Leah Massey didn’t imagine herself as a hardcore singer when she was a kid in Leeds, growing up on pop-punk. Today, she and Pest Control are one of the British underground’s brightest lights. As their infestation grows, she tells us about ambition, grief, imposter syndrome and emo fandom…
Technically, Leah Massey wouldn’t be here without Busted.
It seems a contradictory picture given what she’d grow up to be, but as a young girl, the band eased her into a brave new world dominated by loud guitars. She even name-checks James Bourne’s short-lived pop-punk outfit Son Of Dork – “If anyone remembers them” – who she kept up with after Busted first broke up in the ’00s.
Today, Leah’s recounting this to Kerrang! as the singer of one of the UK’s brightest and most exciting hardcore bands in years. Having started as an idea for a thrash outfit over lockdown, Pest Control are about to head out on the road with Knocked Loose on the Kentucky bruisers’ biggest UK tour to date, where they’ll tread the boards at no less a venue than London’s O2 Academy Brixton. After that, they’ll hit North America for their second tour with death metal legends Obituary, on a truly bonkers bill also featuring Nails and Terror. Right now, she’s shaking off a cold having spent the weekend playing in Spain.
Leah took a winding road to ending up in hardcore. A girl whose world was once ruled by pop-punk and emo (“Fall Out Boy were one of my favourite bands ever!”), she started frequenting metalcore shows at the now-defunct Cockpit in her hometown of Leeds.
“My friend had an older sister who I used to think was really cool,” she recalls. “She was covered in tattoos and piercings. I was like, ‘Wow, whatever she says goes, whatever gigs she goes to, I’m going to those, too.”
Soon after, she fell properly into the genre via the likes of Basement and Title Fight.
“Basement were one of those bands I remember seeing all the time on Tumblr,” Leah says. “[People posted] all their lyrics onto photos of pine trees and things like that.”
In a full-circle moment that might well have had her teenage self excitedly running in circles, Pest Control are heading out on tour with them next month, when they both support Knocked Loose.
“Part of me is secretly freaking out that I get to watch that band play every night,” she grins. “That tour package as a whole is great for us to be a part of. I couldn’t have asked for a better start to this year.”
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Since being on the cover of Kerrang! in November, 2025 is shaping up to be the Year Of The Pest. So, how is Leah digesting it?
“I feel like I’ll have imposter syndrome for the rest of my natural life!” she says. “Until the moment that I’m there on the tour, I’m like, ‘No, that’s not my band playing that.’ I don’t feel like it changes anything in terms of how I am. I think one good thing about Pest Control is that we don’t have any expectations in the sense that we’re not like, ‘We’re entitled to this now because we’re at this level.’ It’s never a conscious decision to try to push ourselves onto bigger things; we just do what we love to do and we hope it comes across when we’re playing.”
After all, Pest Control were built on a thirst for fun. Bursting to life in the pandemic after previous projects came to an end, the Leeds quintet seized the chance to live out their crossover thrash fantasies and did so in a time and space where there really were no expectations – and no immediate possibility of playing live, either. Now, they continue to march forwards with that sense of groundedness held close to their chests. In Leah’s mind, that’s actually a quiet form of strength.
“Some of our Instagram content that we used to post at the start of this band was just really, really stupid,” she recalls. “We’d be drunk on the train back from a show in York, taking photos of anything.
“We never tried to build anything with it. That’s actually helped us to get where we wanted to as a band. We always want to better ourselves and put out releases that we’re proud of, but we don’t do it with the intent of, ‘This group of people or these promoters will love this.’”
Hardcore is a culture that prides itself on authenticity. It thrives on unfiltered expression, unadulterated harsh sounds, community and realness. By the time Leah made herself a home in this world, authenticity was already something she was conscious of.
Leah learned the value of such realness through coming to grips with the fact that growing up, she didn’t always know what she was doing, where she’d end up, or what she was made to do. She wasn’t very academic – “I think I got a D in maths and science” – but she did know she liked writing, going on to pursue journalism for a while in college. Halfway through the first year, though, she dropped out and went straight into work.
“There was a lot of pressure for me to make something of my life,” she says. “I realised that I could do that by not pretending that I know more than anyone else about something, but to just be myself. I’ve always learned that if you aren’t authentically true, it will show to the people around you and that’s when nobody wants anything to do with you. How can you interact with somebody who’s not being their authentic self? That’s definitely something that I feel really strongly about, and I’m really drawn to people who are like that as well.”
The one major thing being in hardcore spaces did teach Leah was to keep her eyes open to the horrors of the world outside her bubble. Before, she’d avoid watching the news, assuming current affairs and politics would be boring. But surrounded by activists and political music, that ignorance-is-bliss mindset melted away.
“One of my favourite bands was Rage Against The Machine,” she points out. “How could I not be that way inclined?”
As she absorbed more from her peers and from music, Leah even made the decision to go vegan for several years, though she does eat meat now. More recently, Pest Control became the first band to drop out of Download last summer over its links with Barclays and the bank’s ties with Israeli companies (Scowl, Speed, ZULU and Ithaca did the same, and Barclays’ partnership with the festival was later suspended).
“There’s a lot of good people in hardcore doing good things,” says Leah, pointing to the example of their label Quality Control HQ’s founder, Ola Herbich. Since November, Ola’s been in prison for her alleged involvement in ‘unspecified forms of political activism’, which has temporarily shut down the label.
“She was the one-woman operation behind getting both our releases out and she’s incredible. She’s such a good example of what hardcore embodies.”
In a community where she’d regularly end up stood shoulder to shoulder with musicians, being in a band was a concept that never felt unreachable. Leah didn’t come from an especially musical or even a creative background – “I’m rubbish at a lot of creative things” – but had a crack at being a vocalist even though she had no idea what she could unleash once she opened her mouth and roared. She might not have known what she was doing, but she did it anyway.
Once upon a time, Leah thought she was a far more serious lyricist. In her projects before Pest Control, she was searching for something deep and meaningful to say, sometimes creating lyrics out of poetry on her phone. Later, she worked out she was overcomplicating things.
Nowadays, she’s screaming on top of music to make you run through walls and as such, the most natural gear for her to sit in is a vibe that’s catchy, fun and sometimes even fantastical. It’s par for the course for a band whose debut album, 2023’s Don’t Test The Pest, bears the image of a giant grasshopper slurping on a man’s exposed intestines. On their recent EP Year Of The Pest, they’ve got a song called P.M.C. about a parasite hijacking human brains. The video for their febrile 2023 single Enjoy The Show, directed by Static Dress frontman Olli Appleyard, stars Higher Power’s Jimmy Wizard as a greasy-looking drunk who transforms into a bug that PC are called – in yellow hazmat suits and all – to exterminate.
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As mosh-worthy as Enjoy The Show is, it also broke new ground for Pest Control, opening up an opportunity for Leah to excavate more serious, personal matters.
“That was the first song I wrote after losing my mum,” she explains. “I was away with the band in the van and instead of looking out and being mindful and present, I was in my head constantly. That was a message to myself to enjoy the life you have, try not to get bogged down in these thoughts and just carry on going.”
On Year Of The Pest, she took it a step further. Its final track, Good Grief, makes no such attempt to find the jagged sense of lightheartedness that Enjoy The Show does. It’s Leah’s space to vent after suffering the loss of not only her mum, but her dad as well.
“I was like, ‘You know what? I deserve to be pissed off about the fact that this has happened to me,’” she says. “It felt amazing to get out. I remember showing my brother the lyrics, and my grandma – she was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’ It was good to have that moment to write something that maybe more people could relate to if they’d been in a similar situation at all, and also for myself and for my family. It’s definitely something that I feel like I would like to do on the next release, to ingrain some more serious lyrics as well as the fun side, obviously. The experience of both those songs has been great for me personally.”
That might be a thought for the future, but the present is looking pretty sweet, too. Be warned: the pest is getting out of control.
Pest Control tour with Knocked Loose from March 17. This interview originally appeared in the spring 2025 issue of Kerrang!.
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