Church Tongue

From the second that “Heart Of Darkness” kicks off You’ll Know It Was Me, the new EP from Church Tongue, it sounds like that’s exactly where the Midwest band have journeyed for this record’s inspiration. Across its six songs, brutally abrasive guitars mix with vicious, guttural vocals, riff after punishing riff. Each track sounds like being stuck inside a nightmare, only to be violently ripped from it when it ends. But there’s no respite—before there’s even time to take a breath from the harrowing dream state, you’re plunged immediately into a new one. But sonic appearances can be somewhat deceiving. The band—vocalist Mike Sugars, guitarists Nicko Calderon and Chris Sawicki, bassist Jack Sipes and drummer Kyle Spinell—actually describe You’ll Know It Was Me as a “a short record about love that each track touches on in its own way.”
“Thematically,” explains Calderon, “Mike wanted to write about the different kinds of love and the different ways that you can love—for example, loving yourself enough to end a toxic friendship, or loving yourself enough to become sober. And the very last song is quite literally a love song for him and his wife, about how if he dies before her, he will haunt her forever.”

Those different kinds of love have manifest themselves in the band’s most personal and accomplished set of songs to date. That’s not just because of the (relatively) extended period between this record and its predecessor, 2021’s The Hubris Of Gods Departed, but also due to what’s happened in those four or so years. At first, there was the existential uncertainty brought about by the pandemic’s impact on bands and the music industry that adversely affected, well, everything. When that lifted slightly, Calderon found himself dealing with an increasingly busy schedule as the rhythm guitarist of Knocked Loose, having joined that band in 2021. Sugars, on the other hand, was making music with (the now-defunct) Vatican, and then Psycho-Frame.

It meant that Church Tongue got left on the backburner for a while, but eventually the members gravitated back towards the band—and a whole load of new experience and new connections at their disposal with which to pick up from where they’d left off. Recorded and produced by Greg Thomas—who’s recorded all of Church Tongue’s music to date—with Chris Teti, who also helped with production duties, at Silver Bullet Studios in Connecticut, these six ferocious songs are the end result. They build upon the foundations already set in place by the band, offering an intentional and uncompromising vision of who and what Church Tongue is.
“With that last EP,” says Calderon, “we felt like we had finally landed on what we wanted to do as a band. Everything we love about heavy music was encapsulated in those three songs. Initially, the plan from there was to do an LP, but we kind of just fizzled out. So in a way, this feels like a new beginning, but more so like a continuation and a revamp of what we were about to do. It also feels like we fixed the things we didn’t like about the last release.”

In addition to that (overly critical) self-reflection, Church Tongue have also added to their arsenal on this EP. Three of these songs feature guests who help transform them into something even more formidable than they’d otherwise be. “When It Betrays”, a song about Sugars’ (relatively) newfound sobriety, contains an eviscerating and pulverizing appearance from God’s Hate drummer and Twitching Tongues vocalist Colin Young. The band gave him free will to write lyrics for his own vocal parts, and what came back included a line from Twitching Tongues’ “Feed Your Disease”.
“When he sent his part over,” remembers Calderon, “and we heard and read the "Feed Your Disease" line, we just couldn’t believe that he was gracing us with it. We’ve been fans of God’s Hate and Twitching Tongues for a long time, and actually took a lot of inspiration from Twitching Tongues with this EP, so we didn’t feel worthy. We feel like it should go to somebody more deserving. But we are very thankful for it.”

The guest appearances didn’t stop there. Initiate vocalist Crystal Pak lends some caustic screams to the crescendo of “The Fury Of Love”, ramping up the hypnotic intensity of an already incredibly intense song.
“It’s the most ambitious track on the record,” says Calderon. “We do this long brooding minute-and-a-half of the same riff over and over again, which is a nod to Converge, and Crystal really nailed her guest spot on that. She’s amazing, as are her voice and her band."
There’s also Deafheaven’s George Clarke, who adds his devilish mark to the ominous fire of “You’ll Know It Was Me”—that song for Sugars’ wife, which might possibly be the most disturbing declaration of love ever committed to tape. It was also originally written by Calderon to be a Knocked Loose song, who had just been touring with Deafheaven in the UK.
“George was actually the first guest that I asked,” remembers Calderon. “Knocked Loose had just finished our Deafheaven tour in the UK, and around then I’d asked him. I couldn’t believe that he said yes. And then we were like, ‘Well, George said, yes, so maybe we can ask all these other people that we had in mind!’ We shot for the stars and it just clicked and worked. It’s very exciting.”

Without these three cameos, this would still be an incredibly potent record. With them, it becomes another beast entirely—a record jockeying for position as surely one of the most visceral and powerful releases that 2025 will see. It’s also one than reintroduces, reestablishes and recalibrates Church Tongue as a real force to be reckoned with—a band unwilling to compromise and who are going after exactly what they want when it comes to making music.
“All of us are in a very good and comfortable place now as adults,” explains Calderon. “When we were writing, we really just felt like we were doing what we loved. And We had such a fun time writing this. I know it’s such a cliché to say, but this is the rawest form of ourselves that we can put into music. It’s literally just everything that we like about heavy music in six songs. Because at the end of the day, it’s important to write the kind of music that you want to write. If people like it, that’s great, but as long as we like it, that’s all that matters.”