stuff ready for tours. It puts a fire underneath you to just go in and really crack on and I think it gives us all a bit more of a an individual input as well. The project’s a band project, but it means everybody’s individual. Elements within it are their own. It’s just it was a really good way of doing it. I really enjoyed the experience of recording that way. But it was intense, it was hard work.
E&D: The legendary Bob Otis from Dropdead features in the album track ‘Primitive’. How was it having him on the album and how did that come about?
Gray: Unreal! We’ve played with Dropdead, and I’ve met some of the members, but I’ve never spoken to Bob directly, but I’ve got him on Facebook, and me and him are both long time vegans. I think he’s definitely aware of our band, and he’s always been pretty positive anytime I spoke to him. I just took the punt, and sent a message on Facebook, and was like, Do you want to do some guest vocals for it? He was well up for it. We had a list of people were going to ask to do some guest features, and then we had some backups to that, but everybody we asked said yes straight away. We didn’t have to go down the line of asking anybody else, I couldn’t believe it, we were well chuffed! The same thing happened a few years ago, not as many people are aware of it, but our first 7”, we got John from Weekend Nachos on it, same thing. It was like, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. I couldn’t believe it, to be honest. Powerviolence is my favourite genre of music, but it’s such a niche genre. It’s funny, you see your friends bands climbing up and getting bigger festivals and whatever and I feel sometimes we’re a bit closed in, but the flip of that is, all the bands that you grew up listening to, all your heroes and stuff are so within reach, it’s amazing. It’s like starting a death metal band and trying to get a feature from Glen Benton, it’s never going to happen. They’re probably not even going to reply to your emails. But when you play such a small genre, I’ve got to play with all my favourite bands already. Now, we got to work with Fuck On The Beach, and we’ve got Bob from Dropdead on stuff, and we can do all the stuff we dream to do.
E&D: What other guests have you got on the album?
Gray: We’ve got Dave from P.L.F. He’s done a guitar solo for us. He’s in another band called Oath Of Cruelty, who do a lot more shred, and because none of us could do guitar solos, we wanted to have a proper rapid solo on it. So we messaged him. We just thought it was really funny as well to have somebody guest but not just doing vocals, so it was nice to have someone contribute something else. We’ve got Smith, the drummer from Afternoon Gentlemen, he’s currently playing bass for Exorbitant Places Must Diminish, he’s done some guest vocals. Steve, the guy that’s done all the artwork, he’s in a band called Give Over, and he’s done some guest vocals as well.
E&D; Who would you love to feature on an Endless Swarm album in the future?
Gray: My favourite band of all time is Lack Of Interest, so any way that we can work with one of them would be a dream for me. One I know is never going to happen is, working with Spazz in some ways, because I know that they’re never, ever coming back. But Chris Dodge, if we could get him as a feature at some point, I think that would be incredible as well.
E&D: Can you tell us a bit about the album cover?
Gray: I sent it to Steve, and I basically said, I wanted the idea of a person splitting up into bits and having tubes and wires and iron rods coming out of him. I sent him one reference from Tetsuo as well. It doesn’t look anything like the photo I sent him, but he’s obviously taken the tubes and wires built on it. Everything he’s done has been perfect for the the concepts, but I think with this one, we’ve gone slightly darker with the lyrics, and a bit more, as I say, body horror and that kind of thing. So I wanted something a bit more expressive with that, and he absolutely nailed it. To be honest. It’s way better than all ideas out of my head. He’s really done a cool job, the colour palette, he picked the colours himself, and we’ve now built everything around the colours that he chose because we’re so happy with it. All the variants of the vinyl, and for the CD.
E&D: Did you feel any pressure in following up such a well received album as Manifested Forms?
Gray: I don’t think so, because there was something with Manifested Forms that really felt like we were hitting what we’d always set out to do with the band. I think it took us all the previous releases to kind of get to Manifested Forms. When we did that album, it was like, this is the Endless Swarm sound, and this is what we felt most comfortable writing. That was the first time we were in the studio where we were writing Endless Swarm stuff rather than being like, it’d be cool to sound like this or like the last album or even the first album. We wanted to put in specific songs and I think that was quite freeing., when you get to the point of a band when you’re able to just write and it’s just your own, you’re not having to think about anything. So with us as, I don’t think we felt as much pressure, because we knew what we’re doing. By the time we finished Manifested Forms, we were up to 150 songs written and recorded. So I think it’s probably too long to take to get to a point where you’re so comfortable with the writing experience, but that’s where we found it. This time, I just found the writing experience really, really easy, to be honest. It kind of just flowed so naturally, it felt like a really natural process.
E&D: Have you had any thoughts about any new material?
Gray: Yeah, I started writing the other day. I did that kind of as a joke, because everybody’s like, when you finish writing and recording, you’re in this again! I’ve already got a potential title for LP four, and some concepts and stuff. I sent that to the guys, thinking they were all going to tell me to f off. But they were fine, to be honest. We were also approached by a band, I’ll say it cryptically, that shares members with Jarhead Fertilizer and Full Of Hell to do a split. That’s kind of grown arms and legs now, there’s us and three other bands involved, and we’re doing like a Brutal Supremacy type 7” but it’s going to be four bands doing a few minutes of material. I’m recording that potentially at the end of this year. So, yeah, so another LP and a split.
E&D: You’ve got an album release show in Glasgow in October coming up, are you excited for that one?
Gray: Yeah, it’s cool. It feels nice because generally, we’re just supporting bands still, and if we ever headline, it’s in Edinburgh, and it’s usually stuff that we’ve arranged ourselves, so to be approached by Audio and Hamilton Hunter, and to be asked for them to book us and build a show around it, have our tickets available at see tickets shop and stuff, feels like a a nice milestone, if anything, just for ourselves, to tell family and that, you can go buy your tickets in a shop. I’m pretty happy with that and we’ve had a lot of interesting bands asking to play and stuff like that. So it’s nice to feel that step up. When we did the ten year anniversary show and that sold out, I was like, holy shit. It was the first time we’ve got, a decent following at home, and because you’re bringing other bands over and stuff. To actually be able to watch your fanbase grow locally is pretty nice.
E&D: Will you be playing the new album in full at that show?
Gray: No, I think some of it is beyond our ability to do as a live band. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing to me, because for this album I’ve written all the lyrics, I place them all. I don’t write them with somebody else having to sing them in mind. So there’s different tempos and patterns to my vocals that match what Alex is playing on bass. For him to play bass and do some of the vocals at the same time, there’s just too many elements for him. I think we’re probably going to do about a third of the album live, so we’ve been practicing that. We’ve played a couple of them. We’ve got so much material at this point as well that it’s hard to know what to cut as well, and we’ve never really had a sense of what our fans like. We’ve never been able to actually gage what their favorite material is. Through the years, I think our writing styles changed quite a lot. There’s a decent chunk, a good, a good third of our set will probably be new stuff.
E&D: Is it going to be 37 songs like you played in Edinburgh for your tenth anniversary?
Gray: That was a one off. I don’t think I’d do that again so much. I think we’re doing twenty three to twenty five at the moment, but the last song on the new album is our longest song we’ve ever written, and we’re playing some of that as well. That kind of feels a bit more than one song, We generally aim for about twenty seven minutes of music. So I think it’s about twenty three or twenty four songs at the minute,
E&D: You mentioned the boat trip show on the Firth of Forth earlier. Are you looking forward to that and how did that idea come about?
Gray: I’m a bit trepidatious! I don’t know how it’s going to be. I’ve never seen the boat. I’ve never been to any shows there. I was aware that Jack from Disposable, I’ve been working with him more recently because I’ve started booking my own shows. I’m booking in Legends now. We’ve got a pretty good deal going. I saw him posting on Facebook, and his band was playing on a boat. I had a look at it because I live in the village over from Queensferry, so I had a wee look, and I was like, you know, that might be pretty fun, to launch the album on the boat! We’ve sold out. We’ve got full capacity. I saw the videos of Jack’s band playing on it, and there was folk standing on chairs or the windows of the boat. There’s a hundred people trying to squeeze into this little room, so it’ll be an experiment anyway. I’ve had so many people, because it sold out in a day, wanting to get tickets. Then I’ve had so many other bands that have been interested in doing it as well. I think if it works, it may be something that I’ll do once or twice every year. I’ll bring special bands up and stuff like that, we’ll see how it goes first, and then we’ll take it from there.
E&D: Have you get any other shows coming up that you can tell us about?
Gray: We’re going to Canada in September, and then when we get back, the album launch in Glasgow, and then I think a month later, we’re going out to do a few shows in Holland as well I think that’s our year.
E&D: Are you booking shows into next year as well?
Gray: We’ve got a couple of festival appearances next year that we can’t announce yet. Matty who plays guitar for us normally is on a sabbatical of sorts, he had a kid at the beginning of the year. So he’s taken all of 2025, out, but he’s coming back the summer of next year. So the guy that we’ve got filling in, Neil, at the moment, I think the plan next year is to do one tour with him in the first half of next year, and then when Matt comes back, we’re going to do another tour after that. This is all talk at the moment, but I think we’re floating the idea of doing the United States again at the beginning of next year at some point, and then potentially Australia, New Zealand later in the year. That’s our plans. I don’t even know if I’ve got the whole band to agree on that yet, but I’ve approached them and said, I think that’s maybe the best plan of action. We kind of float about, see what offers come to us, and then just kind of gage off of where you’re sending a lot of merch to. I always get a breakdown of where our fans are and Canada was really high up, and then Australia and New Zealand are up as well in the top 10 of places that were streaming us and listening to us. We kind of figured we’ve got a decent foothold there. So we should probably head out there at some point.
E&D: Will you be doing shows in the UK as well?
Gray: Yeah, I feel quite bad because we keep saying we should probably do a UK tour. But when we’ve only got so many weeks to take off a year, it doesn’t feel very exotic to be around. These things are doable over long weekends and bank holiday weekends. So, yeah, I think so at some point. What we’re saying is, well, maybe hold out for a bigger band that we can tour with. I think at one point Fuck On The Beach we’re coming to play Chimpy Fest and then tour the UK around that. We got asked to support them for that, and then that never happened. So we never toured, and then we played California with Lack Of Interest last year, and they’ve started booking shows now. So I’d spoke to Tony at Chimpy Fest and said we should bring them over, and we’d kind of floated a UK tour to them, but they couldn’t get the time off to do it. So that was our two attempts at booking a UK tour. But it will maybe happen at some point.
E&D: How did your tours in the US and Japan go last year?
Gray: Unreal. The USA one was life changing in a way. The first time we did the USA was 2017 and I was just taking a punt of trying somewhere new. We had some people we spoke to out there, and we had enough contacts to book a tour, but we didn’t really have any kind of fan base out that way, really, because when there’s people that knew us at each show, it was a handful of people. We were still getting that really early band experience where you turn up to shows and folk like, oh yeah, we don’t have any money to pay you, there’s nowhere to stay, there’s no food or whatever. We were getting left in the lurch quite a lot. Some shows, we got paid well, but we played one in Austin, and we got $17 for playing! We were just told we had to sleep on the stage. So we slept on the stage once everyone left, and then let ourselves out, loads of that kind of thing. We have to pay so much money to be out there, but the last time we did a full run of sold out shows, we’re getting paid double what we were asking for. The crowd, is just such a different experience to what we’ve ever experienced. I know that we’re getting older now. We’ve been doing it for a wee while, but the whole crowd is younger kids eighteen, nineteen years olds. They’re all super enthusiastic. I guess if you’re gaging success out of how much, merch is selling, how many people are turning up, then it was our most successful tour by a long shot. Japan is a very difficult place to crack, to be honest. It was our second tour there, and we pretty much haemorrhage money on that. With the work culture and stuff out there, there’s just so much happening all the time. The venues are so expensive to hire for promoters that they have to charge a lot for people to come to the shows so, and then they don’t really have much money for bands. Japan was a great experience, but very different. We’ve got great friends over there now, and culturally, it’s just the best place to visit, We would go back again, even if we were only playing to twenty people, it’s amazing!
E&D: With the Japanese link with Tetsuo: Body Hammer, do you think they’ll be all over the new album over there?
Gray: Well, you know, it’s funny. We were talking about this just the other day because we’re making new merch. We did two designs to go and tour in Japan. I did one with Japanese writing on it, a character on a t shirt and nobody bought it. Nobody cared. They all just wanted to buy another t-shirt, which just had a train on it that said powerviolence, so I was starting to think that it’s like a band coming over to Scotland and putting fucking Irn-Bru on a t-shirt! Maybe they’ll love the Tetsuo stuff or maybe they won’t care. It’s the same way that the Eastern influence that I love, maybe they’re just wanting the Western stuff. Maybe they love powerviolence, because it’s pure Cali/American stuff, that’s what appeals to them more. So I don’t know, but I like it, so I’ll see what happens.
