Cauldron are one of the most energising hardcore bands in the UK right now. The Birmingham quintet have also made its smartest record of recent times, last year’s Suicide In The City concept album. They’ve even put Brum’s phone number into a chonky riff. Meet the band cooking up a potent spell in the underground…
At one point, it looked like were it not for bad luck, Cauldron would have no luck at all. Showing huge promise, as well as a skill in turning shows into pandemonium, back in 2020 they released their debut EP Last Words: Screamed From Behind God’s Muzzle, just in time for COVID to shut down their plans around it. But not before getting robbed of all their stuff.
Four years and one killer album later, last year’s scorching Suicide In The City, the Birmingham hardcore quintet – singer Frazer Cassling, guitarists Dec Breckon and Jess Webberley, bassist Perry Wattis and drummer Zak Jenkins – stand as one of the most exhilarating young bands in the country. Having spent the summer smashing their name into memories via festival shows at Outbreak, 2000trees, Bloodstock and Burn It Down, as well as plenty of gigs of their own, it’s time for anyone not already enraptured to get acquainted…
Cauldron’s aggressive sound is like hardcore shot through with Slipknot’s vicious weight
Frazer: “Me and Zak have been friends since high school. I knew no-one that was into metal, so I gave him a Slipknot CD and said, ‘Do your research.’ He took it home, and they’re still his favourite band. After that, he learned drums because I knew guitar, we started going to our first shows together, played in our first bands together… We started Cauldron when we were playing in a bunch of hardcore bands, and we wanted to do something a little bit heavier, like those classic Ferret and Trustkill Records metalcore bands.”
Brum’s 0121 phone code has already given one of the city’s festivals its name. Cauldron have gone one further and used it as guitar tab
Frazer: “It’s a cool little nod to where we’re from, the 0-1-2-1 riff. It’s a cool way to reference it, and it’s a good way to shout out to everyone from Birmingham at a show, especially because it’s such a heavy riff. When we say it when we’re playing it, the people who know, know.”
It’s not just a type of music, after all
Perry: “We were the new Birmingham hardcore band for four or five years. But there was still a scene, still that community.”
Frazer: “We’ve played a lot of the places in Birmingham where they do hardcore shows. We’ve played in practice spaces and places like that as well. And we’ve done the German shows where you play in a basement. Honestly, sometimes you get weird ones. We played one in Kassel, where the building was a library, right? You walk in and it just looks like a normal library, everything’s furnished perfectly, everything’s well intact. But then you go downstairs, and it’s like your classic basement venue, covered in graffiti and stickers and stuff.”
…and learned that even with the worst luck, there’s still some good in the world
Perry: “We put out the EP, Last Words: Screamed From Behind God’s Muzzle, but then COVID hit literally as we released it.”
Frazer: “We went on a weekender to support it, and our van got stolen. We lost all of our gear and didn’t get any of it back. We had a show booked in Canada that got cancelled for COVID as well.”
Perry: “So much was happening and we were getting so excited, and then COVID went, ‘You’re not doing that. And by the way, you also have to make a load of money to get all your gear back.’”
Frazer: “We’re from Birmingham, which is the car theft capital of the UK. If you’ve got a car, it’s getting stolen, probably. We made the mistake of thinking, ‘We’re parking in a nice area of Birmingham. It should be okay.’ We didn’t consider that those are the places where people steal cars from.”
Perry: “They took our merch as well. [The police] found the remains of the van, and the merch was all shredded and burned, and our gear was gone. We had to buy it all back.”
Frazer: “People did help us out, though, lending gear and cabs and stuff. We’re in the hardcore scene, so bands help each other out.”
Suicide In The City follows the story of a group of people in a support network in Seattle being taken advantage of by a corrupt leader…
Frazer: “I’ve always loved concept albums. I’m just a nerd like that. Me and Dec are really big Coheed And Cambria fans. I’ve read all their comic books, I’m deep in the lore, and it’s something I always wanted to do myself.
“It’s about these characters that meet in a support group in Seattle that’s run by this guy who has nefarious intentions. He’s trying to prove a point to himself about his own psyche by making people do things that they’re not proud of. But, honestly, it gets to a point where even I don’t really understand the concept. There’s a whole part with this robot. I’ve written it, but I don’t really get it. Really, the majority of the story is about these five characters and their own issues, and how they’re navigating things. It’s not a story in chronological order, it’s more about delving into the characters.”
Frazer has done a lot of background on a work-in-progress book, from which elements of the characters have been lifted
Frazer: “There’s a story there. [So far] it’s chapters that aren’t really connected to each other, because I haven’t written the in-between filler bits. But I have written all the parts where I’ve wanted to write a song about something, and I needed something to inform those lyrics, so I wrote the chapters first. On the song The Meeting Place, there’s a chapter in the book for the meeting place, and all the lyrics from that song add to that chapter, and they add to each other, where there’s lines from the song that are from the novel. The book is more a thing where I’m writing it out so I know it and I can follow it.”
If you can relate to the characters in Suicide In The City, it’s probably because there’s something real beneath the surface
Frazer: “The escapism of writing a big story is freeing, in a way. Even if you write about a character going through the same problem, it’s not you, it’s a character in a book. That’s why I did it. Because then it’s no longer about you. I don’t want to just sing about myself, so I made these characters have elements of myself in them. I’d write about them going through the same things, processing something. It would help me to see, ‘Okay, if I was advising that character, I’d advise them differently to how I’m currently acting.’ It helped me put a bunch of different things into these characters, and then I made the story super-campy and over the top to take the piss out of myself a little bit.”
As well as the concept, single Crossing The Threshold is about veganism, and dedicated onstage as such
Perry: “It’s about how much it means to us. As cool as it is releasing a vegan song to maybe influence people, it’s also about just being proud of being vegan.”
Frazer: “I’m not trying to upset anyone. I’m gonna dedicate the songs to the vegans, but I’m not gonna be onstage telling people to go vegan, because I don’t think that’s a method that works. I don’t think the crowd at Bloodstock, first thing in the morning, wants to be told to go vegan. But it’s a shout out to the people that are dedicated to a cause that I am passionate about as well.”
Perry: “But if it does influence someone when we play that song and say what it’s about, that’s awesome. We all love bands like Earth Crisis who have songs that have made us go, ‘Oh shit, maybe I should actually think about what I’m doing.’”
Frazer: “That song wasn’t on the album, because it wasn’t a part of the concept. But everything ever is political. Literally everything you do has some sort of tie to politics. Writing an album that deeply discusses mental health and that sort of thing, even though it’s not me telling you a specific agenda, it’s still a political thing. It felt important to write about at the time, and it’s still something I’m passionate about.”
At Bloodstock, Cauldron kicked up a wild pit before 11am. Oddly, it was also the first time they’ve ever had a circle-pit
Perry: “For some reason, we all thought we were playing at half 11. The day before, we realised it was half 10, and we were like, ‘Oh, no. What if no-one turns up?!’ But it was crazy – even if the people there who drink were probably all hungover. And yeah, that was the first time we’d ever had a circle-pit!”
Frazer: “Reactions like that are part of hardcore, but still, it feels amazing to see people throwing their arms and legs at half 10 in the morning. I know that if that was me, I would still be in bed.”
Cauldron are currently on the up-and-up. But as long as people are still going hard for them, that’s all that counts
Perry: “The past year has felt like milestone after milestone. We’ve been doing festivals like Bloodstock and Outbreak, we’ve done a support slot for Misery Signals at their final London gig, which is huge for me because they’re one of my favourite bands ever. This year we’ve done a lot. Next, I want to see about going that step further.”
Frazer: “We haven’t got some kind of point-by-point, objective mission statement. We just want to play shows and have fun. Playing big fests like Outbreak is great, but we can play a dive bar and have just as much of a good time. We recently played a dive bar in Essex, and it was one of the best shows we’ve ever played. We can do that for 10 years, and if nothing else happens to us, and we still keep playing those shows, I’m happy. It’s as much about the travelling around and being together and friendship as anything else.”
Cauldron’s album Suicide In The City is out now via The Coming Strife. This article originally appeared in the autumn 2024 issue of the magazine.
Read this next:
