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Album review: Dying Wish – Flesh Stays Together
Dying Wish come of age on engrossingly nihilistic third album, Flesh Stays Together.
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Dying Wish: “It’s incredibly nihilistic. I had to reckon with the fact that art is supposed to be honest and uncomfortable”
A “time stamp” of what’s going on around us right now, Dying Wish are about to unleash their full, furious power on new album Flesh Stays Together. Vocalist Emma Boster reveals what it’s like having more eyes on the band than ever, the importance of finding common ground in society, and how she’s learning to use her platform…
- Words:
- Nick Ruskell
- Photography:
- Imani Givertz
By her own description, Dying Wish vocalist Emma Boster is “a happy-go-lucky sort of person”. As she muses this to Kerrang!, you’re already way ahead of her. Smiley, friendly and possessed of an easy-going coolness, there’s plenty of reasons to be cheerful as well.
At the start of the year, she and her bandmates were criss-crossing America with Spiritbox as they properly hit ramming speed, taking in such storied halls as the Hollywood Palladium and New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom. On a previous visit to the Big Apple, the stage was none other than that of Madison Square Garden, by the invitation of Limp Bizkit, the wage of being one of America’s hottest and best rising hardcore outfits.
The rest of the year’s calendar is similarly lovely: there’s a U.S. tour with Poppy, then they join Malevolence’s massive European juggernaut alongside Australian crew Speed, before hitting the highways of America once again, under their own steam on their biggest headline tour to date.
Today itself finds the band – Emma, guitarists Sam Reynolds and Pedro Carrillo, drummer Jeff Yambra and bassist Jon Mackey – in Louisville, Kentucky, tearing it up at the massive Louder Than Life festival, at which they count themselves among such company as Bring Me The Horizon, Knocked Loose, the reunited Dillinger Escape Plan, Amira Elfeky and loads more.
Fortune has smiled further on them as their mid-afternoon set time on a stage in its own corner of the sprawling expo centre site comes around. After three days of skin-grilling heat, a severe weather alert as storms rolled in this morning threatened to pour cold water on the fun as the entire festival was paused. As Dying Wish took to the stage, the sun had his hat back on. And even though the grounds are tarmac, being quite literally an enormous car park, there’s a swirling, speeding pit throughout. Those particularly keen to run the risk of a broken face should they wipe out get busy crowdsurfing, as Emma and the band churn through some of the weekend’s most hard-hitting music. It’s all quite nice for an occasion that she jokes is something of a makeshift honeymoon, having just got married two weeks ago.
Then there’s the band’s new album, Flesh Stays Together, a work that finds them growing into their rising status magnificently. It doubles down on their gnarly, barbed-wire hardcore, while widening their palette to take them somewhere truly bold. It’s brilliant. And this, she sums up with another bit of description: “We’re totally fucked.”
“This record is incredibly nihilistic, and that is something that I didn’t really realise until it was done,” she says. “In hindsight, I was like, ‘Oh wow, this is really dark.’ Part of it is how I actually feel, and there is another side of me that thinks there is hope, but I had to reckon with the fact that art is supposed to be honest and uncomfortable. That’s how I felt at the time, and that’s how I feel now.”
Emma has always written with purpose and used her place on a stage to speak up. In Louisville, there are dedications to “the girls and the gays”, to the trans community, a call to free Palestine. Since she first started using her lyrical pen, though, the temperature of things has increased. Times have become uncomfortably more interesting. Warnings have become things that are happening.
“It’s a time stamp of where I feel like we're heading. I did the same thing with [2023 album] Symptoms Of Survival, which is about Palestine, essentially, and now it feels like we have completely arrived there. And then I wrote this record about the division between people and the loss of faith, and everything is catching up and becoming a little too real.”
This sort of stuff was in Emma’s orbit from an early age. As a kid, she grew up in a “very liberal, very feminist family” as the daughter of a single mum, and the granddaughter of a “very progressive” woman. In an era presided over by George W. Bush, it was quite the guiding light to have.
“I was pretty privileged in that sense,” she says. “I didn’t have to unlearn a lot of conservative feelings. We also weren’t a religious household either. We didn’t go to church, and we hated George Bush. I think that’s kind of where it started for me at a really young age.”
Music would become a thing for Emma as a teenager. At the time she lived in the small town of Central Point in Southern Oregon, where though she had friends at school who were into it, she says there wasn’t much going on and not a lot of people like her, leading her to connect with other fans through MySpace. It was here that she got her head into the underground, When her family moved to Portland, five hours to the north, the new opportunities were game changing. At 14, she began going to shows like Warped Tour for the first time.
“Growing up in the hardcore scene inspired the way that I’ve written lyrics”
Getting more into the heavier hardcore sounds of bands like Terror, Earth Crisis and Ceremony, DIY shows soon followed, her first being San Francisco outfit Punch. As much as the music, the ethics and messaging of the genre chimed with what Emma already knew.
“Dissent is in the DNA of hardcore,” she says. “So, growing up in the hardcore scene, always loving bands that talked about stuff like this, that’s always inspired the way that I’ve written lyrics, partly just because I came from that background.”
Emma didn’t quite twig that she could be the one doing this at first, though. She’d always wanted to be a singer, and actually took it seriously enough as a kid to go to singing lessons and be active in the choir. But for much more than that, the options she thought there were didn’t offer too much hope. “I was never gonna be a pop star, or be in an indie band or something.”
It was while attending a hardcore fest that something clicked as she watched Canadian outfit Mortality Rate and saw their singer Jessica Nyx onstage. “She was so cool, and it suddenly made me go, ‘Oh shit, why don’t I start a band?’” Asked for her memories of her first time onstage, she replies, “Nothing. I think I threw up in my mouth, and I was so nervous that I just blacked out. To this day, I still get nervous before shows. Sometimes the adrenaline is so high I don’t remember anything. So, I remember nothing. There were pictures, I was there, I just don’t remember any of it!”
Though there was always a meaning to Emma’s lyrics, the difference between those first nervous steps is that she has the ear of many more people. And with that comes an extra weight of burden not only to use her voice and platform, but to use it for those who don’t have one.
“It’s weird,” she begins. “It’s not necessarily a responsibility that I had ever imagined for myself, but I do think it is a privilege to be in this position for me personally. A lot of people don’t have this platform where they can reach people and try to open people’s minds, or wake people up. It is a privilege for me to be able to simultaneously express how I feel and get people on the same page.”
Asked for what she considers the most important songs on Flesh Stays Together, she holds up a pair. Heaven Departs is, Emma says, “a song for the people of Palestine that have been murdered.” In a similar vein, A Curse Upon Iron holds up war and violence as an ultimately futile pursuit.
“That’s basically a song about how God has abandoned us and how war will turn all of us into victims. Even though you think you’re on the winning side, nobody wins in war. That’s a really important song for me.”
It’s this sense of universal humanity that sits at the heart of what Dying Wish are saying. Talking about these things in conversation, Emma doesn’t speak like a politician, or with an ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ stiffness. Just a concern for the people who will inevitably end up footing the bill for decisions made by those with more power than them. Onstage this afternoon, she implores Louisville to “take care of each other – this is a dark fucking world and the system wants you to hate each other.”
“It’s privilege for me to be able to simultaneously express how I feel and get people on the same page”
In a time where the us/them divide between normal people who often don’t recognise that they’re standing on the same bit of ground as their perceived opponents, this is poignant. Especially in a fortnight where Donald Trump has loudly stated that he regards trans people as a terror threat, words that will almost certainly be seen by some as a license to flex prejudices. Emma knows that not everyone who hears what her band say are going to agree, but the hope isn’t to get rid of them, but to find the similarities, and recognise one another as human beings, rather than enemies.
“The temperature is very hot right now, and the only thing that we can really do is just stick together as normal, everyday taxpayers,” she reflects later. “But unfortunately, what they want is for us to point the finger at each other and not at them – and it’s working.”
This, Emma has felt the warmth of once or twice, albeit online. “I’m never going to pipe down because I’m afraid. But there have been a few times where I’ve seen some comments or received DMs and I’ve been like, ‘Hopefully these people are all talk, because, if not, I could be concerned for my safety.’ But I mean, it’s nothing compared to what trans people put up with on a daily basis. So I’m not like, ‘Woe is me.’”
Again, Emma says that obviously not everyone thinks the same about everything. But the gap between us needn’t be quite so big. Because, again, if you look closer, a lot of things are more universal than they may appear, and forgetting basic humanity is part of the issue.
“I do think that we take away the humanity when we no longer decide to have conversations with each other,” she says. “As long as you are not advocating for someone getting their rights taken away, and for their existence to be banned, I think that there is a lot of common ground between me and someone who, maybe, potentially voted for Trump. I think that we would have more in common than someone in government that represents either their side or my side. It doesn’t matter.
“We need to recognise that it’s not healthy for all of us to agree on everything. But as long as we can find some kind of common ground and work together, we can build a society where everyone succeeds.”
This is all going into plenty of ears, and Flesh Stays Together looks set to elevate Dying Wish from a very promising band to something properly star-powered. In amongst the boiling rage of the record, there’s the odd moment of clean singing and clarity, where they’re expanding their palette rather than aiming to catch a quick wind.
Important as the message is, Emma also says that band life, playing shows, is the greatest part of all this. That they get the opportunity to bring their noise on the road with Limp Bizkit is just cool, isn’t it?
“Fred Durst is super-dope, literally, just so chill,” grins Emma. “The tour we did with Limp Bizkit was catered, so we’d be chilling in catering, and he would come and sit down at lunch and talk to us about life and whatever else. He’s a very nice, very lowkey guy, which is kind of surprising. You wouldn’t look at that guy if you didn’t know who he was and think, ‘Yeah, that guy’s famous.’ He’s just chilling.”
If the idea of the two bands together still seems weird, Dying Wish are used to that. Their first tour back after the pandemic was with spooky metalcore ghouls Motionless In White. Now they’re with Poppy. It’s not that they’ve flown the nest, they’ve just never had a permanent one in the first place.
This is examined in the album’s opening track, the unambiguously-named I Don’t Belong Anywhere. Again, not woe is me, it’s actually a proud celebration of the way Dying Wish can connect.
“That song is about us, and about the fact that we don’t really belong in any specific genre,” Emma enthuses. “Or, we can fit in almost any genre of heavy music. The amount of different bands we can play with is crazy, and we’re very lucky for that because it means we can try things and play with more bands. We have kind of created our own little path. We’ve always felt like there wasn’t a crowd that we couldn’t play to. Another thing is, if you’re going to discover Dying Wish, it’s probably when we’re on tour at a show. That’s always been our method of getting in front of new people. We don’t really use social media as a tool to market ourselves as much as a lot of other bands – our method is just to play shows and get out to people that way.”
As they show in Louisville, they’re very good at it. And as Dying Wish continue down their long and winding road, things are primed for a burst that reaches even further outward.
“Every moment of hard work that we put into this over the past eight years of being in a band is really coming to fruition in this moment,” Emma smiles. “I think the Spiritbox tour was a big deal for us, but for this record, we have more eyes on us than ever.”
They do. And that’s partly why Flesh Stays Together is the album that it is. It’s furious, but its soul is that of a band who are serious about what they do to make sure that, if you’re going to draw that kind of attention to yourself, you give it the respect and responsibility it deserves, whether people are there to Break Stuff or break systemic injustices.
“It’s all super-important,” Emma concludes. “And if we’re going to put out a message, I want people to hear it.”
Flesh Stays Together is due out on September 26 via SharpTone. Catch Dying Wish supporting Malevolence in Manchester and London this November – get your tickets now.
Read this next:
- Dying Wish: “We’re very radical people, but maybe showing love and compassion is the most radical thing that we can do”
- Killswitch Engage: “We’ve got more in common than we do differences as human beings”
- Knocked Loose: “Sacrificing heaviness was never an option… As this band grows, it only gets more uncomfortable and extreme”
