Scott Hull Says the Next Pig Destroyer Album Will Be “More Extreme” Than Head Cage
Unless Donald Trump is arrested or Ronnie James Dio comes back from the dead for really (i.e., not as a hologram), this is, without a doubt, the best news you will hear all day:
Pig Destroyer, the only band whose music I will allow to be played at my funeral, are working on a whole lotta new stuff, according to guitarist/producer Scott Hull (also of Agoraphobic Nosebleed renown, as if you didn’t know that already). Better still, it sounds like they’re working on a variety of new stuff.
The info comes a new Decibel interview with Hull centered around The Octagonal Stairway, the band’s just-released collection of b-sides and rarities (buy it here).
Hull begins by saying that he recently had to re-learn all the material from Pig Destroyer’s first two albums, Prowler in the Yard and Terrifyer, for the purposes of playing them live (presumably this was pre-pandemic). As you can imagine, this got Hull thinking about his younger self:
“It’s interesting to revisit 20-year-younger me and my mindset when I was writing that stuff. It’s neat because it’s as close to getting back into that groove as you could possibly get. It’s inspiring me to go back into that direction a little bit; not to just rehash stuff, but I could tell what I was trying to go for, what we were trying to go for, which is a little different than what we do now. The songs are a little bit longer in structure and they’re a little catchier. Early in the Terrifyer and Prowler in the Yard days, and [the EP] Explosions [in Ward 6], we really tried to intentionally cut grooves off before they got too repetitive, something that the early Melvins records did and we really tried to follow that.”
Hull elaborates:
“It was kind of the disposable attitude about writing the music for me… A lot of it was trying to capture something that was very inspired so we would try to write and get a song down just enough so we could track it and get it done with, whether or not we would play that at a show was another issue altogether. We just really didn’t want to dwell and over-practice stuff. We wanted to keep it kind of rough and have the wheels about to fall off feeling.”
After revealing that today the band “definitely write stuff and demo stuff and do pre-production demos for things” and all those more traditional practices, he goes on to discuss the band’s plans for future releases. These will include a live album (!), a Head Cage-y, noise-rock-ish split with Cherubs, and a new full-length that will more in the vein of old school PxDx:
“We’re intentionally in our mid-period phase that a lot of bands have gone through. Napalm Death had their Diatribes and the three albums. We’re sort of intentionally in that, where we’re doing stuff that’s a little groovier and it’s not necessarily as extreme, but it’s something that we need to sort of get into our discography and out of our system. I’ve already told the guys we’re going to go back into something more extreme for the next record.
“We’ve got a live album coming up after The Octagonal Stairway and then we’re going to do a split with Cherubs which is going to be more in tune with that noise rock-type stuff and then we’ll do another full-length. I have every intention at this point for it to be shorter, faster, weirder songs, sort of like the earlier stuff.”
My only question is: are pre-orders live yet?
You can read the entire interview here.
