Splitknuckle: Essex Kings
“From every angle of what people may or may not like about the band, I think this is the best thing that we’ve done.” SPLITKNUCKLE vocalist Joey Drake is right about his band’s new album Breathing Through The Wound. The Essex bruisers have been going for over a decade now – their status as UK hardcore legends cemented at least as far back as 2018’s excellent Innocence Bleeds EP – but they’ve really surpassed themselves with this long-awaited full-length.
“Obviously this album is the first time we’ve had to proper knuckle down and crack on with it,” offers guitarist Liam McCarthy. He and Drake are joined on the call by the rest of the band – drummer Matt Bullis, guitarist Christy O’Connor and bassist Larry Statts – on the day of the album’s release, its arrival closing a near six-year gap between records filled only by a compilation appearance and a couple of tracks on a split with Pittsburgh punishers SETTLE FOR NOTHING. Much has changed in the hardcore scene in that time – in the UK and beyond – but for SPLITKNUCKLE it’s all business as usual.
“We’re all doing the same as we did before,” emphasises Statts. “Just maybe a touch more organisation is needed to pull off something like this, which didn’t come naturally for any of us but you just persevere and go with it. In all cases we just want to have a laugh with each other – that’s the whole point, and that hasn’t changed whatsoever.”
Clearly though, the band took their time to get things right for Breathing Through The Wound; the weeks of hard graft and late night recording sessions after full days at work all seem worth it when presented with the finished product – a truly vicious 40+ minutes of serrated metallic hardcore with heavy death metal influences and displays of impressive technicality aplenty. It’s the most ‘SPLITKNUCKLE’ they’ve ever sounded, which of course was entirely the point.
“In the past we’ve gelled well with people in our scene and people have a certain expectation that we sound a certain way live, which is good, and they expect that to be nailed on record,” elaborates O’Connor. “Sometimes people have been like ‘it just doesn’t sound quite as good as you sound live’. I just want people to listen to it and it represent us basically, and I think some of the reasons for the stresses in the studio and taking so long were we were just trying to make sure of that.”
To make that happen, the band returned to producer Ben Spence – not hugely experienced in this kind of music but a friend of theirs for a while and ultimately the perfect man for the job. “Sometimes when you have a producer pushing you it can create an influence that typically isn’t what the band is about,” suggests Statts. “We’ve recorded with Ben once before doing a cover song for The Coming Strife compilation and we enjoyed the experience there and it really allowed us to bring what we had in our heads to life in the recording. That’s exactly why Ben was good because it was loose and it wasn’t so pushy and it let us do things the way we wanted to do them.”
Of course, for every crushing riff or breakdown, Drake has a hard-hitting lyric to match. Breathing Through The Wound seethes with all the rage one might expect of a death metal-influenced hardcore record – whether that’s at betrayals close to home or more big picture stuff like the Russian invasion of Ukraine – but Drake can also get vulnerable when he needs to.
“I’ve got thousands of notes on my phone that are just fucking vomited onto the notepad,” he explains. “There’s certain songs like Fuck Your Whole Life where if I were to read out the lyrics it’s probably how I’d talk when I get into a zone when I’m moaning about something anyway, so that’s cool. But when it’s like the title track I’ve got a lot of pals in hardcore – people who might hear that song or look at the lyrics – and there’s certain lines in there where I haven’t really told a lot of people stuff like that. That kind of thing is a bit worrying because you’re giving a part of yourself that very few people who are close to you have even seen, but that’s what you’re supposed to do.”
And he’s not the only one for whom SPLITKNUCKLE is about far more than riffs and moshing. Like all the best bands in hardcore, and anywhere else for that matter, it all comes down to hanging out with your mates. As we come to wrap up the band do share the typical hopes of seeing things grow in the years to come – and based on the quality of Breathing Through The Wound they have every reason to expect them to – but more than anything else it is about doing it together.
“Doing music with these guys over all these years is absolutely priceless,” concludes Drake. “Maybe the biggest lesson for me personally is friendship over everything really; the thing that’s more important than this band is that we’re all good to each other and keeping it about having fun. I think that is the secret to a lot of bands’ longevity; you speak to some OG bands and they might have never made a fucking living out of it, but they’ve stayed around for like 20, 30 years and they’re all still friends and I think that speaks for itself really.”
Breathing Through The Wound is out now via DAZE/Northern Unrest.
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