Do you ever listen to something that makes you feel kinda sick? Hell, forget the music, even just looking too long at the artwork for Believe in Nothing’s debut full-length, Rot, is enough to turn a stomach or two.
Taking cues from bands like Full of Hell and The Body, the Eastbourne-based four-piece craft hellish, gelatinous masses of sludge and noise as a backdrop for lyrics very much centred on real-world horrors but often just twisted into something a little (or a lot) more dystopian and deranged.
One of the album’s singles, “Gut," is about “cutting your guts out and giving them to your work coach after another heartless and mechanical sanction by the state” for example. Another tells the story of a public execution from the POV of the victim, while others still detail nuclear apocalypse and environmental collapse and killers dragging bodies into the woods and just all your usual dinner table topics really init.
Vocalist/noisemaker/pig heart mangler (we’ll get to that) Caine Hemmingway had plenty to say about it all.
Could you tell me a bit about how the band came together?
The band came together off the back of spontaneous jam between myself and the now drummer Jasper. I was a bit disillusioned with making music, felt really deflated and like the magic of writing wasn’t there anymore. We jumped in a room, I played drums, he played bass and we just clicked.
We jammed and recorded a demo for “Fist Full of Worms” in an afternoon. I really wanted to pay attention to falling in love with writing in a room again, to catch the fucking electricity that making loud music does. So we’ve carried that sentiment with us throughout the band as much as possible. It’s a privilege to be able to make music that way.
I ended up recruiting Lawrence and Steve for guitars, both extremely talented but in different angles of heavy music. After some lineup changes, me getting pneumonia and switching Jasper to drums, we settled on a solid line-up for the band, threw everything we did before away and started again.
I had a pretty solid idea of what kind of music we were gonna make, and the guys were definitely pushed out of their comfort zones, especially with the noise board taking a whole new layer of sonic space. We had to really fight to find our sound, and find it all together. It took a lot of work and patience, but that fight kind of set the tone for the band. Made us go all in.
It seems already that the live experience is particularly central to Believe in Nothing, how do you feel that that had a bearing on the album?
The live show is an ever evolving thing, it’s where we get to really play with people’s limits, including our own. We have learnt so much from constantly experimenting on stage. Musically, it’s helped us with rudimentary things for songs before we recorded them like tempo, tones, attack and delivery. But playing live has given us the confidence to work with space, patience and tension. To know that less is more, being comfortable in the uncomfortable.
The live show has grown to be a chaotic, unpredictable, uncomfortable and almost a psychological experience for us and the crowd. These aspects that we’ve experimented with have leaked into the writing, performance and production of the album. But I would say the live show does go a lot further than what people hear on the record, and I’m really happy with that. I love when bands offer something more than what you expect live. I always want to shock myself, and if that happens to people when they see us, great.
The lyrics are a good match to the music - suffering, violence, desperation, environmental collapse… what leads you to the themes you write about?
I think just being alive is enough. The world is a really scary place, I almost feel like we are living in some kind of collective delusion to not be on our hands and knees beating the earth in tears some days.
The music and the lyrics bounce off each other when we write. I rarely come into the room with anything. So the sounds we start crafting help evoke an image, a story, a world in my head, and that will then impart the direction of the song. I have purposely left a lot of questions with no answers, left no resolution in the lyrics. No happy endings. Nothing tied up neatly. I wanted to do that because that’s fucking life, it’s messy, complicated and just not what you want most of the time.
The lyrics have come from a place of fear in the volatile and collapsing new world we are stepping into. I am pretty sure I had a mental break of some sort while writing Rot and I stopped taking all medication too. So maybe there’s a bit of that in there.
There’s also often this kind of uncanny/unsettling specificity to some of the lyrics, what inspires that way of writing in particular?
Great question. So great in fact I’ve had to go away and think about this for a day or two. This kind of vivid and granular specificity is just kind of what I’m like all the time. I seem to have a knack for expressing dark and macabre imagery that can grow in my head. It doesn’t turn on or off, it’s just there. Whether you call it being wired different, neurodivergence or just plainly being a weird fucking guy, I don’t know, and I kind of don’t care.
I have become incredibly comfortable with who I am since becoming clean and sober eight years ago, so I think I’ve just been able to accept the way my brain works and become attuned to letting that be front and centre to my creativity. The band, writing lyrics and building this world for all the songs to sit in is the bucket for all that thick mental tripe to fall into. If I didn’t do music, there would be another bucket, getting it out is imperative.
I always try to write lyrics in a way that’s relatable and vivid. I want to create a whole scene, give you the time of day, what the air smelt like, what I had for lunch and how it’s going to taste as I vomit it through my fingers. In the kind of music we are making, I have had to boil it down a bit.
So that vivid and descriptive writing style has inevitably leaked in, I have just had to make it as direct as possible. I did end up writing a book that lets me get more descriptive about the world the songs all live in. It’s called The Wisp, I quote it at the start of the title track of the album. That’ll be available to get from shows.
What do you feel you get out of making music this extreme and bleak?
Catharsis and community. I wouldn’t say the music is therapy for me, I made a very clear goal to not purge my personal trauma into the songs, but the raw catharsis and purge of screaming until you feel like you’re going to pass out is unbeatable. Doing that, for me, isn’t a want, it’s a need. I love performing. And I love the whole craft of evolving this band with my friends.
The community I have found from Believe in Nothing is life affirming. It’s genuinely beautiful, and more than I would have ever imagined. The people you meet in other bands, sharing the same experiences and writing about similar themes, it makes you all feel like you’re all fighting the same bad guy. The connection you make with people who come to the shows, it’s like nothing I’ve experienced.
I think making the kind of extreme and bleak music we write and perform puts a vulnerability out there. It puts a lot on the table, cuts pretence. The responses have ranged from people walking out in disgust and anxiety, to crying on my shoulder when we finish, not saying a word. Both responses are equally as valid and important to me. I never expected some of the responses we have had, it’s humbling.
The artwork is horrific (in a fitting way) - could you talk me through creating that and how it relates to the record overall?
I’m really happy with how the artwork came out. Thank you. Finding something that encapsulated the broad themes of the album was very difficult, something big, something torn and broken. So I back tracked and just focused on the literal term of rot.
I went out and got myself a pig heart, an ear and some bones. I smashed them with a brick and stuffed a chain through the heart. Then I gathered some other bits, vegetation, seeds, mealworms, etc., things that at a glance could blur the line between anatomical gore and vegetation, which is a bit of a theme I’ve done with the visuals of the band this year.
I put all that in a box outside my door and left it in the sun for 6-10 weeks, and left it to rot. I took pictures everyday which I’ll do something with at some point. The smell was breathtaking.
How important is the DIY approach to you as a band?
The DIY approach is really important to us. Jasper recorded everything for the album but drums. We put a lot of our own shows on at the beginning, and have gone on to self book tours across the UK. I have done all the art, visuals and promo for the band, and even made some of the merch. Steve makes his own pedals for his guitar rig. The list goes on, it's a lot of work but worth it.
We’re super lucky to have the skills to make it happen. But a lot of stuff I’ve done has been all for the first time, just pursuing that gut instinct and stubbornly making it happen any way I can, whether that be rotting pig hearts for album covers or learning how to use graphic design software to make merch designs.
Anything we can’t do ourselves, we keep within a tight group of people who we trust. I’ve had a very focused vision of what Believe in Nothing looks like and sounds like from the start, and making that come to life can sometimes only come from doing it yourself or within the band.
You’ve played with a load of cool and diverse bands already, and you’re also on Church Road Records who are of course purveyors of all kinds of great heavy/alternative music here in the UK. How do you feel about ‘the scene’ in the country so to speak?
The heavy music scene in the UK is flourishing in the face of the ugly world growing around it, and it is a privilege to be part of that creative reaction right now. There’s a real sense of community within the bands on Church Road, and across the heavy music scene in the UK. I feel like I’ve made some friends for life just from playing shows this year, everyone is looking to support each other, be inspired by each other and all without egos or macho bullshit.
While we talk about scenes, I just wanna put some light on the local scene we have come from. We’re from Eastbourne, a seaside town that, like most, is having its struggles. But with a landscape like that, comes an environment for visceral and meaningful art. Myself and the rest of Believe in Nothing are heavily involved in the local scene, working with bands and venues to build a music scene from nothing over the last few years, under the umbrella of Eastbourne Music Collective.
We’ve gone from sad covers bands, banging out “Mr Brightside” to another jaw-swinging bunch of cunts on a Friday night, to not just creating a space for bands like ourselves to play, but also hosting some incredible bands from across the UK: Inhuman Nature, Blind Monarch, Tribe of Ghosts, Pascagoula, Black Shape, the list goes on. That has only been possible because of the community and drive within Eastbourne Music Collective.
Massive shout out to everyone who has supported us in Eastbourne. Massive shout out to a few of our fellow noisy bands from Eastbourne: Black Groove, Chub, Mortal Karkass, Defamation Project, Harrowed, Mortuary, Chugzilla, Loose Endz, Veltmans. Again the list goes on. We are incredibly proud to be part of the Eastbourne Music Scene.
Do you have any concrete hopes or plans for the future of Believe In Nothing?
We have started making plans for writing and recording more music. We plan to record a split, and then another album. Our plan is to keep playing shows, keep experimenting on stage and keep challenging ourselves and the audience, and let that bleed into the next album.
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Rot is available now via Church Road Records.
Believe In Nothing on social media: Instagram
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