Pupil Slicer: Blossoming
“The sound, as if coming from the earth itself… It pierced my mind, awakening something primal, indescribable”. That’s the intense opening line that greets you upon hitting play on the incendiary second album from PUPIL SLICER; Blossom. Where its predecessor Mirrors was chaotic, eviscerating breakneck brutality, Blossom is a sprawling, sci-fi horror epic that levels up every single element of their sound and offers an expansive look into their creative vision. It’s an album that deserves all the plaudits it’ll get and then some; but to say the band ever expected to be in this position with the explosive success of Mirrors would be a lie.
“We really didn’t expect anyone to listen to it,” band mastermind Kate Davies offers. “We only expected it to get shared on Mathcore Index and a few mates would like it, we’d play the local scene around London or a couple of weekenders, so we didn’t want it to be too out there,” they explain of the debut album. How wrong they were; holding spots in many year end lists, if not topping them, they were lauded as one of the shining lights in the UK’s mathcore scene. That reception imbued them with the confidence they needed to go away and make its follow-up the truest version of their creative vision they could.
“I think our creative vision intensified, it didn’t change the direction we wanted to go,” Davies explains. “All the elements on Blossom are there on Mirrors, whereas on Blossom, we had the confidence to say, everyone liked basically everything we did so we should just fully commit to the bit and go wild!” Taking all the self-described “weirder” bits of Mirrors that were less references to their influences and far more PUPIL SLICER, they decided “[we’ll] just push that further, have no fear of whether it comes out good or bad in the end.”
That’s a bit of a misstatement; Blossom didn’t just come out good, it’s fucking remarkable. Davies spent long hours labouring over it, writing, rewriting sections until what they’d put down corresponded with the vision they had for the work and the world within it. “It’s all in service of the song,” they state simply. “There’s a lot of struggle; I’ve got such a specific vision I’m trying to achieve. Luke [Fabian, bass] wrote bass for Dim Morning Light twice all the way through and both of them I threw away. Then I wrote bass for the whole song and threw it away!”
“It’s such a high specification,” Fabian agrees, offering that Blossom overall is “a lot more honed, it’s very sophisticated” in its writing. “There was a lot of pushing to make it to make it as cohesive as it is, there was a lot of times I said, I’ll leave it that’s fine,” Davies recalls of the incredibly taxing writing process, “and then six hours later I’d ask myself, am I doing that because I can’t be bothered and I’m incredibly burnt out – if I come back in two weeks, will I be really upset I didn’t change it? So I would have to change it.”
Blossom certainly doesn’t lack for personality, either, something Davies and Fabian both stress during our conversation. “I think a lot of music now, a lot of its instrumentation, lacks personality. Everything is so unison, so processed, the instruments don’t give each other room and it’s so saturated,” Fabian argues. Davies agrees; “being mainly a three piece at the core, we left a lot more room for consideration of how each piece works within that. The bass is as much an instrument as my guitar parts.” For a stellar example of this, look no further than second single NoTemple; it’s PUPIL SLICER at their most belligerent and technical, while at its end there’s an arresting bass solo that wouldn’t sound of out place with IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT. Underneath a panic chord breakdown reminiscent of CODE ORANGE, there’s as Fabian describes it, a gap that he took advantage of with a dark jazz bass solo.
They picked the title track as the first single, despite (and because of) its huge sonic departure from what people might expect, and “it’s a reflection on everything that happens in the album and everything to come,” explains Davies. That was, again, a challenge for them to write; “I wrote the whole song around the bass break in it. Then I gave it to Luke and said, you can’t change that but you can change whatever else you want.” “So I added the Californication bass,” laughs Fabian.
It’s impossible to talk about Blossom without talking about its narrative, too; a concept album that – by Davies’ admission – might originally have even been a double album had the label not put their foot down, it spreads across the worlds of science fiction, body and cosmic horror and more with ease. Davies won’t be drawn on the specifics of the narrative (when we ask even for a brief synopsis of the plot, both they and Fabian simply laugh “no”) but is more than happy to discuss its key influences and what shaped it. Much as Mirrors was, Blossom remains deeply rooted in their own personal experiences, this time extrapolated into the sprawling narrative. “I want people to form their own summary of it,” they begin, “but I don’t want to explicitly say what’s going on. I’ve got way more written than what’s in the lyrics of what makes up the story.” They compare it to David Lynch; the film auteur famously refuses to be drawn on, or explain many of the concepts in his works to allow audiences to form their own opinions and connections. “It’s NAPALM DEATH in space!” Fabian grins.
“The main two influences [on the narrative] are Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker and Outer Wilds: Echoes Of The Eye,” Davies explains, “but there’s also Event Horizon” (Departure In Solitude directly quotes the film with the lyric “hell is only a word / reality is much, much worse”), “emotionally and conceptually it draws a lot from them. I was really emotionally moved by them; I was in a bad place when I played them and they deal with themes of abject despair, they’re very existentialist, and then overcoming that despair and finding hope within that. I wanted to convey those themes on our album.”
Over the course of the hour we spend with Davies and Fabian, despite the depth of their answers, and with multiple listens to the album, it becomes clear that Blossom is at this point, not just an incredibly high watermark musically and creatively, but that its depths and nuances conceptually and thematically will require even more time with them to truly unpack. And that’s arguably exactly how they wanted it; their creative vision has been allowed to truly run free this time. With nods to not only their musical influences but conceptual, too; philosophy, movie and video games quotes are sprinkled throughout, never at random but with the sole purpose of serving the song and narrative. Blossom is the sound of a trio doing exactly that; blossoming into a creative tour de force whose ambition and scope is boundless. Mirrors announced PUPIL SLICER to the world; Blossom is them seizing it.
Blossom is out now via Prosthetic Records.
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