Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs are on the cover of the latest issue of L&Q, and subscribers get a ltd edition flexi disc featuring an exclusive version of new track ‘Terror’s Pillow’. Sign up today
Be warned: This is probably going to make a lot of people feel super old, but it’s been a decade since Pigs x 7 first landed on the scene. In those ten years, the Newcastle band have changed massively, taking a scalpel to their own work, sweating off the long freakouts and reducing the lazy acid jams until all that’s left is a taut, well-honed machine that doesn’t fuck around.
Land of Sleeper, the band’s fourth record, could be a chips-on-the-table moment for Pigs. Unlike the preceding albums, the songs aren’t really pushing the envelope or messing with the established formula. It takes about 15 seconds for the band to drop in on opener ‘Ultimate Hammer’ and just like that, the band pick up almost exactly where they left off with 2020’s Viscerals. Thematically, though, the album feels like a change in tone, bleak in a way that previous records haven’t been. Pigs have always had a sense of darkness to them, but this mines new levels of existential dread, resulting in a few curve balls around the halfway mark. No more so than on ‘The Weatherman’, a menacing creeper that features vocals from Bonnacons Of Doom’s Kate Smith and choral flourishes courtesy of Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington.
All in all, Land of Sleeper is the sound of Pigs completing their development phase and emerging as something perfected and unique.
