Canadian femme-forward post-hardcore act Midnight Peg has garnered a good deal of well-deserved acclaim for their debut album Horn Colic in 2022. The debut earned enthusiastic praise from the likes of DIY Conspiracy, Cups N’ Cakes, and Reverie Mag, plus airplay on college radio across Canada. In this eventful past year, they’ve toured Western Canada with Pussy Riot and shared the stage with punk legends D.O.A.
Today, the band are debuting their latest album Skinning, which drops tomorrow on Thousand Islands Records but you get to hear it here first a day early. With a stunning marriage of raging power and powerful melodies, Skinning captures a wide range of emotions.
“Skinning is the apotheosis of our song-writing style; it takes frenzied, but refined risks across the board,” says Midnight Peg guitarist and vocalist Eric Neilson. “You can hear that right off the bat, it opens with a pretty contemplative drone followed by a punishing blast of hardcore aggression. I guess you could say, this one is fairly conceptual too. Melodic themes recur and reference each other, so as a whole, the album resolves its own chaos. It’s meant to be listened to front to back. The instrumentation is only a backdrop when compared to Rocky’s vocals, she’s really experimented and expanded on the voice she developed in the first album. The dynamism of her performance – soft melodic accents scattered between full-on screaming and her signature narrative interludes – has become Skinning’s calling card”
“We really wanted to push what we were doing in the first album,” explains vocalist Rocky Mann. “It feels like an exciting time right now in heavy music, and bands are popping out all the time here; the diversity is exciting. Skinning grew out of that experimental, cross-genre moment where it all feels a bit unstable but totally alive. It’s a mash of total pit-banging hardcore noise and aggression, sly melodic hooks, and a sort of reflective, ephemeral scuzz. Lyrically, dark humour, satire & sarcasm make for the package. But I think the climax, the heart of each track is actually a sort of quiet guttural despair in the modern ubiquity of violence, absurd ritual and how we survive.”
Check out the album below.
Skinning is out tomorrow and you can preorder it or pre-save it here. Follow Midnight Peg on Facebook and Instagram for future updates.
Photo Credit: Cecil Sykes @beholdersrepository
