The Dirty Nil: “If plugging into amps and turning it up to 10 doesn’t do it for you anymore, then you’re done”

“This place was a burned out hull when I was growing up,” Luke Bentham says of his native Hamilton.

The Canadian city used to be a steel town. Back in the midst of the 20th century when business was booming, it provided materials for the auto industry in Detroit. But with so many manufacturing jobs in North America long since going the way of the dodo, Hamilton dwindled into a shadow of its former self.

It’s not without its natural beauty, though, including the Niagara Escarpment, a 650-mile long wall of limestone and dolomite that slices through the city, and later provided the cliff which Niagara Falls thunders over at a rate of 3,160 tonnes of water per second. And speaking of waterfalls, Hamilton has 156 of them, making it the waterfall capital of the world.

It’s also a city with a capacity for reinvention, as slowly but surely, artists have reclaimed it, empowered by the influx of money from Toronto, which Luke calls the “sleeker, more beautiful sibling”, 42 miles away, northeast around the coast of Lake Ontario.

Luke is one of those artists, having formed The Dirty Nil in 2006. So, too, is his friend David O’Connor, a tattoo artist who’s taken it upon himself to design a flag for the city, complete with Tim Hortons coffee cups, the mobility assistance scooters dubbed ‘DUI scooters’ dotted around, some cigarette buds, and a tiger symbolising the local football team, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

Aside from being a riotous interviewee who’s fiercely articulate and full of mischief – our detour about flags the result of there being a jolly roger pinned to his wall – Luke’s conversation flits between high and low art with relish. So while one minute he’s rhapsodising about the “horrible detail” in Led Zeppelin: The Biography by Bob Spitz – “It’s gnarly with a capital G” – the next he’s discussing the classy trip that inspired The Dirty Nil’s forthcoming fifth album.

A couple of years ago, Luke and his partner visited the Vatican. Being a secular person, Luke wasn’t that enamoured with the visit – “I knew I’d hit my crucifixion depiction limit pretty early in the day” – so ventured further from the popular spots, bypassing the sardine-packed Sistine Chapel and finding a basement heavier on dust than tourists.

It was there that Luke came across the work of Italian sculptor Francisco Messina, specifically a depiction of two men in army fatigues desperately fighting over a knife, a look of abject horror on both of their faces.

“I couldn’t stop staring at it – it was the hardest shit I’ve ever seen in my life,” marvels Luke. “No black metal or thrash metal graphics have anything on this.”

He took several photographs and sent them to his bandmate, drummer Kyle Fisher, with the words: “This is the only item on the moodboard for our next record.”

So taken was Luke with the piece, in fact, that he spent many months trying to get it licensed for use. Francisco Messina died in 1995, so contact had to be made with his family, which proved fruitless, so the band contacted the Vatican.

“We received a cease and desist,” laughs Luke. “I don’t know what you know about those fine people, but they have got a serious legal team.”

Nobody, thankfully, was able to stop The Dirty Nil from completing The Lash. Even the artwork issue was resolved, kind of, as UK-based artist Jack Sabbat brilliantly captured the spirit of Francisco Messina’s work, with an ink on paper rendering of two skeletons locked in (im)mortal combat. Despite its title, The Lash isn’t a celebration of a heavy drinking session – it actually comes from a lyric in opening track Gallop Of The Hounds (‘In vain, I asked for mercy at your feet / But you never spared the lash’). The speed with which Luke and Kyle agreed on the title, the former says, is indicative of the shooting from the hip the duo did on this stripped back, to-the-point, intuitive record.

“There was a violent nature in some of the music,” suggests Luke, a self-proclaimed “military historian nut” who remains vehemently anti-war. “[The title] felt like a really good battle flag to march across the world with.”

Being lean and mean wasn’t the main impetus for making The Lash. Nor was there an overwhelming desire to be different, musically, from its predecessor, 2022’s Free Rein To Passions. It was more a question of being free of the shackles of expectation.

The Dirty Nil’s fourth album arrived after the pandemic had eased its grip on the world. Like so many bands unable to tour during that period and disconnected from their fanbase in the ways that matter, during the making of Free Rein To Passions, its authors wondered if there were still fans out there to release music to. And if there weren’t, who exactly were they doing this for?!

“There were a lot of creaking insecurities that made their way into the making of that record,” admits Luke. “So when we got out on tour and realised that not only do we have fans, but we have more fans now and things are going well, it really informed a confidence in us to bet on ourselves more and trust our gut instinct on things, rather than consider what anyone else thinks about it. Our number one goal was to make something that made us stoked, and who gives a shit what happens next? We’re all going to die one day, so we need to be happy with what we make.”

As a creative ethos goes, it was straightforward, it was stark, but it was also pretty life-affirming. And it gave The Dirty Nil clear boundaries to operate within.

“We designed the parameters and the logistics around making ourselves happy,” smiles Luke. “Doing it in a way that would limit us in terms of second-guessing things. We only planned out a very short amount of time in the studio, for instance, and at a much simpler studio than we’ve ever recorded before, with our friend who we’ve never made a record with before, and so we liked his style.”

The “very short amount of time” Luke mentions was just two weeks. And that friend he refers to was Vince Solveri, The Dirty Nil’s front-of-house engineer. As gambles go, giving yourself so little wiggle room while replacing the hugely experienced guy who produced your last three records (John Goodmanson) with someone earning their spurs seems bold to the point of foolhardy. The band’s team, however, was fully behind it.

For all the sense of perspective and reclaiming the enjoyment of making music this process brought, this devil-may-care attitude may well have also been born from Luke’s fundamental dislike of the music industry’s practices. He will, he says, hack away at the work emails and take the conference calls, but he’s got more adept at compartmentalising things, so “it doesn’t bleed into my time with my electric guitar”.

Luke’s beef partly stems from the team The Dirty Nil used to have around them – “There was a lot of pressure on us to deliver the big one” – but also from a wider ecosystem that expects algorithmic precision in what new music is capable of, internally as well as externally.

“Why do we need to answer all these other people’s problems with our music?” asks Luke. “That doesn’t make any sense to me. So this album is a complete recoil against that, refocusing on ourselves and our need to have fun, because if we’re not having fun, the wheels fall off. We’ve read enough band biographies and watched enough documentaries to know that if plugging into amps, turning it up to 10 and letting it feedback doesn’t do it for you anymore, then you’re done.”

Thankfully, that’s the spirit The Lash captures: the unalloyed pleasure that rock’n’roll provides, of freedom and abandon. And for its authors, the relief of being able to create something from nothing in the first place, given all the elements working against you.

“Conditions are never optimal,” suggests Luke. “There’s always a point when you step on some sort of unforeseen landmine that puts things in jeopardy, shatters your little crystal vision of how this is all going to go. And that’s a built-in feature of life in general.”

The Lash is due out on July 25 via Dine Alone.

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