PISS is on the rise

Tay Zantingh climbs the shallow stair from floor to stage of Polaris Hall. Standing, trembling, she faces the crowd with a mic in her hand. “Interior. A girl’s bedroom. Nighttime,” she speaks. “A girl lies on her back in the dark staring at the – cut. Sorry. I can do better.” She shakes, searching for the words: “The room is lit by the face of her cellphone. His number is dialed. She’s finally going to – cut. Again.”

The play continues, more frantic with each “cut,” progressing her jagged monologue set to the dulcet slowcore sounds of the band behind her. By the end of “blocking a scene you can’t remember”, I am crying, wiping tears from my face while overcome with catharsis. Weeks after getting to chat with the members of PISS online, I am now here witnessing their live power. It is like nothing I have ever seen before.

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PISS seems to have this effect on people. Their band name is both abrasive and cheeky (try fitting it into most sentences without a little giggle), with a sound that’s entirely new and stunningly raw. The Vancouver, B.C.-based hardcore quartet dates back to when Zantingh met guitarist Tyler Paterson at a party and has since flourished into something unstoppable.

“We just got to talking and we had a lot of common interests,” Zantingh smiles, recounting meeting Paterson. At the time, she was living in Victoria and Paterson in nearby Vancouver. And by all accounts, PISS nearly never existed: Zantingh was planning to move back to her home state of Ontario after a breakup. Instead, Paterson invited her to live with him and start a band. With Paterson’s friends jumping in soon after – Gavin Moya on bass, and Garreth Roberts on drums – PISS have enjoyed the right-place-right-time serendipity. What they have created over the past two years has ultimately culminated, albeit almost accidentally, into something big, brutal, and booming.

“The reception that it started getting pretty quickly, especially here in Vancouver, made us realise that there was something going on,” Roberts notes of their all-of-a-sudden notoriety. Paterson adds, “It’s been reassuring as an artist, but at the same time it’s frightening and exciting.” Zantingh was also taken aback by their sudden burst of recognition, adding that she hasn’t been adjusting quite so well. “I’m a very private person who likes to have [the] freedom to make mistakes and take risks,” she admits.

These feelings are understandable, especially given the vulnerable lyrical content of each track. With physical and mental safety in mind, PISS prioritise care and are community-minded. They begin each set with a trigger warning and hand out earplugs, encouraging the crowd to take care of themselves as needed.

Stemming from an active Vancouver music scene, all four members clearly uplift each other, embracing the sensitive nature of the work and what it takes to create it. “I feel really safe with them, to take such a big risk,” Zantingh says, beaming. “I feel like the dynamic between us works very well. We never fight. We do have disagreements, but the dynamic works. The three of them are very laid back, very grounded.”

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Witnessing the group interact, it’s obvious that they live in a unique social and artistic harmony. “The really cool thing about working with Ty is he’s like a fucking machine. He just generates ideas and they’re always so weird and cool!” Zantingh gushes. “He approaches songwriting with no ego at all, so you can just be like, ‘That one’s not really for me,’ and he’s like, ‘Okay.’”

When PISS began, they started as a scrappy operation, recording in Zantingh and Paterson’s basement. There was only one problem – as a band dependent on screaming, they had to find an alternative to record the vocals. “We don’t want to scare our upstairs neighbors, so we just got in my van and drove to an industrial area where there’s nobody, for a couple days in a row, [and] just did vocal tracks,” Zantingh smiles. “I think it sounded good.”

Since then, they’ve recorded in other locations, working on their unreleased album at The Hive Creative Labs in Victoria with the support of veteran producer Colin Stewart (A.C. Newman, Rose Melberg). “We shine when we’re playing live, so we spent a lot of time thinking about how we could capture that energy in the recordings,” Zantingh notes, adding that Stewart allowed them to experiment with space, keeping the live energy by playing together. “There were times I wanted to be completely alone, so he would clear everyone out,” says Zantingh, who was occasionally sectioned off from the other three, given her own space. “Sometimes I wanted headphones, sometimes I wanted the monitor. He was [always], no questions asked, no eye rolling – it was whatever I wanted.”

With the band wrapping the Canadian leg of their first major tour and imminently playing shows in the UK and Europe, Zantingh admits, “I get scared that maybe the project isn’t physically sustainable, because the shows take so much out of me.” That said, she has taken all the proper precautions, caring for herself the way she urges their audiences to take care at shows. She adds, “I quit smoking, stopped drinking as much, started seeing a vocal coach, and [am] trying to take it really seriously.”

Bathed in the intimacy of unrelenting emotion, PISS cuts to the bone with a blade of bass-laden dissonance and driving, hard-hitting rhythms. They seek reprieve in the form of cathartic release, blending the hard with the soft and challenging listeners to face the horrors of the world while being cradled. As they continue on their first tour, it’s clear that this is just the beginning – the world better get ready for a whole lot more PISS.