SLAG are on the rise

She is a mermaid, after all, and thus a little different from the rest of us, and thus deserves to die. Right?

You might take this kind of social commentary from the video for “Legs”, a single that arrived like an hors d’oeuvres just a few months before the band’s recent debut EP. It’s not the pitchfork-wielding men that instigate the mermaid’s untimely end, though. Freya Eastcott, SLAG bassist, horrified milkmaid, dobs her in after coming across the sea creature in some nearby woods. At this point in the song, Gibson repeatedly sings, “If I let my guard down,” jabbing the words with pain. The answer to that dangling clause is revealed on screen: if I let my guard down, I die.

Judging SLAG by their cover – a thrift-store haul of cool, expressive Brighton weirdom – you wouldn’t assume death has an omnipresent role in their writing. But it’s always imminent, rearing up in the shadows like on a horror movie poster. “My body is ready to die / It feels like the end of times,” Gibson howled on their snappy breakout “Ripped”, surely the most auspicious and fully formed debut single from a band that year (2024). It’s this dislocation between Gibson and her body – or her body betraying her, letting her down – that marks a throughline of SLAG’s lyrics. “Sometimes I wanna get jacked / But right now I feel so sick” goes the final punch of that track.

This all makes sense under the SLAG umbrella. The name reclaims an ugly, often appearance-based pejorative and flips it into something you want to shout in all-caps. Something beautiful, bright, colourful – like the band members themselves. Similar ideas are provoked by the title of the EP, Losing. “I still don’t feel like an angel / And I’m hungry all of the time” goes the anthemic, nose-scrunch opener, “Face Off”, waterlogging the word ‘losing’ with uncomfortable ideas around beauty standards. Like many of Gibson’s lyrics, the face off concept mutates as the song progresses, cycling from one meaning – “I’ll take my face off and lose my head” – to the next. As in, this is a face-off. Gibson versus herself, perhaps.

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“I don’t think I want to tell you,” she says. She is not at all standoffish, but sincere, thoughtful. Sat cheek-to-cheek with her bandmate Seb Cooper on a couch, she expands a pause, looking across the living room as she decides whether to elaborate. “I think it’s more important to me that you have your own relationship with that. If that’s okay.” It is okay. And maybe it’s even more powerful that way.

Music videos are a playful, one-step-removed format in which SLAG take these macabre lyrical ideas to outlandish extremes. In Gibson’s favourite music vids, Christopher Walken can fly. “It gave me the impression that I might one day be able to do that as well,” she says of Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice”. “I was devastated when I found out that he was on strings.”

In Cooper’s favourites, Miley Cyrus is not a pop goddess but a rare species in captivity whose latin name is Ayvis Cyrus and has gigantic raven-y wings; as he puts it, “she looks so good it’s incredible.” It’s also worth noting that everyone is fighting in that latter video, “Can’t Be Tamed”.

SLAG look like they are – once again – trying to kill each other in the video for the EP’s title track. They perform “Losing” in a glitter-bombed sweet 16-sorta party. It becomes a total write-off. Already one of their noisier, unmoored cuts, it descends into a chaotic brawl with hyperventilating guitars as the five go at each other on the dancefloor.

SLAG are good at music videos. Or, the end result looks good. Maybe the production is fraught – ‘people were harmed in the making of this video’ is the way it tends to go. Eastcott got a nosebleed at the end of the “Losing” one, for instance. “When we smashed her face into the cake, it actually didn’t do anything but make a dent. The icing didn’t break,” Gibson recalls.

The singer has taken her share of bruises too. “I don’t know why I keep putting myself through it,” she says, referring to “Legs” and that water burial. “I was so freezing cold all day, and they threw me off a boat. That hurt. It was like belly flopping in a swimming pool. I had red marks all over me.”

But she counters herself: “They’re very important for me.” This is why she keeps putting herself through it. “Some favourite memories of my childhood are watching music videos on the family computer.” Cooper is right there with her: “I genuinely think that was half the reason I got into music.”

How they got to be SLAG, though, was thanks to Gibson’s tenacity and initial leadership. It was fresher’s week, night one, a mild September eve three years back. Gibson arrived in Brighton with a name, a guitar, and tunnel vision to start a band (“degree? Secondary”). She also had a willing neighbour in Cooper, and together they went on a recruitment drive.

“In like one hour of being in a smoking area with a bunch of brand-new uni students who have all come from their hometown, we just made the band,” he remembers – “and we’re still together.”

There was no criteria. No “band seeks bassist into Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul, and Mary” flyer a la the legendary story of how Pixies found Kim Deal. “No checking of any credentials,” Cooper says. Gibson admits they hadn’t heard either of their new recruits – drummer Luke Martin and guitarist Dan Phillips – play a second of music before adding them to the newly created SLAG group chat. “It was totally fate.”

Eastcott joined a little later when she responded to a flatmate-wanted ad. Her new flatmates just so happened to be looking for a bassist as well. “So many random chances that have just come together,” Cooper muses. “I feel like my luck is gonna run out at some point.”

So far, good fortune seems to be blowing their way. (Though of course luck has nothing to do with it when the songs are this gnarly!) The band recently inked a deal with the Big Scary Monsters label – home to American Football, Lambrini Girls, and illuminati hotties – after a rep came to see them play to an empty room. “I remember thinking, oh god, there’s five people here, he’s gonna think we’re terrible,” Gibson remembers, “but they saw through that.”

Big Scary Monsters seems the perfect fit for a band that toys with rickety time signatures, noisy feedback trails, jazzy extended chords, scuttling-spider riffs, and yowling gut-punch choruses that rip the songs apart. But SLAG hadn’t necessarily clocked that this math/emo/punk ecosystem was what they were orbiting. “Seb, biggest pop girly on the planet ever, is now number one Delta Sleep fan,” Gibson says of the math rock band, “which I never saw coming!”

“In one month, I managed to listen to them so much that they became my top one album of the entire year of 2025,” he says. “Never known obsession like it, honestly,” Gibson deadpans.

To be fair, Gibson’s main squeeze while growing up was a band closer to their new home: The Fall of Troy, an outside-the-lines post-hardcore trio from Washington state. Her guitar teacher turned her onto them. “I was just completely obsessed with them for most of my teenage years, and spent so much time trying to learn their songs, but they were so far above my skill level that I never really got there,” she says. “But I think practicing this stuff so much has really had an effect on the way I play guitar. My guitar teacher, honestly, all the music that he’s shown me would be what influenced the way that I play.”

The rest of the band members are into their own niche stuff and there are hardly overlaps outside of 2010s pop bops. That means they come at things from different directions – and sometimes they include every direction. This is what makes their music exciting and insurgent, forcing you to squint and interrogate. They point to “Private Gyno” from the new EP. There’s a slaloming guitar riff after the first chorus that they play twice through. The first time is Gibson’s version, groovy and tight. The second time is drummer Luke Martin’s flailing-limbs, where-am-I version.

“I’ll get cross with him and go, ‘What are you doing? That’s wrong,’” Gibson laughs. “He will have interpreted my riff in a completely different time signature to the way I’ve interpreted it, but because there isn’t any rhythmic context to what I’m doing, that only makes sense.”

There are many instances of this why-not-both approach leading to serendipitous magic. Dan Phillips’ stacked-fifth chords really throw rocket fuel on the chorus of “Face Off”. They weren’t in Gibson’s original outline. “We’re such a great team,” she says. “It really does feel like everyone’s putting their hands in the middle – let’s go.”

Cooper describes it as the band putting the flesh on: “It transforms from something bony to something fleshy,” he says of the skeletal arrangements that Gibson brings to her collaborators. “And it really does transform,” he continues. “We’ve turned songs upside down. It definitely would not hit the same without everyone else’s influence." Gibson strongly concurs.

This bony-to-fleshy analogy seems apt considering lines like “If I built myself up from skin and bone / If I got ripped” and Gibson’s reference to body parts in general. Maybe there’s something in there about relying on your friends to help operate the parts of you that don’t work how you want them to, to help make you work. Cooper and Gibson tell me about a four-and-a-half-hour car journey in the middle of the night after a cancelled show left them stranded with nowhere to stay. “In solidarity with our drummer who was driving, we bumped tunes all the way home,” Gibson says. “From midnight to half 4 am, constant pop music,” Cooper adds. “It was unbelievable. It was honestly four hours of music. It was so fun screaming, alone on a motorway.”

SLAG are there for each other in these real-life tests. They have the stamina to turn a not-so-fun situation into a party. Gibson’s lyrics come from an internal place that we can only theorise on, but maybe getting those ideas down in song excorises any demons, drags them into the room. From there, the band gets to play with them, mold them, almost mocking their own pain. They turn “Ripped”’s skin-and-bones conflict into a workout video. They murder the mermaid as a slapstick commentary on how society unthinkingly attacks anyone who is different from the hive. They murder each other because why not? – it’s so far from the reality of their supportive, tight-knit friendship. Joining a big tastemaking label won’t change any of that foundational stuff, they tell me.

“What do we want to share with the world, Seb?” Gibson poses when I ask if there’s anything we didn’t cover.

“Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Videos coming soon.”