God Damn

There’s dullards out there who think that vicious punk-rock spite and nagging, sugar-crusted, pop-smart songcraft make for strange bedfellows, and that’s fine, because it means us smart folks will have a band as brilliant as God Damn all to ourselves for a little while longer. Only a little while, though; the Black Country duo have just cut a second album so smart, so irresistible, so made-for-radio, so slips-down-the-ears-so-easily-you-barely-notice-it’s-trying-to-slit-yer-throat that even your granny will be whistling the likes of Dead To Me before Christmas.
They formed in 2010 as a trio with a dark secret: before forming God Damn (a name frontman Thom Edward says he regrets now, selected only to cause offence), they were in a [whisper it] indie band. “We had a little major label interest,” remembers Thom. “We were young, and we were naïve, and we listened too much to what people said our music should sound like.” They compromised their vision, they tried to please, they fucked everything up. And in the aftermath, licking their wounds, they vowed to never get fooled again. “We decided to stick two fingers up at that sort of thing,” Thom grins, of God Damn’s gnarly birth. “We didn’t want to play any normal gigs, only guerrilla gigs, and we wanted to give all our music away for free. Our sole purpose was to piss people off.”
Like a pube on a toilet seat, people were indeed pissed off, some of them at least. Others, however – the groovy fuckers of legend – dug the spite, the energy, the vision of early God Damn. They cut an album’s worth of demos, and everything was looking bright, until they lost that third member, in grim circumstances, and abruptly became a two-piece. Edward and his drumming frere Ash Weaver steeled themselves and entered the studio to cut a debut album, Vultures, that reflected their embattled state of mind. “Vultures was a bleak album,” admits Thom. “A venting of the spleen: epic, intense, sculpted. That was a dark time for us, and those were really sad songs.”
As personal as Vultures was, its dark rock vision found plenty of kindred spirits as God Damn took their debut album on the road. On grand festival stages or supporting the likes of Foo Fighters in the enormodomes, Vultures’ sulphurous tuneage proved more than a match for the wide-open spaces. In the more intimate environs of their own headlining gigs, anarchy and carnage reigned. “There’s a bunch of people completely losing their shit at the front,” says Thom, of a typical God Damn live experience. “Recently I’ve had to stop shows because people are covered in blood, I’ve had to tell people, hey, this isn’t the place for a fight. Further back, it’s a melting pot: everyone from bikers to housewives to teenaged girls.”
After many months taking their testament to the people, Thom and ash rolled off the road and into some well-earned downtime. Only it didn’t quite pan out like that. “I had a real creative spurt,” grins Thom, acidly. Their second album was written in a matter of weeks, and recorded (with the assistance of producer Ross Orton, who had previously recorded Arctic Monkeys and who Thom, with no little affection, has dubbed “Sheffield’s answer to Saxondale”) in only three weeks. “We did it quick because it was pouring out of us,” says Thom. “And you don’t ever put the kibosh on creativity.”
The songs sound everything like God Damn, and yet nothing like Vultures. “We didn’t want to make another album like that,” says Thom. “We’ve really moved things forward,” adds Ash. “It’s a lot more direct, and there’s a lot more tunes on it, proper songs that I’m proud of. These are the best songs we’ve written so far. It’s something I really believe in.”
These new songs were more upbeat (“These are still horrible, nasty songs though”, Thom is quick to insist), and unabashedly pop, in the same way Nirvana’s Nevermind was ‘pop’: prizing the value of a tune as a means to caving your skull in, and using artfully crafted verses and choruses to slip past your defences and detonate their malevolent little stories when you least expect it.
The reference points come thick and fast – harmonies torn out of an Alice In Chains album (Failure), blasts of garage-y psychedelic pop that give Ty Segall more than a run for his money (Oh No), brawny stomps that make like QOTSA back when they could fuck you up but good (Six Wires), even an infernal, soul-scraping blues that sounds like Tom Waits jamming with The Mars Volta (the nightmarish Violence). Moreover, though, they always sound like God Damn, even as every addictive nugget redefines what sounding like God Damn even means. Vicious, metallic, corrosive, these songs are still defined by that uniquely accessible quality, that addictive X-Factor that’ll have you skipping back to the start before a song’s even finished, just to see if they really are that audacious, if they really want to make music this catchy, and also this caustic: bubblegum cut with something nasty that will keep you chewing till your jaw turns to powder
“Whatever comes out, comes out,” says Thom, of the God Damn creative process. Years before, he’d been trying to write pop songs to please corporate paymasters, before realising that was a fool’s game and buying his freedom with the ugliest, grandest noise he could make. Now he finds himself writing pop songs again, but because he wants to: perversely brilliant pop songs that exist only to lead innocent ears astray, and to give no-longer-innocent ears the pleasure they crave.
“We do what the fuck we want to do, and if it turns out poppy, it turns out poppy,” he adds. “We’ve come full-circle with this album. We’re writing pop songs. We think we’re the fuckin’ Beatles now.” (“It’s still got that alternative edge to it though,” adds Ash. And he’s not wrong.)
Thom’s already begun writing their next album, by the way. “I’ve just had my first kid,” he explains, “and I wanted to get one more nasty album done, before I start writing about flowers and shit.
Seems unlikely, to be honest.