Nox Pulso – interview

Unstoppable industrial duo, NOX PULSO have just set loose their scorching new single and video, Night Trap  – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9c3uTqSNfo . We wanted to find out more, so we grilled the guys…….

What is the full band line-up, who sings and who plays which instrument?

Duncan Williams: Vocals, Guitar

Matt McIvor: Electronics, Vocals

How and when did the band form? Tell us anything interesting about your hometown

We formed in the summer of 2022 although we have known each other for, and even shared the same stage a few times over, the last 2 decades. We spent our formative years in a suburb about 45 minutes outside of London, although we live a bit further away from each other now! There is almost nothing remarkable about our slice of suburbian nowhere, it is somewhere like everywhere, aside from the fact that because nothing ever happened there, in the late 90s our general area became a hotbed for new alternative music, with bands like Hundred Reasons, Vex Red and so on prompting Surrey to be dubbed the “Seattle of England” in a lot of the alternative press. Both of us were pursuing music ourselves at that time, but in scenes which did not dare speak to each other: Matt in drum n bass, Duncan in nu-metal. When The Prodigy really broke into the mainstream we started seeing crossover gigs at our grassroots end too: when we did end up sharing the stage these were very odd gigs – they often resulted in punch ups in the audience!

When and how did the band really start gelling and solidifying?

Essentially on the first day we got together in a rehearsal room. We’ve known each other for 25 years and had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted to do: dance music for metalheads- – although it has evolved a little since then to a more song-based format.

Who are your musical influences?

Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, The Prodigy, Rammstein, Cubanate, Front 242

Where did the name of the band come from?

It’s supposed to be Latin for “night beats” or “nasty pulse” but because neither of us speak Latin, we had to take a guess. We wanted something that would directly describe the sound of the band.

How far back does your history with each other (the band members) extend?
Are you friends from school or any family relations?

We met in 1998 at college. We went to the same house parties, slept on the same floors, played some of the same stages in our relative guises, and went to night clubs and occasionally other people’s gigs together, too.

In your opinion, how is your band different from all the other bands out there?

We really come from two very different musical worlds – pure dance music, and alternative metal. Nox Pulso exists in the gap in between those our separate experiences in those backgrounds.

Lots of dance acts have a rock edge – take The Prodigy – but we apply a more traditional heavy song format, more vocals, more guitars. Lots of heavy acts have dance/synth moments – but they are more like incidental flavouring (think the way Rammstein use keyboards, or Rob Zombie uses electronic drums; very sporadic albeit delicious flavouring!) – our electronics are the total backbone of what we are doing, like a dance or industrial band but with a lot more vocal and guitar emphasis. We struggle to find the right genre to describe what we do for exactly this reason.

If a deaf person were to ask you to describe the sound of your music, how would you describe it?

You are hiding out in a cheap motel room in some suburbian hellhole with Juliette Lewis. As you try to clean and reload your revolver, she is leaping around on the barely-sprung mattress necking Jack Daniels neat from the bottle and blasting Nox Pulso on a 30 year old transistor radio, demanding that you take her out dancing tonight.

Where can we find your social media sites?

All the links: www.noxpulso.com