Glasgow-based post-punk quartet Conscious Pilot release their new single ‘Human Poultry’, the second offering from their debut album of the same name, due 8 May via DevilDuck Records, making them the only British band currently on the Hamburg-based label’s roster. Heavier and more urgent than anything the band have put out before, the track hits hard from the off — a fast, punky riff that somehow manages to be both relentless and completely irresistible, built for movement as much as catharsis.
The song started life as bassist Jack Sharp’s attempt to process the particular sting of being fired, that specific cocktail of humiliation, self-recrimination and forced acceptance. What emerged was something more tangled than a straightforward venting of frustration: a track that wants to scream but keeps catching itself, that reaches for humour as a defence mechanism while knowing full well that’s exactly what it’s doing. It doesn’t quite let itself off the hook, and it doesn’t quite let the listener off either. The band add:
“‘Human Poultry’ is about being slowly prepped and consumed by everything around you — trying not to hate yourself for not doing enough, overthinking, and ultimately just getting through the day.”
The album the track previews is a record shaped entirely by place and circumstance. Written and rehearsed at the ‘Workshop’ — drummer Chris McCrory’s studio in the heart of Glasgow — Human Poultry documents the band’s first two years in the city: the strange, funny, occasionally grim texture of daily life refracted through a set of songs that span employment, crime, religion, sport, technology and art. The connective tissue running through all of it is a particular kind of modern helplessness — the sensation of being quietly reshaped by your environment whether you like it or not. Every song finds a new angle on the same basic feeling — the sad made funny, the mundane made strange, the personal quietly universal.
The record was made with an equally distinctive set of collaborators: Seth Evans (Black Midi, Shame, Geordie Greep) and Adele Phillips (Fontaines D.C.) recorded and mixed it at RAK Studios in London, with Felix Davis (Geese, The Vaccines) mastering. The artwork comes from Scottish painter Keiti Forbes.
Conscious Pilot Live Dates
May
1 – Newcastle, The Cumberland Arms
2 – Edinburgh- Leith FAB Cricket Club
3 – Nottingham – The Grove
5 – Oxford – The Library
6 – London – The Shacklewell Arms
7 – Ramsgate – Ramsgate Music Hall
8 – Brighton – Green Door Store
9 – Bristol – The Lanes
12 – Hull – The Polar Bear
13 – Todmorden – The Golden Lion
14 – Darwen – Sunbird Records
16 – Leeds – Hyde Park Book Club
22 – Glasgow – Stereo
For more informationo n Conscious Pilot please check their facebook and instagram.