We discussed the sources of inspiration for the dark places the songs go. Debbie talked about how they were usually things seen on particularly tragic tv, or efforts to process things friends were going through. I couldn’t help thinking of Simone Weil’s insistence that one of the most significant things we can do is sit with other people’s suffering – try to understand the emotional experience of the things someone else is going through. We discussed the way metal gets used almost as therapy, and the way fans tell bands about the meanings music has had for them at life’s most difficult times (but also the way it’s difficult to get a handle on how or why it has had those meanings). In a world that often refuses to look suffering in the eye, metal can often seem like the art of processing things that might otherwise be pushed beneath the surface.

I was really interested in the reasons Debbie gives for sustaining the indeterminacy of Heriot’s meanings and never giving in to anyone’s desires for them to pin these ideas down. They relate to songs having the potential to grow with their listeners, and to the fact that how she feels, as songwriter, about the events a song relates to will change with time, so that being too “on the nose” about links between emotions and events would strip a song of future relevance. This idea of a song living a future life of its own struck me as an intriguing (and unusual?) aspect of what Heriot see their music doing. (As an aside: the next event I was working at after this gig was about art, literature, and oceans. I ended up talking to an artist about how the late Norman Ackroyd always changed the conversation to football any time someone tried to ask about meanings or motivations behind his etchings. The artist put it in a way that made me think instantly back to Heriot: “the silences are vital. As an artist, you don’t even tell yourself what your deepest motivation is, because to explicate it would unravel it”.)

Debbie and I talked, too, about the new directions the scene has taken in the last few years. This included the diversity of voices and perspectives in the scene today and the impact this has had on the range of sounds and styles the genre embraces. Given the way so many of the most innovative bands today are fronted by women and nonbinary people, yet the scene still has its problems with misogyny, I wish I’d asked Debbie more about what her advice would be for anyone wanting to write about gender in metal.

Talking about metal’s last decade led to Debbie describing how the pandemic left musicians trying out new things in their rooms and brought new courage to experiment. Debbie’s clean vocals were born from this. They’re a contrast to Debbie and Jake’s guttural roars but not so much of a contrast that they change the mood – worlds away from gothic metal’s “angelic” styles. There’s careful calculation to the way Debbie’s clean singing always remains as unsettling as it is emotive, and manages to soar while staying mired in the grimy heaviness beneath. It’s drawn from listening to singers as diverse as Billie Eilish and Caro Tanghe of Oathbreaker (I also hear medieval inflections, and parallels to the soundtracks of medieval shows like Vikings or The Last Kingdom – both in the choice of notes and timbres – but Debbie told me that was just coincidence).

What this all amounts to is a band that has been growing phenomenally fast in the range and power of what they’re doing; a band who owe their existence to a thriving underground scene and are profoundly respectful of that debt; and a band who present a real challenge to try and write about precisely because they reject outright the transparency of punk’s traditional politics.