an interview: Seven years of struggle and persistence poured out in less than 15 minutes

For screamo band Kid, Feral, the truth finally comes out

The song “Substance” has a lyric that captures Kid, Feral’s sound—a burning-at-both-ends sound, always changing, always shifting: "I'm trying to fill the gaps, changing shapes like they ask while I'm breaking.”

But later in the song, singer Vile Hartman screams, “This year is the same, just like the others / I'm scared I might just not grow old after all.”

I hear a story about somebody with an unstable identity struggling in a destabilized reality—and seeing only repetition.

Swedish screamo band Kid, Feral debuted with “Live and Let’s Die!” in 2018. And to hear the new album, you’d wonder if the band might not grow old after all because they still sound like mid-2010s-era screamo.

The album has that era’s fragility, and it has less guitar distortion and fewer hardcore vocals than today’s screamo bands, like Blind Girls and Portrayal of Guilt.

That’s partly because its recording started in 2019. The drums were recorded in October that year; the rest of the album, though, was rewritten, reworked, and rerecorded more than once since then. Those years were hard, personally, according to the band. But they did not let the album go.

Kid, Feral talked to me about the new album.

Damon: Hello, and congratulations on the album! I like it. The music has that cathartic quality that good screamo has. There’s a quote attributed to French poet Paul Valéry that says, in short, art is never finished, only abandoned. After almost 7 years, does it feel cathartic to release this album? Or does it feel more like you’re abandoning it? Or a mix?

Kid, Feral: Very, very cathartic. It's been super very weird to finally, FINALLY be done with the album. It took so much work. Just imagine—we've listened to these drum tracks from 25 to 32 years old.

I can say that we are all in the band 100-percent happy with the result. It definitely feels like a completion. I think all of us in the band are happy to never, ever work with these songs ever again ... ahaha!!

We're more looking forward to making new songs and not looking back so much after this debacle.

Probably releasing more often now. Seven years is not too hard to beat!
 

D: Had the album been released around 2019, what might be different? What would sound different?

KF: It would have been a very different album. Our old bassist, Ossian, was more of a punk guy, so there would have been a different bass sound for sure.

It might have sounded a bit less melodically intricate because guitars and bass were rewritten and refined a couple of times. That's probably the biggest difference.

It almost might have been less well mixed since we've gotten better at production, and our taste has evolved since then.
 

D: Here’s the obligatory question about influences. What screamo bands were you listening to in that 2016-2019 time? And which screamo bands, if any, were you listening to when you were finishing this album? Did your tastes change in that time and, if so, what effect might that have had on the final sound of the album?

KF: Jeromes Dream, mostly. It's our favorite screamo band, definitely. We've had the pleasure to see them twice live now—once in Gotheburg and once in Canada at New Friends Fest (NFF) in '24. Since we played our show at NFF the same day as them, we went backstage and shook their hands after they played their show lmao. It sounds corny, but, to us, it was like meeting Led Zeppelin, so we just had to do it.

Also saw Raein at NFF, which is a huge inspiration. Ran up after the show and talked about mic positions on the Stratocaster. They have such a lovely guitar sound, and yeah, I was like, Damn it's just Stratocasters on the neck position. I was stoked because that's also what I love. They're also very cool dudes and very friendly to nerds bugging them after the show about gear. It was cool and inspiring.

But to answer your question, I think our "schtick" is to try to not emulate anyone and have a unique sound, for better or worse. It's a lot of just plucking things out of the ether during song-writing time and going for it because we literally can't do anything else. Like, we really, really wanted our band to sound like very hard-ass normal screamo, but obviously we just can't do it!!! hahaha
 

D: Please talk about the lyrics to “Puddle Jumper.” In particular, I’m interested in this part: “And I’m accepting the fact that you’re never coming back / I’ve come out stronger.” And this: “Then it hits me that you want me to do better.” These lyrics are nuts.

KF: So, I had a best friend in University that got brain cancer and died unfortunately! It's what the Firedragon3651 song from the first album is about. This song is kinda like the final addendum to that whole experience. The dude's gone now for a while but he's still flowing through my fingers, helping me remember. And you gotta stay positive and move forward—that's the human spirit. 😊

Thank you to Kid, Feral, for taking the time.

I enjoy the album, starting with “Funeral in a Grocery Store,” which offers a furious start, a cathartic onslaught of noise and emotion. The bass guitar hits like a ram. The song includes backing harmonies and a few screams bordering on terror. I like the vocal at 53 seconds—“I don't want to die in a grave I dug with my own hands.” Oh, that deeply felt sense of alienation: "And sometimes I look out the window and everything's normal / It confuses me greatly / When will it all connect?"

“Medieval Poetry,” my favorite song, mellows at 29 seconds as the bass drum pulses under looping chords. The vocal strain against the earworm melody works because it contrasts with the rougher parts. This is the album’s most rhythmically consistent song.

On “2019,” Kid, Feral plays like it has a total lifespan under 15 minutes. The album’s long-ass song is “I Want to Be Your Canopy.” It’s almost two and half minutes!

My second-favorite song, “Puddle Jumper,” starts with guitar notes chiming out a sun shower of well-played pull-offs and hammer-ons. Naked self-deception and truth battle in the lyrics, “And I'm accepting the fact that you're never coming back / I've come out stronger / Love! It's stupidly strong / Tears! When they come / I'll try / Pain and loss can be so scary / I'll try / How can I even start to describe something as awful as you leaving." Then this baffling ending: "Then it hits me that you want me to do better / LOVE! / I want to live, so let's acknowledge these changes."

What choice does one have but to spin awful heartache into motivation?

 

 

Kid Feral released “2019” on May 29th, 2026, through the Oslo-based label Backpack Records. The album was self-recorded in the band’s rehearsal space and self-mixed and mastered.

 

Interview date: Aug 21, 2026

about a Pitchfork article describing a few days on tour with Charlie XCX

She was learning the choreography, but I get the impression she was learning the songs, too:

It’s kind of nice to go straight into rehearsing a record, because sometimes there’s that thing of releasing an album and then you’re like, ‘What do I do now?’” she says, sitting on a bench outside the entrance to the studio. “The day after it came out, I flew here and just locked in. It’s like, momentum—you’re actually kind of feeding more into the album and bringing a different part of it to life immediately. It doesn’t just ... linger."

And then this:

This album, she says, has “tied a lot of things together for me, and shown how different parts of different records can work in tandem.” She’s playing “Pink Diamond,” the aggressive opening track of 2020’s How I’m Feeling Now, on this tour; its chaotic, messy performance is one of the show’s highlights. “I think there are a lot of parallels with this album and How I’m Feeling Now, and that link has made me think about the links through all of my songs, and ... ” she drifts off. “It’s just like, a constant mining of the self, really, isn’t it?” (“Sorry, I’m really talking in abstracts because I’m so fucking exhausted,” she says at one point. “I can’t get like, a real sentence out.”)

Note: https://pitchfork.com/story/the-life-of-the-party-a-week-on-tour-with-charli-xcx/

 

a note to anyone who needs it

Work. Two kinds of work: work-work and creative work. Those are how you get through. They are also how you process everything. Work gives life definition.

Do creative work. Do mixed media. Write. Paint or draw. Cook. Feed family, feed yourself. Play guitar. Play your songs on guitar.

If work-work is most of your life, do you live a full life? If you create always, are you making an honest living? What if you produce little to nothing?

 

Questions like that get processed in work, too.

Your mind does not need to constantly reflect on itself with those kinds of questions. Instead, keep moving. What’s in front of you. No matter how dumb.

Stop wanting peace of mind. Try to ignore the compulsivity and anxiety.

Looking for things outside yourself to define your life will leave you feeling empty and angry.

 

I need to stop wanting peace of mind. I think the thing to do is accept this life and live. It's the life we're living, and we're running out of time.

(sketches) the ugly window plant, looking into the alley

 

lyrics about a girl who draws

You wink and say you feel alone but won’t stay. Made a drawing of me, a drawing of us beside a drawing of the day.

You charged night, feeling far from home until you watch heavy on your face peeling.

Sad caresses, but you let me go as far as I can, far as I can fall. We skim along the surface, rocks skipping, lakes and all.

We walked through the tall grass to a drainage ditch behind your house.
Go there to be alone as a kid. In love in this spot—is it all better closer to your house?

about hearing Robber Robber in DC

Robber Robber played Rhizome in Washington, DC, on Friday, May 22, 2026.

Empath, a band in which the lead singer/guitar player channels her guitar through a bunch of watery effects opened. That band’s drummer had a little tambourine-like bell on his toms. He wore a dirty white tank top, shorts, and a mustache. There was a cinder block against the bass drum. At first, they had to mush the block back against the bass drum because the kit kept moving. The drummer finally gave up and rested the cinder block half inside the bass drum hole.

Robber Robber’s “Two Wheels Move the Soul” was released April 3, 2026. They covered “Suspicious Minds.” The drummer was amazing—and he was just filling in for the regular drummer. The singer announced that more than halfway through the show. I was flabbergasted, he was so good.

a few words about love and nothing

Jonahthinice 

I fell in love with a hurricane, with the sweet warm evening
If nothing because there's nothing
Time and distance blossoms pleasure to cut, cut, cut through you

 

Note: Haiku form

 

Jonahthinice 

love sweet warm evening
time distance blossoms pleasure
to cut, cut through you

 

a note from the downtown office

The custodian lady at work is over 80 and won't pick up our trash if it's wet or has loose food. She trained the others to keep their trash clean. I resented her at first but eventually had to respect her impudence. She never checked my trash. I threw nothing away.

She was gone a while because she had a heart attack. She returned, and we picked up where we left off.

about Augusten Burroughs’ “Running with Scissors"

Running with Scissors, published in 2002, describes an especially noxious and wild period in American writer Augusten Burroughs’ youth. As the story goes, Burroughs’ parents, who fight loudly, frequently, and then violently, divorce. Burroughs, a smart, resourceful 13-year-old who is gay and neurotically image-conscious and clean, stays at first with his mother. But she starts to suffer an identity crisis, and her long-simmering mental health issues snowball. She sends her son to live with her psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, who is clearly insane and lives in a dilapidated Victorian house. Also living there is an assortment of people that includes Finch’s children (some possibly adopted), apparently a wife, and sometimes live-in patients and drifters.

The large house is the home of a repulsive, squalid chaos. It is without rules, without discipline, without sanity.

 

Although initially repulsed by the set-up, Burroughs assimilates. He even forms a close friendship with Finch's daughter, Natalie, who is one year older than he is. Meanwhile, though, Burroughs’ mother gets much worse under Finch’s care.

 

The book is run-through with darkness and disturbances. Like, a sick 33-year-old squatter named Neil rapes the 13-year-old Burroughs; then the two carry on a bizarre sex-power relationship for two years afterwards. Everyone, including Dr. Finch, knows. That is just one of the book’s rape and assault episodes.

 

Burroughs and Natalie eventually leave the house together, but their friendship dissolves after Burroughs fails to take Natalie’s father’s side when Burroughs’ mother accuses the doctor of rape. The book ends with Burroughs’ decision to move to New York City to try to become a writer.

 

A blurb on the dust jacket of the edition I read (St. Martin’s Press, 2002) affected how I read the book. Haven Kimmel, author of A Girl Named Zippy, commented: “Harrowing and hilarious. I haven’t laughed this hard since David Sedaris’s last book.” I understand the reference, but reading this is not like reading Sedaris.

 

Some parts of Running with Scissors are funny—I laughed when I read about Finch’s self-described office masturbatorium, a room in which he rubs one out between appointments. But that is an easy laugh; Sedaris is a smug laugh.

 

Also, Sedaris writes tight prose and can be beautifully sentimental; the prose in Scissors is unremarkable, and Burroughs never sounds sincere.

 

Moreover, Scissors just seems unbelievable. I assume Sedaris exaggerates, possibly straying at times into fiction. He’s a storyteller and humorist. Burroughs, I suspect, goes further and more frequently into fiction that he admits. He writes in Scissors about a time when he and Natalie, both young teenagers, pulled out a window from a pantry room and tried to fit it in a big hole they cut out of the roof. I just do not think that happened. And apparently the irresponsibly, undeniably crazy Finch, who readily tells patients about his masturbatorium and goes through a prolonged phase in which he divines in his own shit signs from God, stays licensed and practices for decades, thinking that the only threat to his practice is back taxes.

 

Burroughs ardently claims his work is "entirely accurate" and insisted the book remain marketed as a memoir during a 2005 lawsuit filed by the family of the real Finch, Dr. Rodolph H. Turcotte, who alleged defamation of character and invasion of privacy. The lawsuit was settled, and afterwards Burroughs reportedly said “what I wrote is the truth” and “it's still a memoir, it's marketed as a memoir, they've agreed one-hundred percent that it is a memoir.”

Notes: 

Running with Scissors spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. 

Running with Scissors was published in 2002; the defamation lawsuit was filed in 2005; the film was released in 2006.

 

a review of a noise rock EP by Coilguns

I wrote about this band’s 2021 EP. Now comes “Peace Trader,” a new Coilguns single about testing a country’s values and you not seeing that most people don’t care to live up to them.

The song starts with an octave chord and quieted drums. At 10 seconds, the sound goes big, raw, and passionate. It feels like good Deftones. A few chords swing back and forth to screams of “Tell me, what have we done with our history of peaceful force? Yet, we still have hopes!” Then the bass and a guitar drop out, the intro is recalled—the octave chord and drums pushed back in the mix so the almost spoken message can be heard, "Still thought that our land would export dialog instead of weapons / Still naive enough to support what we thought was our main goal / International help and solutions for a solidar world / But you’ve traded it all and pretend to be forced now to cope."

Then the sound explodes again. The most effective part comes at 2:40 with a falsetto mourn followed by the realization, however fleeting, that "No one’s land here, but a place to die; we will mourn them all, we will mourn them all.” Then belief in life after death returns.

Unlike migration flows, Coilguns runs tight.

 

off another life

I waited in the parking lot, bloody knees in a bad town, a girl there running around. She was special, aching in my tears. She was so lovely, fantastic eyes, the one I used lay beside. I don't have a home anymore and walked into the strip mall bar with threats all over the walls. The people in there had some drinking money sent from home. The monsters people feed. We drank, and the evening robbed the graves of lives we couldn’t bother with.

These rusted-out ears hear the sound of cicadas breathing a second wind into the afternoon, bringing honor to evening. I blinded a few cicadas once—held a magnifying glass to concentrate the sun into a beam burning their eyes out. Then I set them free. I watched with burnt-out eyes that died a string of illnesses. Cicadas flew away like normal.

There are some lives you don’t want to peek into, and hers was one. She told me she raised four children but was the biological mother of three. One died last year at age 26. What remained was a skeleton’s stare filled with secrets.

 

about spending 4th of July trying not to think about the hearts at stake

I was trapped and strained toward the trapper. I tell you to work backward from a valley in the Carpathians through the age of apocalypse here in America, to California, to the birth of nanotechnology. When a single molecule splits itself into two and eats you and drinks water into its structures, you discover life is widely available. You consume cold babies to survive but find a dead body kept warm by the levitating boy at Old Moon Creek.

subpar lyrics

Ever Since

 

Why should I wake up now?

The meaningless call

Why should I put myself through it?

Why does this happen at all?

 

I can’t find the reason

Put feet on the floor anyway

I stand in the humid air

And wish for winter’s say

 

I wished you loved me once again

But those days are gone

I want to see you

But now I must go on

 

How can I?

Maybe I’m in some kind of phase

I’ll think of you too often, even years from now

I’ll know I’m going the wrong way

for the love of AI

People like us with criminal records eventually wash out of the loop toward the black star. Right before it happens, the energy level of our blood increases as it flows through the compressor due to the action of the rotor blades which exert a torque on the fluid. I chose to suffer, and the warden got murderous with her language until reaching the skeleton-hurts point. Then I was rescued by alcohol-induced psychosis. Exhaustion triggers the simulation of thought. Bypass ratios reached greater than 10:1 because of blade aerodynamics. Thought in the form of prepackaged synthesis makes old thought feel redundant because it has been already simulated. Not a pile of data but structures of knowledge: metaphysics (what is real), epistemology (how we know), and ethics (what we do with that knowledge). Then warden offered to erase my record and set me loose. Still, the deeds we do are ones we've been doing our whole lives. Trained in systems thinking, I looked for feedback loops but found none. We will all die, and, oh, I bet it’s black inside that box. 

about a tired-sounding punk/hardcore band

Industrial Puke’s second album, “Alive to No Avail,” opens with a serrated guitar riff, then comes the whole shebang.

The band plows ahead with its volume-equals-good ethos and centers a maxed-out vocal. The loudest part is always the vocal—chorused layers of it parading machismo.

The Swedish band’s second full-length tries to squeeze a few more miles out of the sound first heard on its 2022 red-blooded crust EP, “Where Life Crisis Starts.” The whole thing was seven minutes. Soon followed the band’s full-length debut, 2023’s “Born into the Twisting Rope.”

I wrote about the first one, “Where Life Crisis Starts,” here.

The band insists on one speed, one volume, and one trick. Its monotonous sound stumbled across the finish line of that brief four-song EP.

It was okay then, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far.

 

something about "Dry" by Augusten Burroughs

I was underwhelmed by Running With Scissors, his much-ballyhooed memoir and debut, but I still tried Dry, another autobiographical work by American writer Augusten Burroughs. Supposedly Dry was written first. I stopped reading it about halfway though.
 
I enjoyed parts of Running With Scissors and understood it to be a memoir when I picked it up. But as I read, I grew deeply skeptical about its truthfulness and quickly learned after reading that the people depicted in the book also disputed the accounts. This soured me.
 
Dry includes in the beginning this author’s note:

This memoir is based on my experiences over a ten-year period. Names have been changed, characters combined, and events compressed. Certain episodes are imaginative re-creation, and those episodes are not intended to portray actual events.

So the story is no memoir. And I guess Burroughs's lawyers were also skeptical of this recovery tale and wanted to head off more lawsuits.

Besides this, the story is repetitive, and the prose did not alleviate my frustration.

Dry supposedly describes the author's battle with alcoholism. In the story, Burroughs is a fairly successful advertising copywriter but gets hammered frequently and eventually his colleagues and boss decide to stop giving him a pass.
 
He goes to rehab, gets out in 30 days, and resumes life somehow, succeeding against his urges. Totally real.