Vexed: Finding Strength at Rock Bottom

“For a while, I wasn’t even sure if we were going to be able to write an album,” Megan Targett, vocalist with ferocious alt metallers VEXED is remarkably candid on the process that, eventually, birthed their second album Negative Energy. It’s not an exaggeration either; as she openly discusses with us during our conversation, she explains that there were a lot of hurdles the band had to overcome before they could even begin the writing process for this album, including internal struggles, devastating life changes and even scrapping the entirety of an album they’d started writing to follow 2021 debut Culling Culture.

That debut, while she admits gave them a lot of opportunities and was welcomed by the metal community with open arms, she feels they’d already outgrown it by the time it came out. “There’s a lot of cringe. We’re proud of what we managed to do, because we were young and naive,” she explains, “but some of those songs were really, really old.” In fact, several of the songs on Culling Culture had existed in some form for up to three years or more by the time they eventually put together the album.

With Negative Energy, that’s not the case at all, though in some ways it’s a wonder an album did happen at all. Her earlier remark that they were unsure of their ability to write an album came from a collective writers’ block; trying to repeat the process of Culling Culture to an extent, they found they were trying to channel their collective traumas into something that still saw the bright side or at least some silver lining amongst the negativity and struggle. She remembers the moment that dam burst, when they threw that album away and found a fertile well of inspiration to create again.

“One day,” she recalls, “we were sat at Al [Harper, bassist]’s house and instead of writing demos we didn’t like, we just sat and let everything out. Unintentionally, we had a therapy session with each other; Al was explaining what he was going through, I said I couldn’t find positivity in music any more, and both Willem [Mason-Geraghty, drums] and Jay [Bacon, guitars] were the same.” The following week, on gathering to write demos, they suddenly found the block was gone; by channelling all their pain, anguish and grief, without trying to find hope, Negative Energy quickly took shape.

If you asked Meg to sum up the album in a few words, she admits that “it’s us hitting rock bottom, and putting it into music. But while it is our rock bottom, we found ourselves and we found the best thing we’ve been able to create, and we’re so proud of it.” Rightly so; lead single Anti-Fetish bounces with an infectious groove and bending notes in the riff enough that they almost wrap in on themselves again, while songs like It’s Not the End – one we single out during our conversation – memorialise and helped them process deep grief.

At this point in our conversation, we come onto It’s Not the End, a sonic curveball late in the album that deals with an incredibly heavy loss in not only hers, but the band’s personal lives that happened during the pandemic. “It gave me something to focus on,” she muses, “because when you lose somebody so close to you and you go through such horrific things, your life almost stops with them. You ask yourself, how am I supposed to keep going, what am I supposed to do… being able to write about it gave the grieving some direction, some purpose and helped to get through it.”

Opening with fragile melody, the serpentine guitar line wraps itself around pain-stricken screams, and around two-thirds in, the song blossoms into a towering monument that memorialises and reminisces in equal measure; “I wrote the lyrics of that part by their bedside,” she explains. The recording of it took a whole band effort, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to do it without their support while she was in the vocal booth. The end result doesn’t tug at heartstrings so much as bare its soul entirely; the emotional toll it takes even to listen to it is shattering.

But this isn’t just an album about grief; We Don’t Talk About It might not delve into specifics, but addresses survivor’s guilt around suffering abuse and trauma earlier in life, while Panic Attack addresses the stigma around mental health, of people saying they’ll listen but not being prepared to do so or claiming that a “brave face” or a smile will fix things. While lyrics are kept purposefully vague “to make it approachable for everyone,” there’s still a core of personal experience throughout the whole of Negative Energy that reflects not just Megan’s experiences, but those of her bandmates too.

Particularly, one that’s sure to ruffle some feathers is the closer Nepotism; as its name suggests, the target of their ire is not just people in the music industry but in all walks of life who exploit their connections to take places or roles they’ve never earned, ignoring the hard work of those around them who arguably deserve the position more. The main reason it closes the album, rather than its predecessor It’s Not The End and DMT, is that “we wanted to end the album in a good old fashioned moshpit,” she grins.

In a roundabout way, that’s what Negative Energy is about, and why even the tracklisting falls the way it does. Life might feel like it’s stopped in the face of life-altering loss and the grief that swallows you after, but you still have to get back up again afterwards. The vulnerability on display throughout wasn’t just borne of that chance accidental therapy session, either, as it was hard work, as Meg explains, to open up so much. “I was forced to grow up young and always had a mentality of, you just gotta get through this,” she explains, “you can have a cry later but don’t let anyone see.”

It places them at the forefront of a scene that’s finally learning to be open about its struggles, from friends of the band GRAPHIC NATURE to VEXED themselves. “You have to accept you can only start getting better, to start processing grief or anything else in your life, when you accept that you’re not alright. This was the healthiest way I could personally process it, and if I hadn’t done that, I’d still be in the same position as two years ago with everything pent up inside.”

As we bring our time together to a close, it’s plain that VEXED have come a long way from the days of Culling Culture and learning how to process pain and life in a new light with Negative Energy; one that they rightly highlight isn’t addressed properly, where we’re all expected to get up and go about our days without thinking of the hurt. Her parting wisdom is light-hearted, but disarmingly profound; “if you need to lie in bed and eat three McFlurries and cry, if that’s what you need to get through the day, that’s what you have to do. And don’t ever beat yourself up about it.”

Negative Energy is out now via Napalm Records.

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