PC Music may be about to wind down, but before then, it’s going out with a bang as A.G. Cook and EASYFUN team up as THY SLAUGHTER for “the perfect PC Music album”. Check out the latest cover story for our New Music Friday playlist edit, The Cut.
Words: Ali Shutler.
We’re not exaggerating when we say that PC Music changed pop music forever. The label was first launched in 2013 by A.G. Cook, with early releases by the likes of Hannah Diamond, Cook and Danny L Harle toying with the genre alongside intertwined ideas of authenticity and consumerism. It was divisive, but this only helped the glitching, garish and brilliant music quickly find a dedicated audience, while collaborations with the likes of Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek and SOPHIE introduced it to the mainstream. It never left, either.
Hyperpop heroes 100gecs pull heavy influence from PC Music and their no-rules approach, while that iconic PC Music sound can be heard in music from global superstars like Dua Lipa, Beyoncé and Sam Smith. Shortly after the label announced it would be winding down at the end of this year, ID published an article entitled “PC Music can retire now because its influence is everywhere”.
However, before the label stops releasing new music entirely, PC Music has one final trick up its digital sleeve: Thy Slaughter. A collaboration between Cook and EASYFUN, the duo released their debut single back in 2015 as part of the celebrated compilation album ‘PC Music Volume 1’. Clocking in at just 135 seconds, ‘Bronze’ is a chirping, giddy slice of glee that wastes no time in introducing syrupy vocals and playful instrumentals before a burst of industrial doom. Apart from a couple of remixes and the occasional live performance, though, that was all anyone heard from Thy Slaughter until they announced their debut album ‘Soft Rock’, which was released on Friday.
Featuring appearances from Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek, and Alaska Reid, the glitching electronic album stays true to PC Music’s enduring legacy, but it constantly toys with expectations as well. Live guitars, Nirvana-inspired imperfections, and twisting moments of industrial fear help the considered album feel like a complete body of work rather than a jarring playlist designed to shock. It is, according to Cook, perhaps “the perfect PC Music album”.
We spoke to Cook and EASYFUN’s Finn Keane about the gorgeous record, the future of the band, working with Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell, taking inspiration from The Strokes and the legacy of PC Music.
You’ve been making music together for a number of years, with the first Thy Slaughter track ‘Bronze’ coming in 2014. Why now for debut album ‘Soft Rock’?
Cook: Back in 2014, I was completely uninterested in making albums. Now in a music scene dominated by streaming, I find albums and album cycles a really vital way of making sense of things. Finn and I have also collaborated on a lot of music outside of Thy Slaughter, and it wasn’t until 2019 that we realised it might be an ideal vehicle for the sort of music that we wanted to hear.
Considering how long people have been waiting for more new music from this group, did that add to the pressure at all? Has the ambition changed over the past 8 years?
Keane: I feel like Thy Slaughter is the dark horse of PC Music. No one really expected that much, and now here it is, returning for Armageddon. The ambitions for Thy Slaughter developed naturally over a number of years. An integral part of my friendship with Alex ever since we were teenagers has been discovering and getting excited about music, showing it to each other, and then writing lots of demos in that style. For us, ‘Soft Rock’ is quite a personal summation of all the musical influences we’ve been talking about for the last 17 years.
Was there a vision going into the record, or was it a case of pulling together tracks that you’d worked on over the years?
Cook: Our first track, ‘Bronze’, launched with quite a particular vision – a minimal, early PC Music track with a shifting key signature and an archaeologically ambiguous bronze coin. Since then, the project has become a lens for Finn and I to reexamine our own work with a new perspective: “What would Thy Slaughter do?”
Why ‘Soft Rock’? What does that title mean to you?
Keane: ‘Soft Rock’ feels like a contradiction. I love music that might be sweet and sentimental but could quickly spiral into something ugly and disorienting – anything that looks at the relationship between two extreme positions. With my ‘Electric’ and ‘Acoustic’ EPs, I was trying to make a song like ‘Audio’ sound as sharp and shiny, then as raw and unfiltered as possible. That’s also an element of 7G that I love: how the music’s morphing every few minutes. On ‘Soft Rock’, the blown-out distortion of ‘Sentence’ leads to the crystal clear piano on ‘Fountain’.
Are there any songs in particular that you’re excited to share or are important to the record as a whole?
Cook: I feel surprisingly precious about all the tracks on this album, maybe because of how specific the process has been. My debut album ‘7G’ had 49 tracks, which felt like a blur of things, pieces and ideas, but each of the 12 tracks on ‘Soft Rock’ is a time capsule with a very specific memory. ‘Lost Everything’ is particularly special to us. We started writing it with Sophie in 2016 and finished it with Ellie in 2022, but the message and the feeling of the track were completely unified as if it had a mind of its own.
There are moments across the record that will be familiar to fans of your work with PC Music, but there are also a lot of new flavours and shapes to the record. Was it important that the Thy Slaughter album pushed the boundaries of what you’ve done previously?
Keane: We definitely wanted to try working a bit differently. We were reading the letter Steve Albini wrote to Nirvana just before starting work on ‘In Utero’. He talks about working fast, not overthinking, and trying to capture energy and enthusiasm rather than perfection. The writing process was sometimes more meticulous, but we always worked quickly on the production, keeping in errors and clicks, maybe trying to make a Steve Albini record involving soft synths and programmed drums as well as guitars.
The album’s been described as a fusion of hard pop and rock; who were you inspired by, and what was it about rock music that you wanted to play around with?
Cook: Genres like ‘rock’ and ‘pop’ are supposedly aiming for completely different things… rock music is meant to be heavy, authentic and self-contained, while pop strives to be light, artificial and ever-expanding. In reality, there’s a lot of overlap. I think we’re particularly influenced by rock bands with traditionally “pop” sensibilities, like Pixies, Nirvana, and The Strokes, or artists and producers like Prince and Daft Punk, who use heavy, sometimes quite volatile sounds to make beautiful pop music.
Lyrically, what did you and your collaborators want to explore across ‘Soft Rock’?
Keane: Each song has a specific origin story, and some were led by our collaborators. But with the songs Alex and I wrote together, as so often happens with any songwriting, things we’d discussed filtered into the songs without having to consciously write them in. Another key part of being Thy Slaughter is that lyrically, you’re allowed to lean into the archaic and mythic at every opportunity. We made the most of that.
It feels like there’s a lot of loss, darkness and disillusion across the record, but there’s also a lot of catharsis. Would you describe it as a hopeful record?
Cook: I hope so. Those two extremes are inseparable; they don’t make sense without each other.
There are lots of familiar faces on the record, but how did Ellie Rowsell get involved, and what made you want to bring her into your world?
Keane: Ellie has been part of one the most respected bands making guitar music while we’ve been off making music on our PCs, so she was the ultimate collaborator for ‘Soft Rock’. With ‘Lost Everything’, she really connected with the concept of the lyrics Sophie had already written over the chorus and was always thinking about how to add layers of emotional depth to the song. I think it’s a highlight.
There’s a dedicated and passionate fanbase around your art, both individually and as a partnership – why do you think your music is connecting in the way it has?
Cook: Collectively building PC Music and the subculture around it has been a massive part of my life, and the notion of “personal computer music” is something that I very genuinely believe in. It’s very personal music made with computers. As a genre or an attitude, it’s constantly making connections, searching for connections and in an endless feedback loop of dialogue with itself.
What do you want this record to mean to people?
Keane: You always hope people enjoy anything you put out, but maybe I care more this time as there are moments on this that feel particularly personal. But to quote Tolkien:
‘And he sang… until their hearts wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together, and tears are the very wine of blessedness.’
Maybe something like that.
This will be one of the last new releases PC Music puts out, and with appearances from Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek and Alaska Reid, it does feel like the perfect way to round out the past decade of PC Music. Was that deliberate, or just good timing?
Cook: Extremely deliberate. It was important for me to mark the “decade of PC Music” as a meaningful milestone. An ambitious (and very collaborative) project like ‘Soft Rock’ is maybe the perfect PC Music album.
This is probably an oversimplification, but it feels like PC Music began to disrupt the world of pop and make things a bit more interesting. With Charli and Caroline both enjoying mainstream success and other PC Music acts seemingly influencing everyone from Beyoncé to Dua Lipa, does it feel like mission accomplished?
Keane: It’s a boring trope to talk about how no one believes in you, but I do remember music industry people being pretty rude about our music: “This is emotionless, it’ll never connect, it’s all a big joke”. It’s been an exciting experience to see this kind of music gain momentum, on a personal level, with ‘Speed Drive’ or ‘Pop 2’ with Charli, but also to see friends like Alex and Dan work on huge pop projects. Obviously, it’s never mission accomplished.
Is this it for Thy Slaughter, or is there more to come?
Cook: Thy Slaughter cannot end.
What’s next for you both?
Keane: Global Thy Slaughter arena tour, three laps.
Cook: 2024 is going to be one of those years. â–
Thy Slaughter’s album ‘Soft Rock’ is out now. Follow Dork’s The Cut Spotify playlist here.
