Watching a Piss show is like a visceral gut punch. A 30-minute, top-to-bottom retelling of their forthcoming debut album ‘You Made Me / Skin On Linen’, the Canadian hardcore punk band and their vocalist Taylor Zantingh’s live set is more akin to a performance art piece or a conceptual exorcism than a traditional gig.
Zantingh paces the stage, pained, straining and frequently bent double under the weight of her words. Around her, guitarist Tyler Patterson, bassist Gavin Moya and drummer Garreth Roberts conjure up slabs of noise that range from the brutal and uncompromising (‘I Wanted To Be A Singer’) to the perversely danceable (‘Time Loop At Hot Slit’). Interspersed between the tracks are clips of feminist activists, literary philosophers and young children. At the core and unavoidable through it all is the distress of Zantingh’s lived experience, as she performs from a record dealing with the ongoing trauma of sexual violence.
It’s far from classic festival fare, but at this year’s End Of The Road, the tent for Piss is heaving. Despite having only released three demos on Bandcamp at the time of playing, the word-of-mouth buzz around the quartet is tangible. The band have drawn increasingly dedicated crowds across Canada and North America since they began playing live in 2024, and at The Great Escape in Brighton this May, the quartet’s intensely powerful show was arguably the most talked-about of the festival.
Today, the crowd reaction lands like nothing else on the bill. Some are just here for the mosh-worthy sonic blitzes, but many people – mostly women – look winded. Some leave. After ‘Andrea II’ – a spoken word piece in which radical activist Andrea Dworkin declares that “as the law isn’t working… I favour violence” – an impromptu cheer resounds around the space. Piss’ performance is magnetic, but there’s substantially more going on between band and crowd than just a musical exchange.
“I‘m always reminded that a big reason why the project is doing well is because there’s this huge problem, and if so many people are resonating with it, that reflects on our artistry and our ability to talk about it. But it also reflects on how horrible a lot of people feel that they’re relating to a record like this,” suggests Zantingh. The band are sitting with NME a few days before End Of The Road, sipping orange juice at a pub around the corner from their temporary digs in Wanstead. “This record is supposed to continue a conversation that’s been going on for a really long time. It feels like simultaneously the easiest and the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.”
Piss have only ever had this specific mission statement in mind. The band began when Zantingh – the only member to come from a hardcore background – met Patterson at a party, and ended up moving from Ontario to Vancouver to live with him and start a group. All the while, the vocalist, who also studied Creative Writing at university, had been crafting “a poetry collection and short fiction, but nothing felt like it was clicking”. When the idea came to turn them into lyrics for a record, though, that changed. Zantingh sketched an outline for the record that same weekend. Soon, Moya and Roberts were invited to join.
“A lot of people want art about trauma, and then when trauma symptoms come up, all of a sudden it’s like… ‘Oh’” – Taylor Zantingh
“What was empowering was that I felt like I had the skills on one hand to say what I wanted to say in the very precise way that I wanted to say it, [but also] all my life I’ve been getting really comfortable with being a total freak on stage and not caring what people think,” Zantingh explains. Moving from her hometown gave her the distance to write about her past, while her bandmates swiftly proved themselves the right kind of people to facilitate and support such a heavy undertaking. “Everything about this project is hard for me in some way, but the hardest thing for them is doing it for me,” Zantingh readily admits. “A lot of people want art about trauma, and then when trauma symptoms come up, all of a sudden it’s like… ‘Oh’. But you can’t have one without the other.
“It’s kind of this elephant in the room that I’m working with three men on this project,” she continues. “But [the other side] is that this record is so connected with experiences of men harming me, but then in order to create it I had this really great group of men come and, without ego, just offer their help and support in order to get us where we are. It’s not just me and my lyrics that got us here; it’s all of our strengths coming together for this common goal.” As if to underline her point, her bandmates sit back for the vast majority of today’s conversation, and just let Zantingh speak.
Piss are not here to make comfortable music. Across 15 tracks, Zantingh ricochets between intellectual references to the likes of Toni Morrison and philosopher Manon Garcia, and almost unbearably raw explorations of her own experience. The result is like a pinballing between the head and the body, of trying to somehow make sense of a senseless world. ‘You Made Me / Skin On Linen’ begins with ‘Kai And Friends’: a pure and innocent clip of young children listing what they want to be when they grow up. Then, Zantingh enters with the scream of ‘I Wanted To Be A Singer’. “I keep trying to make my pain mean something,” she declares over harsh, atonal guitars. “I wanted to feel safe in my body / I wanted to be a singer.”
In the track, the vocalist poses a statement at the crux of the record and the band: “I don’t know if writing about violence is helping me / Is it helping you?” Even now, she’s still not entirely sure. “Once we finished the record and performed it a few times, I was ready to move on to the next thing. But when you’re a musician, you have to do it again and again and again and again and again,” she considers. More than most bands, the toll is tangible. “The band is built on a foundation of my suffering. It’s inextricable, and that’s very, very intense. It’s the most complicated set of feelings I’ve ever had to grapple with because, on one hand, it feels amazing to be able to connect with people in this way, but then the littlest thing will just make me feel completely awful.”
“It’s not just me and my lyrics that got us here; it’s all of our strengths coming together for this common goal” – Taylor Zantingh
With Piss’ momentum escalating by the week, and their debut set to only further that upon its release later this month, the vocalist is having to pay increasing mind to how she safeguards herself. For one, it’s unfeasible for Zantingh to perform five nights a week. Recently, she’s been “constantly adding new things to the regimen” – a therapist, physiotherapist, massage therapist, and myriad supplements. “It’s good to exercise and to take care of your body, but obsessively centring my life around my body also feels like a prison sometimes. I can’t ever have a day where I’m like, ‘I’m just gonna get drunk’. I always have to think about it.”
It’s a huge act of dedication to Piss’ cause, but one that Zantingh is willing to undertake in order to start or further conversations. The children’s voices at the record’s opening, she says, are intended to highlight “the idea of a child as a piece of clay and how, if there are hands that shape them in a way that’s harmful, then the child grows up with these fingerprints on them, into a shape that impacts everything else in their life forever. It’s not like you get harmed and then you move on”. “I wanted the intangible wounds of sexual violence to be manifested in a physical way,” she adds.
Across several quotes and original lyrics, the band broach different aspects of rape culture and violence against women. ‘Blocking A Scene You Can’t Remember’ is a traumatised incantation, delivered like the instructions of a film script (“Interior: a girl’s bedroom, nighttime”), while ‘Vikki’ quotes an activist friend of Zantingh’s: “Our boys are being raised in a rape culture, and then we’re individually holding them responsible, as if they invented misogyny.”
Piss’ approach is decidedly nuanced, contrary to what a lot of the “heinous” comments on their YouTube videos might suggest, or what certain factions of their burgeoning audience might cast them as (“There were two men at the front in Bristol, and I gave the trigger warning at the start of the set, and they just both went, ‘WOKE’, and then walked out,” Zantingh laughs). There’s an awful lot of thought, research and different vantage points across their debut, and Zantingh is equally considered in conversation. “I think the most important opinion that I have is that we should never be scared of ideas, and I think a lot of people are right now,” she says.
“In a lot of the feminist songwriting that I hear right now, there’s a trend of really simple, buzzword-type stuff. And there’s definitely men out there who need to hear that, but they’re probably not coming to your shows,” she continues. “If you want the men in your life to be held to a higher standard, talk to them like they’re adult humans with working brains and let them disappoint you. I believe in my heart of hearts that sexual violence is a collective soul wound that hurts and touches everybody. And maybe a lot of men who are close to coming to that understanding will be pushed away by having a woman who is their peer looking down on them.”
Instead, Piss offer a brutal, uncomfortable mirror to reality and let the reflection speak for itself. In ‘You Made Me / Skin On Linen’, they’ve created a confronting yet vital piece of work that’s impossible not to be affected by. It is deeply, crushingly human – filled with the sort of pain that’s hard to recover from. But by putting it out there, and on the stage, Taylor Zantingh is trying.
“For me, there’s never been a day in my life where I wasn’t thinking about this in some way. And I still think about it every single day, but now I have a lot more control over the way that it is communicated to people,” she says. “I wanted to create this thing that’s as accurate a picture as I can possibly create of my experience, and give it to people, and trust that they’ll find what they need to find and take what they need to take from it.”
Piss’ ‘You Made Me / Skin On Linen’ is out on October 30 via Sub Pop Records.
Listen to Piss’ exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Lisa Wright / @lisaannewright
Photography: Maya Fuhr
Hair and Makeup: Courtney Yellow-Quill
Dollmaker: Sophie Santos English
Label: Sub Pop Records
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