Album Review: Pupil Slicer - Fleshwork
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
When UK Mathcore leading lights, Pupil Slicer, played Radar Festival back in 2023 they delivered the angriest set of the weekend, and I couldn’t help but wonder what might happen if they captured that rage on tape.
Wonder no more: for Fleshwork, album number three from these Londoners, is nine tracks of vitriolic ire at the continuing state of a world that no longer places value in human life, reducing everything – and everyone - down to an entry on a spreadsheet. A concept album of sorts, Fleshwork is Pupil Slicer out to slay sacred cows and protected political classes.
It’s been all-change in the band’s ranks between albums too; bassist Luke Fabian and guitarist Alex Brown have departed, with the low end and backing vocals now being handled by Luke Booth, leaving Kate to be the Slicer’s solitary six-string slinger.
Not that this slimming down has affected the sound in any meaningful way; if anything, the absence of the second guitar gives Fleshwork a space that is filled by the work of the rhythm section.
Heather opens things with a driving low end and Kate’s banshee vocals, riffs twist, wringing abrasive blasts and strangely melodic electronics from the mix. Skipping drums and earworm melodies cannot obfuscate the fact that Pupil Slicer are the heaviest they’ve ever sounded – and we’re not yet three-minutes in. Black Scrawl feels stripped naked and brutally honest as its guitars flail, grinding away against a stabbing Mathcore progression.
Both Gordian and Sacrosanct prominently feature Luke’s bass, underpinning the haunting refrains of the former and combining with Josh Andrews’ drums on the latter, locking into each other with clinical precision and forming a whole new entity, all of its own.
Fleshwork is heavily loaded with short, sharp, shock and awe tracks up front, but that only tells a portion of the story, as Pupil Slicer is too adept at layering colour and shade into their compositions. Innocence’s riff crawls and the reverbing vocals add a hypnotic and haunting quality. There’s an industrial undertone and the break at the halfway mark introduces an alternatively flavoured section that could play on, ad infinitum, such is the mesmeric quality of the outro.
Innocence is mirrored in Nomad, the crawling riff replaced by Black Metal frenzy, symphonic and cosmic, while maintaining the melodic feel, this one even includes an ambient section where Kate gets to rage through an angry punk vocal. The opening sections of epic album closer, Cenote, continues the black metal sound, adopting an Oathbreaker vibe and more than a hint of the progressive through an ambient mid-section, which is raw and all the better for not being over-produced.
The record’s title track is a particular highlight – among many others, it must be said – due to its heavy, punchy riff, which is haunting in its simplicity, and the combination of sixties psychedelia, and Meshuggah-style breakdowns. Yeah, that’s what I said! And, just to show the world is not irredeemable, Pupil Slicer give us White Noise, Fleshwork’s most upbeat tune, made up of alternate vibes and playing with the ideas of light and shadow.
It's a deceptively simple sounding record that draws you into its world and doesn’t want to let you go. At less than forty-minutes in length, it’s a smash and grab affair in which the sparseness of the sound and the appropriate production mean Fleshwork is the album Pupil Slicer needed to make in 2025.
Hopefully, the third album syndrome will kick in, as the band amply demonstrate their ability to move into the big leagues. Next stop, the LLNN tour, when Fleshwork’s tunes will get a robust road test, I’m sure of that.
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