Photo Credit: Natasha Koziarska
In 2020, releasing an EP centred around themes of loss seems incredibly apt. In terms of music we have, for the time being, lost our live scene. In wider society, many of us have lost jobs, security, our sense of purpose and in far too many cases, people we love. Written in 2019, the new self-titled debut EP from Sheffield blackened post-hardcore quintet Hidden Mothers tackles themes of loss in the form of identity, self and love across three blisteringly emotionally tracks. They could never have known just how relevant it would be upon release.
One of the most striking aspects about Hidden Mothers is the sheer range of influences they draw upon to create such poignant music. From post-metal atmospherics to black metal blastbeats to screamo vocals and beyond, the band incorporate a myriad of styles into their sound. Speaking to the band, it becomes evident they were raised on a varied diet of musical genres.
A shared early diet of nu-metal introduced bassist Liam Knowles and guitarist Ari Malekpour to the heavier side of music, but Knowles soon swayed towards punk and hardcore, whilst Malekpour recalls his taste evolving alongside an older friend of his. “When I was twelve there was this fifteen-year-old lad who introduced me to things like Silverchair and Nirvana. As he grew older, his music taste sort of evolved and I kind of stole his music,” laughs the guitarist. “He started listening to Sigur Rós, Björk and Radiohead so that really opened up my love of post-rock, indie and stuff like that.”
Adding to this already mixed bag of influences, vocalist Stef Benham remembers a varied taste from a young age too. “As a kid I was always brought up with my Dad’s influences,” he recalls. “He brought me up listening to early [The] Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Zombies,The Monkees, Jean-Michel Jarre, Clannad, Enya – a wide range of music. Even now, two of his favourite bands are Placebo and Korn and he’s like 72 *laughs*.”
Benham’s musical path, however, soon ventured down darker paths. “I found a tape of my sister’s with Nine Inch Nails on one side and Rage Against The Machine on the other, and that was it really – a whole new world for me. I was more into the Nine Inch Nails side, that weird, dark, really emotional and sinister sound, that’s what I really enjoyed. And that just led me down a rabbithole. I just got into heavier and heavier music.”
Benham’s musical path, however, soon ventured down darker paths. “I found a tape of my sister’s with Nine Inch Nails on one side and Rage Against The Machine on the other, and that was it really – a whole new world for me. I was more into the Nine Inch Nails side, that weird, dark, really emotional and sinister sound, that’s what I really enjoyed. And that just led me down a rabbithole. I just got into heavier and heavier music.”
It’s also interesting to hear the amount of electronic and non-guitar led musical influences that have seeped into their tastes too. “When I was eighteen and moved to Sheffield I completely fell out of love with guitars and started listening to minimal house and techno,” remembers Malekpour. Similarly, Benham reminisces about how “as a young fifteen-year-old sprite I found recreational drugs so then I got into hard house, tech house, dark electronic music, and that’s also where I gained a love for trip-hop bands like Massive Attack and Portishead.”
With such a wide range of sounds influencing how they approach their own music, it was perhaps inevitable that this would bleed through into the way the band connected. “It helps us in the songwriting process,” Knowles says. “Songs are like problems to be solved. You’ve got all these bits and you’ve got to figure out how they all go together and I think if you only expose yourself to one type of music, you’re only going to be able to solve that problem in a limited number of ways. Whereas if you draw from a wider palette, it helps you look at things from a different perspective.”
Malekpour too believes this is something which has helped make their songwriting approach relatively relaxed. “Because our process is so organic, we achieve a flow,” the guitarist notes. “I think all the stuff we’ve listened to is coming out through our instruments subconsciously. So there might be some weird repetition that’s come from minimal techno or something a little bit more funky from Earth Wind And Fire. All these things we’ve been listening to have got to come out somewhere.”
This organic process that Malekpour speaks about so passionately is one of the catalysts that seemingly made everything fall into place so perfectly for Hidden Mothers from the very beginning. Free of the endless artistic disagreements that often arise from five musicians sitting in a room trying to create a cohesive sound together, to say they gelled instantly would be an understatement. “Our first single, ‘The Longest Journey Yet’, was written at our first practice,” reveals Malekpour. “It’s pretty much unchanged from that first practice too.”
“It took like 45 minutes,” Knowles adds. “I was running late for the first practice, and they’d pretty much written it when I got there.” Even before they’d played a single note in the same room, it seemed like their individual paths were destined to cross.
“A lot of us had previous projects that we’d taken a break from,” explains Benham. “I was working as a barber and I was cutting the hair of Ari, Luke [Scrivens, guitarist] and Adam [Kossowicz, drums]. I’d finished my apprenticeship and was looking for something to focus on creatively, I wanted to form another heavy band. I’d worked with Luke previously and we’d always got on and Ari and I had always discussed music whilst I was cutting his hair. We’d listen to the likes of Downfall Of Gia, Oathbreaker and Amenra whilst he was in the chair and I said ‘do you want to do something like this?’, and he was like, ‘Fuck yeah!’.”
From these initial chats in the barber’s chair, the band began to form. Benham recruited Scrivens, who was fresh out of another outfit, who was quickly followed by Kossowicz.“He showed me some of his drum videos and I was thinking ‘fuck yeah, you’re going to be the drummer for this project’,” remembers Beham. “And then it was a case of thinking of somebody who was also on our wavelength who could play bass.” Knowles, the final part of the puzzle, was also on the radar. “I was friends with Liam on social media”, explains Benham. “I saw him posting videos of like-minded music and he seemed to have massive enthusiasm for this type of music. So then I messaged him and he was like ‘let’s do this.’ We got into a room and that was that.”
Cutting hair to cutting an EP took less than two years, and only nine months from the initial practice to a debut live show. But as Benham is keen to stress, the group weren’t able to practice solidly for those nine months. “You have to remember that to get us five in the same room, week in, week out is not the easiest task in the world,” the vocalist admits. “We’re not a band that gets to practice every week. Sometimes it’s only once or twice a month. So when we say it took us nine months to perform those songs live, it wasn’t like we were practicing every week.” Aware that the band may also be a little older than some of their contemporaries, Knowles recognises that “a couple of us have kids, all of us have full-time jobs. It’s not like we’re eighteen, no responsibilities and are able to just lock ourselves in a room and write music, we have to fit it around each other.”
Family and job commitments aside, the band have made it work. Following on from the positive reception of their 2019 debut single ‘The Longest Journey Yet’ and subsequent slew of live shows, September 2020 sees the release of their debut EP. Considering how quickly their first single came together, when did the songs for the EP begin to take shape? “Second practice,” jokes Malekpour. “I do actually think the opening riff came from one of those very early sessions. We just had this momentum from the very beginning.”
The dynamic music that comprises the three-track EP pulls in from a wide pool of influences, but another important aspect to the band’s sound are the remarkably expressive screams of vocalist Benham. Penning the majority of the album’s lyrics and dividing the songs into varying themes of loss, it’s incredibly clear that these songs are exceptionally personal to Benham, that he pours his heart and soul into every note. “I’m basically a really happy on the outside but really angry on the inside kind of person,” says the vocalist. “At that time in my life, when we were writing those songs, I had a lot of things going on in my life, like breakups, things like that, that I was using as a muse. Also, because I was going through an apprenticeship at the age of 32 and living off £150 a week, it was a bit of a low, even though I knew there was going to be a high after it. But obviously my train of thought, being skint all the time in my thirties, it was a knock to my confidence. So I guess that conjured up a lot of negative emotions.”
When it comes to writing lyrics, Benham favours a very organic approach. “I don’t write lyrics before the songs are written, I write on the spot,” he says. “Whatever the song makes me feel, I kind of just blurt out whatever emotion it makes me feel. It’s a nice feeling when you’re able to put that emotion onto something, it’s a very therapeutic feeling.”
Going into a bit more detail of the themes behind the songs, Benham describes the events that inspired the lyrics for the three tracks. “‘My Own Worth’ is about how I felt lost as a person,” he describes. “How people were viewing me at that point in my life. People were looking down on me for always being broke. Also society was full of the Brexit stuff going on and the government was making me feel like absolute crap. So that’s where that song came from.” A little more guardedly, Benham describes ‘Beneath, To The Earth’ as “very much about my feelings about death, written at a very low point at the time” before moving on to talk about the EP’s stunning closer ‘My Blindness, Your Burden’ as being “about my breakup with my ex-girlfriend, sadly. For me that was the most therapeutic song we’ve written, that got me through a really shit time.”
What is abundantly clear is that integrity and an innate passion for their music is what cements the band together. “I feel like my biggest issue with a lot of heavy music is that there’s a lack of earnestness to it,” states Knowles. “I feel a lot of metal lyricists are saying the thing they should be saying rather than the thing they’re actually feeling, trying to hit the clichés and hitting the points they feel they have to hit. But if you’re not writing from your own experience then that’s never going to come across as something personal. I think the way Steff writes is from the heart. It may not be relatable to everyone but it’s relatable to him and that’s the important thing.”
The band’s pride in their music shines through, and rightly so. They also come across as genuinely humbled by the experience of working with a producer they so admire in Joe Clayton. Having previously worked with bands such as Leeched and Pijn, he seemed a natural choice for the band keen to pin down their raw, emotive sound. “I love Joe,” beams Malekpour. “He’s like our Nigel Godrich, like the sixth member of Hidden Mothers *laughs*. When we recorded the single, it was Liam who suggested him, and I knew him from around the scene. He nailed everything we had in our minds with the single. The way he orchestrated us felt right for the band. He knows how to make things we have in our head translate to tape.”
Knowles is similarly full of praise: “He’s so experienced. You can describe something to him and his weird producer brain will just go ‘I know exactly what you mean’. He just knows.” Like all good producers, Clayton enhanced the band’s sound and helped it reach its full potential, bringing his own ideas to the studio which the band then incorporated. “That riff at the end of ‘My Blindness, Your Burden’, much of that was Joe’s production, to try and make it sound as ludicrous as possible,” says Malekpour.
“It’s little things too”, Knowles adds. “Something he got us to do on both the EP and the single, after they’d been recorded, was to get Ari and Luke in a room and record a load of feedback so he could kind of use that to breathe some life into things, give it a ‘this could all fall apart’ live heaviness to it, with the feedback bleeding through the cracks. It makes it feel like a living, breathing thing rather than just five parts tracked over one another.”
A commanding live performer, Benham was keen to capture on tape what they do in a gig setting. “Our main objective is to blow people away when we play live,” the vocalist admits. “As much as we are a recording band, when we play live, we’re all going to put that little bit more bollocks into everything, we’ll go a little bit harder than rehearsal. That’s what we wanted from the EP. We obviously want to make an impact at every show but we want that to come across in our recordings too. Joe was brilliant in making that come across on the EP.” Knowles was also blown away by Benham’s performance in the studio. “When Stef was doing the vocals for ‘My Blindness, Your Burden’ he was in the booth with his top off and a little stubby can of Kopparberg, and he just cracked the can and did the song in one take. Those vocals are just one take.”
The EP will no doubt introduce many new listeners to Hidden Mothers, who will be eager to hear Benham and his cohorts reproduce this magic live. Right now, of course, trying to anticipate future live plans is a seemingly impossible task. The scene we hold so dear is on a forced hiatus with an unclear vision of how exactly live music will take place, if at all, in the coming year. This is something Hidden Mothers appear to be taking in their stride and, like many in their position, they’re simply waiting for the right moment to play live again. When we sheepishly enquire as to whether there are any plans to take this EP on the road in 2021, Malekpour hesitantly responds: “A tour in April, maybe, but it’s kind of impossible to say at the minute.”
This cues Knowles to lament the cruel timing of the pandemic. “We had just started getting a bit of momentum before lockdown happened, felt we were getting somewhere,” he says. “We definitely want to get that momentum back but only when it’s safe and when we can do it in a way that is satisfactory. We don’t really want to play to a group of twenty people sat down, but it may come to a point where that’s the only option, you know? I guess we’ll see.”
In the meantime, the band appear to be busy behind the scenes, with songwriting being a seemingly continuing process. “We’ve got a lot of ideas at the moment, we’ve got like three or four ideas that could become songs,” states Malekpour. “We’ve also got songs which we’ve already written, but because of lockdown, we’ve kind of forgotten about them. In fact I’ve just checked them out on the drive and I’m thinking ‘we should probably take a look a these again’. And also, we are actively now writing a new record, or whatever shape it will eventually take.”
Hidden Mothers’ debut EP is out now on Surviving Sounds. Order digital here or click here for the vinyl.
Words: Adam Pegg
