![]() ![]() In 2018, Davies began writing the majority of songs you'll hear on Mirrors, each one of them the product of a different approach. Eventually, Fabian came into the fold, elevating Davies' natural penchant for mathcore and powerviolence by introducing her to the bands who'd go onto serve as key influences for Pupil Slicer: Botch, the Dillinger Escape Plan and Code Orange. She received a message from a band who were at a practice in Camden, only a few tube stops away from her, almost immediately after posting. After learning her way around the instrument, Davies posted on an online forum for musicians: "I'd love to be in a black metal band like Deaf Heaven," she typed. ![]() Eventually, she picked up the guitar and began strumming along to Deafheaven songs. She dipped her toe into those black-metal waters after a Radiohead and Godspeed You! Black Emperor phase, as post-rock and shoegaze became her gateway towards the music that came closest to resonating the sound of her soul. That changed shortly after she left Bournemouth for London, where she studied for a degree in mathematics, and soon Davies began taking walks through the city with Deafheaven in her ears. While those of us who experienced a similarly bitter adolescence might found some solace for our angst in hard rock or rap, Davies still hadn't been introduced to heavy music. Video of PUPIL SLICER - INTERLOCUTOR (OFFICIAL VIDEO) "I sort of stopped interacting with other people entirely because I just thought people were cruel by that point." ![]() I wasn't one of the 'in kids.' I didn't fit in with others." By the time she left college, at 18, she'd consigned herself to total seclusion. ![]() I've got autism so I wouldn't be able to tell what they had to pick on. What exactly did they have to pick on? "I don't know," Davies says. "They picked on me relentlessly," she recalls. Three years later, she was forced back into public school, where she experienced more callousness from her peers and teachers. Friends for Davies were nonexistent, save for the conductors at her local youth orchestra, where she eventually became leader of the first violins, aged 14. The only music that filled her ears were video game and film soundtracks, and the violin she'd been practicing from when she was seven. She spent four years at a school where she was bullied mercilessly, by students and teachers alike, before she dropped out and enrolled in homeschool. Growing up in Bournemouth, a graying seaside town in southern England, Davies was a target of cruelty from a young age. The personal and political pain that Davies has experienced could only be voiced and expunged with the violence of Mirrors. It's music meant to confuse, to scramble time, to leave you asking, "What the fuck did I just listen to and how the fuck did they do that?" True to its name, Mirrors is both a reflection of Davies - the thoughts and pain and internal narratives so core to her, yet barely spoken of before - and a reflection of a systemically fascist society, where inequality, discrimination and injustice are embedded into its law, customs and economy. The record is so unrelenting in its sonic ultraviolence and in its commitment to dissonance and disorientation that it brings to mind genre high-water marks such as Dillinger Escape Plan's Ire Works and Converge's Jane Doe. The rest of the world should be readying itself along with them. Pupil Slicer - who are rounded out by bassist Luke Fabian and drummer Josh Andrews - are preparing for the March release of their debut album, Mirrors. Video of PUPIL SLICER - WOUNDS UPON MY SKIN (OFFICIAL VIDEO) ![]()
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