Scaler have always been difficult to shoehorn into a genre – blending heavy guitars with dance-able electronic music, they have carved out their own niche. They credit Bristol’s underground electronic scene and growing up with metal music for this intriguing mash-up. And maybe that’s why Bristol is the perfect place for it, with Scaler’s gigs so popular they often sell out within minutes.
“We’ve all been in metal bands playing heavy music and we thought: how can we do this? It ends up blurring,” Alex Hill, one of the band members alongside Isaac Jones, James Rushforth and Nick Berthoud, tells us.
Following on from their debut album release last year, they have now announced their new EP Reflex, out early next year. The single Spiral, taken from the EP, is out now and shows them going back to their heavier roots. It’s an exciting taste of what’s to come.
Alex says about the EP that the band decided to “just bash something out using the core principles of what this band actually is”.
“So, at the start of the year we got in the studio together with nobody else but our instruments, bashed out music, edited it down over the next few months,” he adds.
We sat down with Alex, who told us more about the inspiration behind the EP and their upcoming tour.
Tell me about your music. It’s difficult to put into a box. I’ve seen you both at electronic music venues and at Arctangent. Can you tell us why you think that is?
It’s always been a bit tricky for us to describe it and to be able to work out where we sit and which venues we should be playing, who we should be touring with. The longer the band has existed, the more we surrendered to the fact that it will end up where it ends up. People don’t consume music like they used to, they don’t just listen to music or house music, everyone absorbs everything all the time – which is amazing. We don’t try to exist in only one line. We played a techno festival in Barcelona and the alternative guitar festival Arctangent this year.
We all overlap a lot, we all like abrasive guitar music, we all grew up listening to metal. In the last 10 years or so, once we moved to Bristol, we were exposed to this whole new world of interesting electronic music, not just dance music but ambient stuff, a lot of techno, UK bass, stuff Bristol is known for and it was this whole new world opening up in front of us. We’ve all been in metal bands playing heavy music and we thought: how can we do this? It ends up blurring.
So you’re releasing a new EP. What is it about?
When we made our last full length record it took us absolute ages and it was pretty ambitious. We wanted to do a lot of things we hadn’t done before, work with new people and make songs we thought of making before, new types of vocal and production, which was fun, and see what was possible with this band but it just took ages so we were pretty exhausted.
Then we were like: let’s just bash something out using the core principles of what this band actually is. So, at the start of the year we got in the studio together with nobody else but our instruments, bashed out music, edited it down over the next few months. They’re much more stripped back and still three dimensional. The essence of the band and the core of what we are when we play live.
You’re going on tour! What do you look forward to about playing live?
It’s always been the main focus of the band. It’s definitely a live project. It always excelled in a live arena. Capturing that energy has always been a challenge when it comes.
It’s everything to us, we absolutely adore Bristol. We’re endlessly inspired by what’s come before us and what’s happening now, this and wouldn’t exist without it. Making this music was a reaction to what we were seeing in Bristol and the people we were meeting, the nights we were seeing happen. It’s such an exciting city for music and such an encouraging community to be making music and art in. There’s no cliques, everyone is doing cool stuff and being any part of that.
//Words: Clara Bullock//