KILL THE UNICORN
Eccentric, genre-boning chaos from Switzerland
The uneasy relat ionship between humans and technology has long been explored through music, film and literature, and that fine line between control and dependence is a topic that fascinates Swiss quintet Kill The Unicorn.
“There is a certain paranoid, maybe almost schizophrenic, mood in some of our lyrics,” says guitarist Raphael Zumstein. “Or often they concern vanishing between reality and imagination – or ‘digital reality’.”
The band, completed by vocalist Pipo Thalmann, second guitarist Ziggy Lebon, bassist Marc Sommerhalder and drummer Matteo Leuthold, started out in their hometown of Luzern as a pretty standard deathcore crew, but quickly realised the sound wasn’t working for them. Instead, they turned to their wide spectrum of influences for inspiration, as well as indulging their nerdier inclinations.
The result is a frenetic battering in the spirit of genre-bending maniacs Maximum The Hormone or iwrestledabearonce that violently bashes together melo-death riffery, twitchy post-hardcore shapes and mathy flourishes with playful elements. On songs like Motoko Kusanagi from the band’s new album, Prism, and Beat The Trollz from their 2015 demo, pummelling riffs give way to 8-bit, lo-res electronic sounds straight out of a retro console.
“We grew up in the 90s and if you had a Game Boy, these were the only sounds the device could reproduce,” recalls Ziggy fondly. “With Motoko Kusanagi, the first five seconds were meant to be a clean guitar part that sounded like a banjo. In rehearsal it sounded pretty cool but in the studio not so much. So we replaced it with the 8-bit sounds. We were all into gaming as kids and it’s very reminiscent of that time.”
As fun as
their music can be, Kill The Unicorn’s tunes are also wrestling with darker matters – namely conspiracy theories and sci-fi themes. Latest track F.U.C.K.U.P is about the hacker Karl Koch, who died in mysterious circumstances, while Motoko Kusanagi is based on the iconic Japanese anime Ghost In The Shell. Following the cyborg protagonist Major Motoko Kusanagi, it criticises society’s increasing dependency on technology.
“On her hunt for a dangerous hacker she is confronted with philosophic questions: can an artificial body still be human? What is the meaning of existence as a cyborg?” says Ziggy by way of explanation behind the track. “An anime can be a very powerful medium to visualise such abstract ideas.
“The escape from reality on one hand and feeling lost in reality on the other are concepts that you’ll find in our songs,” he continues. “In a nutshell, our singer Philipp calls it ‘Live fast, die digital.’”
That certainly sounds like a mantra for a band with their eyes fixed on the future. Even if it looks set to be a mad one.
PRISM IS OUT NOW
“OUR SONGS SOUND
LIKE GAME BOYS”