PISS Turns Sexual Violence and Trauma Into a Challenging Debut Album

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual violence, sexual assault, and discussions of trauma.

Noise that asks something of you

PISS’ debut album doesn’t make pain easy to consume. That’s part of its point. Across just over 30 minutes, the Vancouver quartet turns guttural screams, grating guitars, punishing bass and drums, poetry, and recorded voices into a work about sexual violence and the forces that let it persist. The result is more than a loud record: it asks what we do with pain, why we inflict it, and what listeners take from witnessing someone else’s.

The band is vocalist and lyricist Taylor Zantingh, guitarist Tyler Patterson, bassist Gavin Moya, and drummer Garreth Roberts. On you made me / skin on linen, samples from feminist thinkers and activists sit alongside the band’s abrasive sound. Children talk about what they hope to be when they grow up; then, on “i wanted to be a singer,” Zantingh describes a future reshaped by someone else’s actions: “I wanted to write romance novels/ Now I need perfect control over my victim narrative/ The story of a girl who was silent and powerless/ But it’s cliche to write about being powerless as a girl.”

Other recordings bring in Andrea Dworkin on pornography as a human rights violation, Manon Garcia on the Gisèle Pelicot case and the scale of sexual violence, and Toni Morrison on morality, self-forgiveness, and grace. Each voice changes the frame around the songs. The album moves between competing ways of understanding violence and what might be done about it, while refusing to smooth over the contradictions.

That tension is the record’s strength. Its sound can feel as if it’s about to collapse, yet the performances are controlled enough to hold their shape. PISS make violent music about violence done to a body, a person, and a possible future. The friction isn’t incidental; it’s how the album thinks.

For two years, the band performed the same set. Now a version of that work is their debut for Sub Pop, carrying a specific artistic vision into a wider conversation about personal autonomy and systemic violence. Before a nine-hour drive to their next tour stop, I spoke with the band over Zoom. I kept wanting them to explain how the work functions. But there’s a limit to what an explanation can add to something designed to be experienced live or through headphones.

Preview you made me / skin on linen below, then read an edited version of our conversation.

Are you excited to tour? When was your last show?

TAYLOR ZANTINGH: We played a weekend in Toronto and were supposed to play a festival in Kitchener, Ontario. I lost my voice at the first show, so I’m a little nervous. I’ve been doing lots of vocal exercises and trying to take care of myself. I love touring, but I’m constantly on alert about everyone’s health. If someone coughs or starts sniffling, I panic.

Your screaming takes stamina. How did you find your voice as a performer?

ZANTINGH: I never trained as a vocalist. I took singing lessons as a kid, but my teacher quickly started teaching me guitar instead. Being loud always felt natural. I was screaming in my high school boyfriend’s punk band when I was about 16, and I loved it.

The voice in this project came from years of letting myself find a flow onstage, combined with the close attention I gave to words while studying creative writing as an undergraduate. I think carefully about the lyrics, so I don’t have to think much about how I deliver them. That part is intuitive.

My body is the instrument, and that relationship has been strange. My voice has given me a way to express things, build a life, and connect with people. It’s empowering, but losing it can take all of that away. I can’t bring my body to a shop to get it restrung if the instrument breaks. I have to take care of it: warmups and cooldowns, physiotherapy, massage therapy, and regular therapy. The project is so much about my body, too.

The record holds that tension between body and mind. It can sound close to breaking while remaining controlled.

ZANTINGH: When we wrote the record, I thought about the music as the environment where I exist and tell my story. That’s why it can sound so violent. Onstage, we work hard to get the music dialed in. Even when there are technical problems, we keep going unless we absolutely have to stop. That gives me enough security to stop thinking about the performance and connect with people in an energetic way.

I also need the stage to feel safe enough that I can experience the instruments as dangerous in real time. Sometimes I take out my earplugs for part of a song. I need to protect my hearing as a musician, but those moments can feel right for the set. It’s important for people to see me hurting, which sounds fucked up to say, but that’s part of what people respond to.

Some records feel important but are too difficult to listen to every day. Is there an album that gives you that feeling?

ZANTINGH: The closest example for me is A Crow Looked At Me, the Mount Eerie record about the death of his wife. He’s making art about the loss, but he’s also angry that he has to. There’s a direct address to the listener: you might be hearing this on a comfortable bus ride to work, while this experience has torn apart his life.

That record makes you sit with him rather than turning the song into a mirror for your own life. That feeling inspired me. I wanted to resist the way art can turn an experience into a commodity.

GAVIN MOYA: I was thinking about Mount Eerie, too. Maybe Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens. It’s about grieving someone, and it hurts to listen to in a way that makes it hard to put on every day.

How do you balance putting difficult emotions into a creative form with having to revisit them as a touring musician?

ZANTINGH: Sometimes it’s all of those things at once. I’ve learned not to expect one particular feeling from this project. There are days when we’re laughing in a beautiful city and I feel joyful and grateful. Other times, before a tour, my knees still hurt from the last one, I’m worried about my voice, and I’m crying because I don’t want to leave.

Going onstage and telling strangers about something that happened to me can echo the experience of trying to tell my story and have people believe it. Criticism of the art can also feel close to criticism of my experience. I’ve had to get used to living with that tension and letting go of control. For people who’ve experienced trauma, that can be hard. I can’t control how people receive the project, talk about it, perceive me, or behave at shows.

Somatic therapy has helped me sit with a feeling without constantly asking what it means. I’m still processing things from months ago while new experiences keep arriving. It’s an ongoing, living process. I have to understand it that way in order to function.

The album’s samples make it feel like everything is in conversation. Why use collage as a structure?

ZANTINGH: I thought of assemblage as a way to talk about how we make ourselves, and how our surroundings shape us, especially as children. I was also interested in literal objects and fragments as a way to explore womanhood. Then there’s the performer as an object in other people’s minds, resisting objectification while being watched. I liked the idea of making something that never has to be finished.

I prefer the word assemblage to collage. When I was trying to write about these subjects without falling into clichés, it made sense to bring together many things that had influenced, helped, and challenged me.

Some people may hear the voices as conflicting because they’re less familiar with disagreements between feminist thinkers. Two thinkers can be in direct conflict and still have ideas that matter to a movement. The same contradiction exists within people: we can be deeply harmed, and we can also hurt others, repeat harm, or become complicit in our own harm.

We’re made up of different things that don’t always fit together. I can’t reduce the record to one sentence. If I could, I probably wouldn’t have needed to make it.

I’ve read that the samples sometimes change in the live sets. Is that right?

ZANTINGH: The live samples don’t necessarily change, but some changed on the record because of legal issues. When we started, we were a little punk band and thought Howard Stern wouldn’t care. His team sent a letter saying we couldn’t use his voice on the album. Three samples changed because we couldn’t clear or afford them.

Did that change your relationship with the album?

ZANTINGH: I’d been saving YouTube clips that felt interesting or connected to the things I write about, both before joining the project and while making the record. One sample on the album was something I’d saved for the next record, which lives in the same universe. I can get frustrated about it. We had a week to clear the replacement sample, and it had a clear path and made some sense on the record, but I think it’s underdeveloped because I know what I’d planned to do with it later.

That’s a sore spot. I’d spent so long choosing samples that felt right. The range of responses to violence, and the different ideological positions around it, mattered to me. One person declined to have their relative’s voice included. They were an estate manager and believed the relative was firmly nonviolent. I wanted people across that spectrum because I think a movement has to become comfortable with discomfort in order to progress.

Once that voice was removed, the record leaned more toward militant activism. The estate manager didn’t want to be involved in a project advocating that position, but removing the relative’s voice made the album sound more like it was advocating for it. The pieces fit together in complicated ways.

Everything ends up in conversation, whether you intend it or not. That seems counterintuitive to what you were trying to do.

ZANTINGH: What we ended up with was as good as we could manage given the practical hurdles. Everyone else seems to think it works. I know what I wanted to do, and I couldn’t do it because of issues that wouldn’t have affected us if we weren’t signed to Sub Pop and using samples we hadn’t cleared.

You’re already thinking about another record. How is the band approaching new work after this began as a project for one specific idea or album?

Letting the next record take its time

For Tay Zantingh, the next album can’t be made on demand. The band has been experimenting with sound, which she finds exciting, but writing needs quiet and solitude. She could sit down and produce songs now; she doesn’t think she’d like them, or that they’d be any good. The group plans to focus on touring the current record, then give her room to read, think, and make plenty of bad work before the good work arrives. That patience feels sensible: a deadline can produce songs, but it can’t guarantee they’re worth hearing. The band’s first real point of connection came before its first full rehearsal. Zantingh had drawn up an abstract album outline while cat sitting alone over Halloween week, sketching moods and energy for each song. Tyler Paterson says that document helped the project take shape. The early practice sessions confirmed the chemistry; later, the band’s first show—and a set at Music Waste—made the promise feel tangible. The crowd was modest, but the conversations afterward overwhelmed Zantingh.

A shared vocabulary, built by listening

The musicians also changed one another’s sense of what a song could sound like. Moya hadn’t listened to noise music before joining, and Ty and Tay’s playlist and invitation to bring every pedal opened up an unfamiliar world of abrasive, strange sounds. Roberts found Women through the same musical exchange. Paterson points to Zantingh’s poetry reading as a turning point: it gave the band a clearer direction after the pair had been writing casually and jamming in his room. For Zantingh, the collaboration works because their skills complement each other. She can offer an abstract prompt; Paterson can turn it into sound. Each gets to concentrate on what they do well while trusting the other to carry the parts they don’t know how to approach. That’s a useful kind of creative partnership: the unfamiliar becomes an invitation to learn, not an obligation to catch up.

Disagreements that usually resolve themselves

The band describes its decision making as clear and its disagreements as rare. The most memorable clash came while recording the album’s final song. Zantingh wanted Roberts to reproduce a drum part from an earlier demo; Roberts was following a version the band had changed during practice. They were each working from a different idea of what “the same” part meant. The dispute, which also involved Roberts wanting more toms, ended in laughter. Zantingh says she and Roberts butt heads, but often discover they were on the same side all along.

Touring can change how music feels

Playing show after show has altered how some members experience music from the audience. Zantingh says she sometimes watches performances without feeling much, then finds herself crying at a festival set by Calgary saxophonist Jairus Sharif or moved by Calgary band Jed Arbor at Sled Island. She connects that distance to dissociation while performing and touring, and says she has been doing somatic therapy to work toward feeling more present. Roberts recognizes the audience-side version of that numbness. After spending so much time in music venues, it’s harder to find shows that hold his attention, though he still has experiences that break through. Paterson describes the process from another angle: years of searching for more adventurous music helped shape the band’s willingness to stretch the song form and explore different sounds. The record has given the band a vocabulary, but the next one will depend on making space to hear what’s missing. *you made me / skin on linen* is out 10/30 via Sub Pop.