ferb's "Killing It" opens on an arpeggiated guitar figure that's almost meditative. This circling, rhythmic pattern that loops around itself, pulling you in slow, before you even realize you've committed to the ride. I kept nodding along thinking it was heading somewhere modest, but it isn't.
The chorus hits and everything thickens at once. The guitars pile into a dense, wall-of-sound surge and the vocalist pushes into this soaring, strained range where his voice catches just enough at the top that you feel the frustration behind the words rather than just hearing it. I totally stopped what I was doing.
The loud-quiet-loud structure here earns itself because the verses do actual work, coiling tension instead of just marking time. The bridge guitar solo doesn't shred for spectacle, tt bends and climbs melodically, searching for something it can't quite name… felt more emotional than technical, and that's exactly the right call.
Killing It came from a moment of frustration and dissatisfaction from our place in the London scene. That feeling poured itself straight into the music, writing our most immediate banger to date, and unintentionally brought us back to our post-punk roots. We aimed to keep the more intense, wall-of-sound-esque textures we'd started introducing into our sound, but wanted to separate ourselves from any bands we felt too overtly inspired by at that time. It became a fan favourite very quickly and its sound has inspired much of our current writing state in itself.
You hear every bit of that frustration in the production because of the low-grade tension running through the whole track, never fully bleeding out even after the big chorus surges wash over you. That restlessness is what keeps me returning to it.
Recorded across nine months at O'Mellor Studios on Dirt Circle Records. This is a band that sat with it until it was right. "Killing It" sounds like proof of that.
