Tuskar: Anger Is A Gift
“We’ve never written music for anyone else. I write this because it’s my escape, it’s my fun.” That’s Tyler Hodges, one half of Milton Keynes’ TUSKAR talking recently on the creation of their debut full-length album Matriarch. And it’s an approach that has served them well on their early EPs – 2017’s Arianrhod and 2018’s The Tide, Beneath, The Wall. With each release, they’ve been on a natural progression; one that has put them in perfect stead to take the doom/sludge world by storm in 2022.
“Me and Tom [Dimmock; guitarist] have been mates for years. We were in a metal band together, just with a bunch of mates. Then one day we were chatting and we started discussing BARONESS. I was like ‘hold up – you like good tunes? So why are we doing shitty LAMB OF GOD rip offs?’” From that point, they took on influences from the likes of SLEEP and CONAN, and took steps to establishing themselves as one of Britain’s loudest bands.
Nowadays, it’s a veritable and varied melting pot of influences that goes into making TUSKAR the band that they are. The press release lists YOB and HIGH ON FIRE, they’ve toured with the likes of RED FANG and DOPETHRONE, and a youth spent listening to KISS and MÖTLEY CRÜE; these bands have all played their part in creating this sound that exists somewhere around the doom/sludge sphere. “When we started out, people were saying how we weren’t doom and we weren’t sludge – so we just called ourselves Nuclear Sludge. And it caught on! Kerrang! picked up on it and even did a Pandora sketch on it which is definitely a highlight of my career so far. It’s still my cover photo on Facebook.”
After years of honing their sound, work on their debut album started in earnest during the pandemic, but the truth is that Matriarch has been bubbling and boiling for years now. “None of these new songs fit our vibe at the time [they were first written]. Halcyon Gilt in particular was written one way and then kept being changed to become something else. We called it GOJIRA for about two years. We were like ‘who have we ripped off most here? Yeah, GOJIRA’.”
But when Tyler’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, the creative process of writing their debut album Matriarch ground to a sudden, sullen halt. But he was eventually able to channel that energy into a whole album that is steeped in sadness and anger at the hand life had dealt him and his family. “The whole album was a massive challenge” he says. “When we first started writing, I was going through a rough time with family. The album is an homage to my mum – the Matriarch. I depict it as a story from [becoming a] mother to the grave. It’s a journey through how destructive family can be.”
Tyler is very forthcoming about the pain that fuelled the creation of such an emotionally raw record. From the abuse suffered by his sister, to the cancer diagnosis his mother received (which is now, thankfully, clear), you can clearly hear every ounce of bottled up and unprocessed emotion pour out of him throughout the record. “It’s my way of shouting about it for the people I love. To The Sky is about my little sister who is the strongest kid I’ve ever met, and the first time we played Shame, I cried,” Tyler admits. “I want my anger to benefit someone else that’s gone through these things. If one person can hear this record and realise they’re not alone, then it’s job done.”
It makes for an incredibly intense listen and one that feels deeply personal – more so than most anything else released in recent years. Tying together the misery of BELL WITCH’s Mirror Reaper with the acerbic vitriol of LINGUA IGNOTA’s CALIGULA is never going to make for an easy listen, but it is one that is so potent and so rewarding, because this is an incredibly accomplished record. So what’s next for the band?
“The next album is going to be really happy. That, or we’re going to sell out and write a pop album,” jokes Tyler. “We’ve got ideas – there’s stuff already happening, but at the minute we are just looking to get on the road. I’m a booking agent, and I feel like I’ve taken a step back on the TUSKAR stuff working with so many other people, so I kind of want to let someone else do it. Someone less connected than me.” It’s a fair consideration for a man with a full-time job, as well as taking such huge steps with his band, and with the band consisting of just the two of them, it means they’re even more time poor than some of their contemporaries.
“The next thing is going to be even better. It’s going to be bigger. It’s going to be louder. We’re never going to stop trying to progress. We’ve got a lot of ideas we want to play around with. Maybe some violins. Maybe even another member,” Tyler admits. “I’ve always said if we add another member, we’ll have another guitarist. Just imagine the ferocity of that. We’ve also toyed with the idea of synths. There’s something there I want to fuck around with, as a musician.”
TUSKAR is clearly a band with big plans and even bigger ideas. On the eve of the release of their first album, they are already looking to the future and claiming their place wholeheartedly as one of the loudest, rawest and best British bands. Times may be dark, but a TUSKAR–filled future is incredibly bright.
Matriarch is out now via Church Road Records.
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