Burner: It’s Up To Us
“What would TRAP THEM do?” After debating with his bandmates whether to cut the instrumental intro from a track for the sake of holding short attention spans, BURNER vocalist Harry Nott resorted to his go-to catchphrase, WWTTD. The track was The Third Revelation, the opener off the extreme metallers’ new record, No One Is Coming To Save Us, and thanks to the realisation that American hardcore punks TRAP THEM would never value streams over artistic integrity, they did no such cutting.
“These are genuinely quite disturbing conversations because why are we getting to this point?” Harry says. “It feels like if you want to engage in that, it’s just a race to the bottom. And the broader question is, should we be fucking TikTokifying the underground? It’s underground music, for fuck’s sake.”
Far from being shackled by the enticing depths of the underground, BURNER have managed to keep hold of every inch of their soil-drenched artistic integrity while storming the bigger stages of Bloodstock and ArcTanGent, and touring with the likes of death metal megalords DEICIDE and modern heavyweights SYLOSIS. The London four-piece have even graced the pages of The Guardian, as the musical solution “for anyone furious about the state of the world”. There’s also the small matter of TRIVIUM’s Matt Heafy naming them one of five bands “everyone needs to watch in 2026” and then going on to feature on BURNER’s latest single, Accelerationist.
When Distorted Sound asks Harry how all this makes him feel, he says, “I mean happy, obviously. But… I think it’s just a thing with human ambition; nothing ever feels enough. Human beings do not set thresholds for success. We just don’t do it by design. We are like, ‘I want more of everything.’ We want this record to be the thing that, to borrow the phrase that everybody keeps saying to me, gets us over the top. Where we’re playing loads of festivals, the music is more widely sought out, and we feel like we’re less underground and more emerging.”
After nine months of no gigs and not knowing how people are engaging with their music, Harry couldn’t be happier for No One Is Coming To Save Us’ album release show on September 26th in London. “I think you lose track of the actual feeling of being a band, to some extent, because you have this product and you’re trying to sell it. Don’t get me wrong, I think all bands are kind of, to borrow the phrase from your man from EXODUS [bassist Jack Gibson], just travelling T-shirt salesmen that play music. But I just want to be shaking people’s hands, playing music, spitting my venom, and in a van for a week eating nothing but Greggs pasties every day – that’s a real experience.”
Now, before any nihilistic preconceptions about an extreme metal band releasing an album called No One Is Coming To Save Us set in, let it be known that “BURNER is not nihilism for the sake of nihilism,” Harry emphasises. It’s easy to stamp music about the end of the world as gritty and nihilistic, and clump 90% of bands that sound vaguely like BURNER all in the same basket, but that’s doing them a disservice. “It’s a disservice to me, right? I put a lot of effort into the lyricism.” Harry is also a screenwriter and editor and has actually spent the past three years reading an unbelievable amount of Holocaust screenplays. “I was, to some extent, morbidly fascinated by the horror of that event: its extremity, magnitude, and inhumanity.”
“When I think about the historical context of things like World War II or the civil rights movement, people gave their lives towards something where we had an opportunity to maybe build a better future. And it feels like right now all of that is being slowly stripped away and is decaying in front of us. And the question becomes: what do we do? How can we get out of this? Can we get out of this? Can human beings change, or are we doomed to be in this eternal violent cycle where we say ‘never again’ about the Holocaust and yet people are dying en masse? Everybody thinks of Gaza, but all around the world people are being killed or tortured in horrible ways by governments and in conflicts.”
Harry wrote Accelerationist, for instance, about the people who inspire stochastic terrorism, in which unknown people are riled up by hostile public rhetoric to commit statistically probable acts of violence. Events such as the 2011 Norway attacks, where Anders Behring Breivik – a believer in “the Great Replacement theory”, a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory – killed 77 people across two domestic terrorist attacks. “I remember seeing that footage on television,” Harry recalls. “And I can’t grasp the emotional sorrow of that moment in metal music, but I can grasp the anger of the fact that there are people out there right now perpetuating the same myths that have existed long before this, and we can see them year after year as these atrocities happen. It’s the same myths, lies, and racism, and it’s the same people pushing them. And we know who these people are because we see them everywhere.”
“No One Is Coming To Save Us has two meanings: no one is going to come and drag us out of the situation we’re in, and it’s up to us to change things, to save ourselves.”
No One Is Coming To Save Us is out now via Church Road Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS133 here.
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