
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.
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.
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?"
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'.

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.
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.
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.
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.
Cook: I hope so. Those two extremes are inseparable; they don't make sense without each other.
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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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. ■












