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You’d be hard pressed to find a band with fewer airs and graces than Piss. First, there’s the unavoidable matter of their name, which they style in all caps, no nonsense; a word that scans as vulgar and combative but also somewhat facetious when displayed on their merch in loopy cursive, sometimes decorated with bows. The Vancouver quartet’s music is a merciless cyclone of hardcore, poetry, sound collage and performance art that revolves entirely around singer Taylor Zantingh’s experiences with sexual violence.
On stage at Eindhoven’s Hit the City festival in late August, the band greets the stacked crowd with a trigger warning before drummer Garreth Roberts, bassist Gavin Moya and guitarist Tyler Paterson launch into pulverising fits of noise-punk, broken up by audio samples of children laughing and feminist writer Andrea Dworkin talking about pornography. Zantingh hurls herself around, clutching at her stomach and flinging her pigtails before winding down to a nervous, twitching standstill. The intense set is finely tuned to present a narrative of gender-based violence not as entertainment, but as lived experience. They play it exactly the same every night, and have done for the last two years.
“I think a lot of people are like, ‘I’m going to see a band called Piss, this is going to be craaaazy!’ And it’s crazy in a different way than they expect,” Zantingh tells me before the show, over chamomile tea. “People come for one thing and then they’re forced to listen to me for half an hour.”
The buzz around Piss usually takes bands of their ilk several album cycles to drum up, yet they have released next to no music: a four-track demo on Bandcamp, a few professionally recorded sets and radio appearances on YouTube and some viral fan-filmed clips. Since forming in 2024, their reputation has grown through their live performance, prompting Sub Pop to sign them; their debut album You Made Me / Skin on Linen arrives in October.
Recorded over a handful of days in winter 2024, the album was made to mirror the Piss live experience as closely as possible. Throughout, you’ll hear Zantingh gasp for breath or struggle to get words out, lacing traumatic recollections with disturbing imagery of “fingers sewn in the wrong places” and kids “practising blowjobs on glue sticks”. The songs combine Bikini Kill and Fugazi’s DIY approach to “making personal things political” with the uranium-heavy sonics of Chat Pile or Swans. Paterson, who is primarily responsible for shaping the instrumentals, likens his process to scoring a film. “The influences came from a lot of places to uphold the narrative that Tay is weaving,” he says. “The feelings and intention come first, and the sound comes after.”
The way Piss use music, performance art and other voices is fundamental, Zantingh says, because the subject matter is too “monstrous” to be described in words alone. Placing her voice in chorus with a range of others – activists, philosophers, militants, psychoanalysts and transgressive literary figures, including French philosopher Manon Garcia speaking about the trial of Gisèle Pelicot – leaves things open to interpretation. “One reason I feel so strong when I’m on stage is because I’ve found the right way to communicate it, versus trying to confess these things in a literal sense. When I’m telling [the audience] how these events still hurt me today, and they’re watching me hurt myself in real time, they’re watching that injury in a very tangible way.”
While Piss try to provide as many access points to their music as possible, it is, at every level, deeply uncomfortable. When I describe their twisted instrumentals as “gross”, drummer Garreth Roberts says, “That’s Ty’s [guitarist Tyler Paterson] favourite word!” Zantingh’s voice jolts unpredictably from soft spoken-word to chainsaw shriek. All lyrics and samples (which they consider a reading list) are also prominently subtitled in their videos, for accessibility and so the subject matter doesn’t take a backseat to the visuals. “I’d like to be able to print them out so people can have them at the shows – almost like a little programme, like when you go to church,” says Zantingh.
In the queue before the gig, a number of men were sniggering about the name Piss. I wonder whether the band feel their music is always met on its own terms. Zantingh recalls seeing two older men at the front of a festival set. “When I was doing the trigger warning they were like, ‘Woke!’ and then walked off,” she says with a weary smile. “The irony is they probably need that show more than most people there, but I accepted early on that the people I want to play the set for might not be the people I can have the most impact on.”
On the precipice of a debut album release through one of the most revered independent labels, Piss find themselves contemplating an uncertain future. “Part of the reason we waited so long to release the record is because I don’t know, and I have never known, how long I’m gonna be able to physically and emotionally do this,” Zantingh states plainly. “I spend my life trying to turn my pain into something beautiful,” she screams on I Wanted to Be a Singer.
“The foundation of Piss is built on my suffering,” she continues. “We literally cannot exist the way that we exist if you remove that.” That might be unsustainable in the long run, but for now, she says, “it’s exactly what it’s supposed to be”.
You Made Me / Skin on Linen is released via Sub Pop on 30 October. Piss are at Brighton Psych fest on 4 September, End of the Road on 6 September and then tour North America and Europe
