In the scant four years since Pupil Slicer dropped a fragmentation bomb into the depths of the UK underground with their explosive debut full-length Mirrors, they’ve already affected one almost complete transformation.
Where Mirrors was a barely controlled burst of grinding chaos, follow-up Blossom was a more questing exploration of melody and structure. There was still plenty of aggression and noise in the mix, but that second outing marked a major evolution. New album Fleshwork is less of a reinvention, falling somewhere between the cacophony of Mirrors and the relative accessibility of Blossom. In theory that might sound like a step backwards but in practice it means they’ve distilled everything that they’ve got right so far into one destructive yet irresistible package.
This time they get straight to the business end of the distortion pedal, eschewing the atmospheric intros of those previous albums in favour of a thick, almost grungy slab of groove that’s not overly dissimilar to Blossom’s title track and closer. It provides a sense of continuation and, while the track is less overtly melodic overall, there are bristling hooks and whistling, whooping synths threaded through the lacerating vocal rasps.
‘This body, filthy and unclean/ Don't tell me, don't tell me ‘We love you’/ It can't be true,’ screams vocalist/guitarist and main composer Kate Davies. After the sci-fi concept of Blossom they’re once more embracing the personal, but at times it’s no less harrowing than their take on cosmic horror.
Gordian is as tangled as you might expect from the title, with icy slashes of synth criss-crossing spidery rhythms and moments of mathcore complexity. It’s a dense knotwork that nods back to their earlier work while Sacrosanct is breathtaking, launching from an impressively lengthy scream into low, slow slabs of doomy hardcore riffage that shed peals of guitar like bleeding veins. Like most of the songs on here, though, it’s not just a single thing and halfway through it ruptures into multi-armed tendrils of noise.
Innocence makes more use of grunge fuzz and an unsettling post-metal atmosphere, while new bassist/vocalist Luke Booth stamps out his territory with some deep rumbling grooves. Then it’s back to the grind as Black Scrawl thrashes and howls before sinking into a sludgy breakdown that feels like being subsumed in a Pleistocene tar pit.
The giddy genre veering continues as Nomad mixes blackened metal with edge-of-a-breakdown post-hardcore and Fleshwork itself – written for a collaboration that never happened with industrial noise rockers Health – boasts a suitably pneumatic stomp and haunting synth hooks.
White Noise, despite the title, is the most resolutely melodic offering on here before the eight-minute Cenote brings things to an unexpected grandiose conclusion with an almost gothic wall of sound, post-rock instrumentation and more layers of black metal guitar.
Not one song on the album sounds like another yet there’s a sense of cohesion throughout and there’s never a doubt about what band this is. Heartwork is inventive, expressive and even subtle at times, but still imbued with that vital vicious streak that goes right for the jugular. The eyes have it.
Fleshwork is out this Friday, November 7, via Prosthetic
