These days, music should not be made for times of peace. It needs to be made for grinding down your molars, cackling maniacally in new media solitude, and what's playing in your head when your phone lights up with its endless scroll of bad news. On their latest, Newcastle's Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs (Pigs x7), understand this dark schematic, providing no gentle entry into Death Hilarious.
The fifth studio album from Pigs x7 detonates across nine blistering tracks, delivering a convulsive blend of psychic unravelling, noise-rock abrasion, and doom-psych's battered exoskeleton. The album, produced by the band's guitarist Sam Grant, leaves nothing over-slicked or unfinished. It is a record that demolishes the cult of self-care optimism, interrogates capitalistic individualism, and turns the post-wellness landscape into a burnt-out wasteland. If 2023's Land of Sleeper felt like an internal plunge into dream logic and echo-chamber doom, Death Hilarious is its violent reemergence.
But to really understand Death Hilarious, one must locate it within the fractured circuitry of modern Britain. In the post-Brexit era, it is a place culturally defined as much by austerity and instability as by aesthetic trends. Touring is more expensive, support systems more frayed, and the mythos of the British indie miracle is long dead. In its wake is a society of fragmentation, resilience, and the fractured tempo of the new. Within this context, Pigs x7 represents something more significant. Through vitality and antagonism, they are not affectation but index. While their caustic humor carries the DNA of a classed and cornered England, their sound is unshaped by commercial affect, suspicious of polish, and violently allergic to pity and pablum.
Musically, Death Hilarious is a shape-shifter. Pigs x7 still trade in meaty riffs and Sabbathian doom, but they refuse to play it straight. Blockage opens the album as the shortest song the band has ever released. It's a sub-three-minute lightning bolt that fuses thrash momentum with stoner brawn. Collider swings the pendulum back toward structured chaos. As one of the band's most traditionally accessible offerings, its riffing is coiled around a hook-laden earworm that masks its vocal unease: "I might not be so well."
On Detroit, the band constructs a seething study in modern masculinity, where toxic grievances fester in online forums and late-night bar confessions. With lines like "A faint murmur of pillow talk / Keeps me awake, with all that tick-tock tick-tock / It's not my fault you're so depressed / Oh no need to get all upset" frontman Matt Baty's snarl is aimed at the fragile narcissism that metastasizes into fascism when left to rot in the hallways of self-pity.
Without lowering the stakes, Stitches shifts gears into sleazy groove. A glam swagger belies its tar-thick instability—as if Motörhead mugged Giorgio Moroder in the parking lot of a burning swingers club. "Split down the sides, I start to cry," Baty confesses, "In stitches but bleeding out / don't look back" It's Cronenbergian in tone, but more precisely Tsukamoto-esque: the body is reimagined as a flawed assembly, pieced together through violence, memory, and bad ideology. With deliberate dissonance, it's a moment of refusal meant to rupture the neoliberal aesthetic order.
On The Wyrm, they descend into a doom-laden crawl before pivoting into a kind of Hawkwindian trance, churning riffs over metronomic percussion like a séance for the Anthropocene. At moments, especially on the mammoth closer Toecurler, the sound evokes the punishing repetition of Swans but filtered through a grotesque psychedelia that leans toward the corporeal. In other places, the satirical bile and theatricality recall IDLES but stripped of the latter's didacticism.
Death Hilarious's thematic marrow also despises the coercive cheer of corporate self-help, the flattening rhetoric of individual empowerment, and the culture of manicured wellness as a distraction from the decay. Its target is not government policy but the emotional architecture that enables its silent violence. Glib Tongued best exemplifies this point—a track of staggering menace that draws listeners into the narcotic groove of dub-noir. East Coast hip-hop icon and one-half of Run the Jewels, El-P—himself a longtime seer of dystopian decline—delivers a guest verse that intensifies the mood with unafraid specificity: "Notice that flag attached to pickup you've been dragged behind / Your driver gleefully unbothered flash the okay sign / Or how they prime to hold the hive as one connected mind / The party line that you exist in is committing crime" Through hip-hop's paranoiac clarity and noise rock's sustained scream, only the message remains: you are being lulled to death, but Death Hilarious wants you awake.
Behind the record's noise and bile, Death Hilarious reads like the companion to Mark Fisher's theories on "capitalist realism," where no alternative futures arrive, only recycled ruins and influencer pieties. But don't mistake it for dystopian theatre. There is no sleek fiction here, no CGI apocalypse. This is social collapse rendered in spit. If Land of Sleeper was a descent into the void, Death Hilarious is the hoarse, hostile screech that comes back out. It's Tetsuo: The Iron Man played at high volumes; mutation as revolt, circuitry fused to the flesh, feedback looped until the body becomes the machine.
