INTRODUCING: Burner
Chances are if a band are on Church Road Records they’re going to be well worth a listen or ten. Easily a contender for the best record label in the UK today, they seem incapable of making a weak or even middling signing. Naturally, London’s BURNER are no exception. Like many Church Road bands, they pull their sound from a variety of different places, with vocalist Harry Nott borrowing the elevator pitch from one of the first people who ever saw them as “like death metal, with mosh, but blackened, and the vocals go eergh!”
It’s a concise but very apt summary of much of what goes on on their debut EP A Vision Of The End, a 17 minute sledgehammer of a record that’s been in the works for a while now. Initially coming together thanks to a well-placed Facebook post, Nott, drummer Hugo Bénezech and guitarist Nathan Harlow had finally found a bassist in Finn Gannon after working on demos for over a year when they hit an all too familiar obstacle. “We found Finn just about in February 2020, and you know exactly the rest of the story,” Nott smiles. “So then we were under wraps for over a year, just waiting to do our thing.”
Finally though, they’ve been let loose, and BURNER are set to hit the ground running with A Vision Of The End which arrives to considerable hype this June. It’s a record that marries chaotic hardcore a la CONVERGE, to the chainsaw-esque violence of bands like ENTOMBED and NAILS, to a myriad other influences that primarily come from the brain of songwriter Harlow. “My main thing is I just write stuff that I like listening to and that I like playing,” he explains. “I try to keep it as natural as possible. We’re all into such similar bands and similar music that we don’t really have to think about what we’re trying to do, it just kind of happens.”
Of course, a major consideration that goes into the song-writing process of BURNER is that of the live experience, something which seems to be paying off already given the excitement surrounding the shows they’ve played thus far. “Going to metal shows since I was a teenager, you want a band that just makes the crowd kick off really,” emphasises Harlow. “From a performing perspective it’s a weird balance because a lot of the stuff is quite technical and I want to play it right – I don’t want to just play terribly. But you want to try and push that energy onto the crowd too. I don’t ever want to be a band where people just stand there and watch.”
It’s perhaps only natural then that the final product feels intensely urgent, not just musically but also in its lyrics and themes. Lead single Ingsoc for example was dedicated to “the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, the peoples of Hong Kong, Tibet and Taiwan.” For Nott, the decision to shed light on these unfolding human crises in relatively distant corners of the world came from a place of “moral outrage – just disgust and anger and hatred for the evil forces in this world. That sounds like such a general bullshit statement but it is authoritarianism, and I think speaking now the conflict of our time in my mind is between democracy and authoritarianism. I think given recent events that’s become all the more clear. That’s the struggle that we should be engaged in politically.”
“You shouldn’t just be espousing the same bullshit that everyone else is talking about,” he adds. “You should be talking about things that really matter to you, and it’s never gonna be just pretending you’re a tough guy. It’s gotta be something real, and what’s real? The suffering of the world. There’s no evil I could conjure up pretending I’m some murderer in a dungeon that’s worse than what’s going on right now in Ukraine or in Xinjiang Province, or in any country where human rights are being oppressed and people are being tortured and murdered and disappeared. That stuff, for lack of a better word, pisses me off, and it’s upsetting and it’s frustrating, and I think to some extent you have to connect with your fear to really say something.”
Indeed, both Nott and Harlow are clearly fired-up throughout our entire conversation, and neither of them can entirely believe all that’s come their way in the last few months. “Honestly we’re kind of at a point where we’re trying to look forward to things and opportunities that might come our way while at the same time trying not to punch above our belt,” summarises Nott. “We’re very conscious that we don’t have the ground swell that’s needed to put us on par with the things we’d like to do yet, but we’re very eager for it.”
“Honestly the past few months have been just fucking nuts for all of us,” concludes Harlow. “I’ve been playing in bands since I was like 11 or 12 years-old, and there are so many times where you feel like you’ve missed the boat or whatever, and what I didn’t expect was for so much to happen at once so quickly, and that’s kind of how it’s been going. It’s been so overwhelming. We just want to keep the ball rolling like that really, see what comes our way, trying to take what we can and run with it.”
A Vision Of The End is set for release on June 17th via Church Road Records.
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