It’s a sad truth in life that nothing lasts forever. And yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Patterns and history repeat as external forces exert pressure on them, and it’s easy to get swallowed up by it all, to give in to those forces and let the tide take you in the opposite direction of where you want to go. The Dirty Nil, however, are one of the exceptions to that rule. That’s something increasingly rare in and of itself, and more so within the music industry. But since forming in high school in 2006, the band have remained staunchly dedicated to their ideals of putting their music first.
They released their debut album, Higher Power, in 2016 – after a long string of singles and EPs, many of which were self-released, in case you were wondering why it took so long – and then won the Breakthrough Group Of The Year award at the 2017 Juno Awards, the Canadian equivalent of the GRAMMYs. Second album, Master Volume, came out in 2018, followed by the brilliantly-titled (and just brilliant) Fuck Art in 2021. It was around that time, however, that The Dirty Nil felt those external forces trying to reshape who they were to capitalise – in every sense of that word – on the reputation the band had built for themselves over the past decade or so. What had started as something joyous was being derailed, and turned into something it was never meant to be.
“We got into this just to do it,” admits Luke humbly. “Our ambitions when we started the band consisted of, ‘Maybe we could play a show in Hamilton,’ which, for all you geography nuts, is 10 minutes down the road from where we’re from. We weren’t like, ‘Let’s be like rock’s...’”
He doesn’t finish the sentence, but was presumably going to say ‘next big thing’ or ‘new Metallica’.
“We didn’t know we could do that,” he continues. “We didn’t have anyone to look up to that could tell us, ‘Oh, here’s what you do there.’ We just stumbled backwards into the whole thing and made a million mistakes and did one right thing here and there. But it wasn’t until the middle – where we had like some shitty management and other things where people started putting all these expectations on us, and basically trying to impose their shit on us – where things got really messed up and really un-fun.
"I can’t tell you how not fun it is to write songs when you have that kind of bullshit in your ear. What’s that Lord Of The Rings guy where he’s just sitting on the fucking throne and he’s all rotten and the guy’s like whispering in his ear? I felt like that guy.”