Haggard Cat: Chaos Therapy
They have surfed crowds on carpets and never seen or heard from the carpet again. They have walloped Glastonbury’s stage, garnered the reputation as 2000trees’ house band and broken everything under the sun in their live performances. Vocalist/guitarist Matt Reynolds and drummer/vocalist Tom Marsh are masters of chaos, and they are HAGGARD CAT – the noise punk duo from Nottingham.
“It’s always been chaos,” Matt says. “We’re less chaotic as people now, but that’s just how we’ve always naturally done it. I think that’s the beauty of what we see in music: it’s the energy that we feel with it. And I’ll never lose that feeling of chaos therapy that happens when you’re playing.”
After a HECK of a lot of forced stops, self-reflection and growth, HAGGARD CAT are about to release their third full-length album, The Pain That Orbits Life. “It wouldn’t have been possible to get where we have with this album without those moments of reflection. Suddenly, it’s not all looking inward; it’s looking outwards. There’s a canvas all of a sudden, as opposed to just a mirror. God, that sounds so wanky,” Matt laughs.
To paint the picture (canvas), Matt starts seven years ago, when the duo tackled being encased in concrete, but not with a batshit cover of the CANNIBAL CORPSE single; they actually encased themselves in concrete with only a letterbox-sized gap for mates to pass them slices of pizza through when they got too close to nibbling each other. “Definitely one of the worst ideas we’ve ever had,” Matt says. “We came up with it as a music video concept, and it was supposed to be about Brexit and how the touring industry was going to suffer. The concept was that we would perform the song, and the wall would be built around us in time-lapse. We took this to our record label at the time, and they changed it into this horrible stunt where we just got entombed for 24 hours. It was supposed to be an art thing, and it turned into a protest that wasn’t really a protest because Brexit had already happened.
“We weren’t in a massively great place when the wall went up around us – I think the process of releasing all of those singles with that label had been quite a strain on our relationship. So we spent 24 hours unpacking it and relearning that we still loved each other and that it wasn’t each other that we should have been fighting against: it was what was being inflicted on us from the outside. I know it’s not possible for everybody, but if you’re having trouble with a loved one, maybe just lock yourself in a room for 24 hours. No, actually, strike that. That’s a terrible idea,” Matt laughs. “It worked for us, but I think there’s a deep amount of love between Tom and me, and we’re cavemen. We needed to literally have everything stripped from us to realise that again.”
A year later, Matt and Tom were chased through Ireland and back to the UK by, excuse the reminder, lockdown, having just released their second album, Common Sense Holiday. They spent the next 18 months in one of their longest periods of enforced self-reflection, dropped their previous record label and then self-released the EP Cheer Up in 2021, in part to make sure they would have new songs to play on their upcoming, three-times rescheduled UK tour. “It was like nothing ever happened, like we were suddenly completely back to normal, but the whole world had changed,” Matt says. But then Tom came off his bike, broke his collarbone, and they were out again for six months. Then, towards the end of 2024, Tom had to have major surgery on his wrist for carpal tunnel.
They had been playing together in bands since the age of 15. “And we’d been: go, go, go, go, go that entire time,” Matt says, gesticulating at speed. “So, although it felt awkward to have this stasis kind of put on us a few times, those were the times when we looked inwards and went, ‘oh, what are our personalities outside of just going on tour and making music?’ We found joy in spending time with family again, reconnected with old friends, and rediscovered relationships that we hadn’t had time to cultivate at the same time as everyone else in our world had been cultivating them, because we’d always been missing from the picture.”
Splattered with industrial synths, layer upon layer of raging punk vocals and stage-smashing choruses, The Pain That Orbits Life is HAGGARD CAT’s most definitive record yet. And by definitive, they mean: “We weren’t doing it for anybody else. We spent so long on it and had so much time with it that we didn’t see the need to shape it in any direction that we felt it had to go. We didn’t put any restraints on like oh, it has to just be two instruments. Or there can’t be really metallic moments because we’re not a heavy band. Or there can’t be lighter, poppier moments because that’s not what people want. It’s like, why not? It doesn’t matter what people want. Ultimately, we’re just pleased that we get to make music together and the act of doing that for a record.”
And if people don’t like it, they can always encase themselves in concrete on 8 May with nothing but The Pain That Orbits Life for company. “With it on repeat,” Matt emphasises, “Exposure therapy to the record.”
THE PAIN THAT ORBITS LIFE is out now via Church Road Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS129 here.
For more information on HAGGARD CAT like their official page on Facebook.