Cauldron: Metalcore Brewed To Perfection
“I just hope that people hear how much of ourselves we put into it.” A lot of bands say something like that about their music, but Frazer Cassling of CAULDRON means it more than most. The Birmingham-based metalcore outfit’s debut full-length Suicide In The City is mere days old as we chat to their frontman over Zoom and it is getting all the love it deserves in all the right places, but the road to this moment was far from easy.
“I’d moved out with Zak, our drummer, and within a month had to move back to where my parents lived, because I couldn’t take care of myself,” explains Cassling of the circumstances in which the album began to take shape. “I had to be cared for. I was basically bedridden when I started creating the story, initially just writing down notes and kind of fleshing out how the story would play out, that gave me a reason to open my laptop and start writing notes and then that just kept going from there.”
From this emerged a rich and detailed concept inspired by Cassling’s love of bands like MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE and COHEED AND CAMBRIA, and one that drew heavily on what he was going through at the time. “I feel like each character is kind of a representation of something that I was personally struggling with when I made them, but not in so much of an obvious way,” offers Cassling. Among them is a teenage girl being bullied at school, a victim of domestic violence, a man with no memories at all, and of course the album’s main character – and ultimately its antagonist – therapist Tristram St. Claire, who attempts to manipulate his patients into carrying out a sinister failed plot.
As has already been mentioned, there is much of Cassling himself in the story, but – somewhat refreshingly – he posits that putting it out there “isn’t really as scary as I guess you think it would be. I’m quite comfortable with the vulnerability because during that time in my life I was reliant on other people’s vulnerability. I was relying on watching other people talk about similar things to what I was going through and them being very open about it and then me realising I don’t live in an isolated space where I’m just a freak. So now in my life it doesn’t really bother me to speak candidly about things like that, and I think that was quite natural when we were making the album.”
Of course, concept albums have always been a bold move, but perhaps never more so than in the current age where so much is made of the diminishing attention span and TikTok and Netflix and skip intro and ‘no-one listens to albums anymore’ and all the rest of it, but Cassling and co. aren’t really worried about any of that. “The way we see it is that we want to be authentic,” he emphasises. “We don’t really care about trying to push playlisting and shit like that because we just want you to listen to our album and we’re just gonna say to you ‘please listen to our album’.”
And you really should; Suicide In The City is one of the best examples of what you might call ‘throwback metalcore’ of recent memory – right up there with the likes of RENOUNCED and DYING WISH and definitely at least the debut SEEYOUSPACECOWBOY LP. “I wouldn’t say we intentionally throw back, but we are inspired by a lot of the bands that were on Trustkill and Ferret – the classic metalcore labels – so naturally we’re making music that sounds kind of throwbacky,” elaborates Cassling. “I’m never really trying to elevate the sound or to bring anything new to the table. I don’t care about trying to reinvent metalcore or anything like that, I just want to make a good metalcore album, because all of my favourite bands just make good metalcore music and don’t really feel the need to try to make this crazy thing.”
Indeed, it is not just the wider world of classic metalcore that is in good health at the moment but also CAULDRON’s local scene in Birmingham, which Cassling believes is in the best place it ever has been. “You have a bunch of people running the scene that actually really care about the scene,” he explains. “They’re not trying to make money off the scene, they’re trying to elevate the scene because they love going to shows and they want the shows to keep happening… you go to any Birmingham hardcore shows, they’re really young, new audiences that haven’t really been to many shows, don’t know many bands, but are just having a crazy good time.”
This is all Cassling wants really; there is no ten-point plan for world domination, just a desire to keep making good – dare we say ‘proper’ – metalcore that connects with whoever hears it. “I’m happy to keep playing in youth centres in Germany and wherever,” he concludes. “I want to keep playing in places and going to places, and I want people to learn the words and people to like our songs but I have no mechanical hopes for the band. I don’t care about how much money we make, what labels are interested or whatever, I just want to keep doing cool and fun things and I want people to like what we’re doing.”
Suicide In The City is out now via The Coming Strife Records/Ephyra Records.
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