There are a few Bottom Feeders kicking around heavy music. A Philadelphia hardcore outfit going by Bottomfeeder, written as one word, a Danish sludger band, a South African powerviolence band that hasn’t been active in over a decade. A couple more scattered around. The four-piece with a new EP out is from Calgary, runs in the Every Time I Die / Converge / Norma Jean / The Chariot metalcore lineage, and got its name from a soccer match. Guitarist Matt Lannon’s father-in-law was yelling at his television while his favourite team lost to a lower-division side: “Why are they losing to this bottom feeder team?!?”
“It sounded super rad,” Lannon says of that moment. The band did a quick check on the others, noted that none of them had been active in Western Canada or anywhere relevant to what Bottom Feeder were trying to do, liked how the stacking letters made for a balanced logo, and committed. “Our ultimate band goal is not world dominance, but becoming a well known band in western Canada and none of the bands we found were relevant up here at all,” Lannon says.
The four-piece’s debut EP, simply titled “I”, landed last Friday. Six tracks, self-released. Lannon calls it “very pedal to the metal” with “elements of stoner rock, sludge, and even some clean singing”, which is more or less how it plays out: swung metalcore that lands a head-bob groove one minute and a demolition job the next. The release show at The Rock Shop, a t-shirt store in Calgary, sold out before the first band hit the stage. Feedback’s been coming in from Europe, Australia, and Indonesia. No Echo also ran a short feature on the band last month.
The lineup runs Craig on vocals, Cam on bass, Brandon on drums, and Lannon on guitar. A year of constant local shows has tightened the unit. “We’ve been lucky to keep the same lineup, so it’s been a year of learning to gel live and figuring out what kind of band we want to be,” Lannon says. “Right now we’re in a really good place, the shows are super tight.” And the songs have all sped up: “We certainly play all our songs faster than we did a year ago.”
The reference points the band lean on aren’t chosen for fashion. The four of them average late 30s, and ETID, Converge, Norma Jean, and The Chariot were the records they wore out as teenagers. “Most of us still keep up with and listen to modern hardcore bands,” Lannon says, “but when we sit down to write music together, the bands that we cut our teeth on is how it comes out, it’s not really a conscious decision.” What still draws him to that era of heavy music specifically is the looseness of it. “Bands like ETID would have blast beats and groovy dad rock riffs in the same song and it was dope, Converge has chaotic grind and thick-as-molasses sludge songs on the same record and it was still just considered metalcore. And then all these bands would play shows with whoever. These days hardcore feels a bit more siloed, beatdown bands play with beatdown bands metalcore with metalcore, etc.”
The six songs on “I” stretch back further than the band itself. “Trauma Cycles”, “Judas Goat”, and “Witch Bottle” were demoed by Lannon during his university years in Vancouver, sitting around three years before anyone else in the current lineup touched them. “No Place Like Home” goes back even further, written in 2017 for a previous project that never panned out and kept because the song was too good to throw away. “Wolf Becomes You” and “Hybrid” were written together in 2024 once Bottom Feeder was a band proper. Each member left their mark on the older songs too: bassist Cam wrote the entire bass intro to “Wolf Becomes You”, and the drum fill that swings “Witch Bottle” back into its chorus came from Brandon.
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The decision to release six songs as an EP rather than drip-feed singles across half a year wasn’t even a discussion. “I know drip fed is the way the industry is going to appease the algorithms, but it’s just so lame,” Lannon says. “EP’s and albums are where it’s at and still by far my preferred way of listening to music. Playlists are fine for discovering artists but if I’m sitting down to check out a band I want a thought-thru, well put together release. A longer release requires more thought as the songs have to flow right and there has to be enough variance in to make it engaging and feel like a cohesive piece of art.”
Recording, mixing, and mastering for “I” was handled by Scott Oliphant at Colossus Audio, a Calgary engineer who’s been around the local scene forever and played in a million bands (he’s currently out in the US with Dying Remains supporting Gatecreeper). The session ran light on second-guessing: “The first mix was honestly 95% there, we just made some tweaks and a few colour changes and bam, EP done.”
Lyrically the EP circles around birth and death, pain and suffering, alternate realities, and what Lannon calls “a unifying consciousness that connects us all.” Most of those threads sit in the songs without footnotes. “No Place Like Home” comes with a longer story. Lannon’s demo title for the track was “Winnipeg Handshake”, Canadian slang for breaking a beer bottle and stabbing someone with the jagged neck. The lyric was built outward from there. “At the time, it was winter here and winters are particularly harsh in Alberta,” the band explains. “I was concerned about the unhoused population here in Calgary, many of whom spend the nights outdoors. At the same time, Calgary also has many vacant, unused skyscrapers, that are privately owned, and seem like an obvious solution to house folks that are freezing to death out in the elements.” The song narrates a fictional encounter: a security guard finds someone trying to stay warm inside one of those vacant towers, orders them back out into the storm, and the person, hopeless and unwilling to continue, ends it with a broken bottle sitting next to them.
The cover art comes from Philadelphia illustrator Joshua Dunlap, who works as @chemicalmessiah on Instagram. Vocalist Craig found his work and passed it round; the band took to it instantly.
“He’s got this very specific style that is a combination of creepy, surreal, and colorful which combines to be quite memorable, especially in heavy music,” Lannon says. “So many heavy bands use black/white or a xerox look, which is cool, but we wanted something different.”
Bottom Feeder liked Dunlap’s work enough to commission a separate print for their second single, “No Place Like Home”. The art doesn’t tie directly to the EP’s lyrics, but Lannon notes it captures the same surreal vibe and the chaotic nature of the music itself. Alongside that, the band have started putting more weight on visuals and video to build a stronger overall identity.
The wider Calgary picture sits behind all of this, and Lannon has been involved in local music there long enough to give a proper chronology. The early 2000s belonged to skate punk, Belvedere and Downway making the loudest waves.
The second half of the decade swung hardcore, with Nikola Tesla, Alivia, Riviera Heist, and From the New.
Community halls would host shows with attendance regularly in the hundreds. Then, one by one, the halls stopped allowing shows. By 2010, Calgary had a single all-ages venue catering to heavy music, The New Black. It closed in 2013, and the city went without a dedicated all-ages venue again until after the pandemic.
“It does not matter where in the world you are,” Lannon says. “When that happens, the scene dies.” Calgary’s geography didn’t help either: Edmonton is three hours away, Regina seven, Vancouver eleven, which makes long-weekend touring tough. The 2010s, by his account, were a rough decade to be a Calgary hardcore band.
Post-COVID the picture has flipped. BLOX Arts Center, a government-funded all-ages venue, finally opened, something Calgary had needed for years. Demand there runs months out, so everywhere else fills the gap: t-shirt stores (The Rock Shop), pizza restaurants (Pizza Bob’s), the storage room of a coffee shop (Loophole), under bridges on the east side. “After a decade of red tape and NIMBY’s shutting everything down there’s a real punk rock vibe of ‘fuck it, we ball’ in the city which has been an absolute joy to be a part of,” Lannon says.
Promoters to know in Calgary right now, by his recommendation, are DOA, Book Burner Productions, and Community Music Initiative (CMI). On the local band side, he lists Glasscult, Tatara, Astrology Girl, Griefeater, Sumptorium, Exit Wound, Our Last Crusade, Citizen Rage, and Umi Yokai. Vietnam’s Cรบt Lแปn gets a separate shout from outside the city. And on the bigger end of his current listening: “Does the new Converge release count? That record is dope.”
Bottom Feeder have seven new songs in various stages, two of which are already in the live set. The next release will be a short EP of three or four tracks targeted for January 2027, with Lannon’s brief running: “only rippers allowed, 4 songs in four minutes!” A longer, more musical record is planned for late 2027 or early 2028. Touring will stay limited.
“We all have day jobs and families so this is really a weekend-warrior labour of love project so no major touring plans,” Lannon says. “Our long term goal as a band is to become an established band in our part of the world, get on festivals and opening slots with bands we love and to just keep working towards that.”
“I” is out now, self-released. Recording, mixing, and mastering by Scott Oliphant at Colossus Audio. Cover art by Joshua Dunlap.
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