No Life just dropped their properly heavy new single “Labyrinth“, with drum and bass running right through it. Mixed and mastered by Michael Campbell at Crucible Sound, the track is about being stuck and lost in your own head with no way out. Vocalist Connor Dickson’s younger brother Tommy runs Brooklands Sound with their best mate Jezrah Gould. The two put money into a hectic sound system and DJ gear, started hosting their own gigs, and have built a name in the New Zealand DnB scene playing alongside world-renowned DJs.
The band started in Christchurch in 2021, with Connor on vocals, DJ on guitar, Con Davis on bass and vocals and Jimmy Cassol on drums. Connor went to Australia first and the rest followed. They live there permanently now.
“Haha fuck man, so much eh!” he said, asked what he got wrong about the move before he made it. “Not bringing enough money to get myself settled, or realizing how big this place is haha. It wasn’t all too bad honestly, New Zealand & Australia are both quite similar so there’s not much of a culture shock. The main real difference is NZ is a lot more laid back & easygoing, almost like in slow-mo.”
He got done for it in the first week. “My phone overheated as I was driving into Sydney to see friends, so I took my phone off the cradle to reaccess maps, as I had no idea where I was going & I got pinged for being on my phone and the Transport Agency was pretty uptight & cut-throat about it and wouldn’t let me away with a warning, so it’s a little more uptight here than what I’m used too.” The rest of it went easier. “Thankfully the music community was really welcoming & the friends I’ve made have helped me get established, push the band to new ears and get us better opportunities.”
This goes back to Connor’s dad and his mates. “Growing up I was introduced to House, DnB & Techno at a really young age by my Dad & his friends, as we were a part of the surfing community and our house was the watering hole of sorts where parties happened most weekends, so that love for EDM has been there since day dot, especially when I heard The Prodigy & their use of jungle/break beats – it blew my fucking mind, just like Slipknot did when I first heard them,” Connor said. “So early on with the band we wanted to make sure we could capture that & not just the nostalgia from the heavier bands I/we grew up with.”
Connor now books artists for Brooklands Sound with a lot of what he has picked up running No Life, while DJ mixes their sets and helps them with content. The nights around Brooklands feed straight back into No Life too. “That was even more of a driving factor to being more DnB/EDM elements into our music,” Connor said. “More often than not we want these elements to be seen as an instrument just as much as a guitar or bass/drums.”
DJ builds most of it, sometimes with friends helping out. Early on the EDM got tacked on once the song was more or less finished. These days the riff comes first and the electronics go in section by section as part of the arrangement, and DJ counts them as one of the main components of what the band do. “We’ve always wanted more of it in every song haha so definitely no arguing for less of it.”
“Foulmouth” came out on 22 July and goes after two-faced people inside the scene, though Connor did not start out with a target. “I feel like with ‘Foulmouth’ that ‘aim’ came afterwards, initially when writing the lyrics I was listening to A LOT of Limp Bizkit & was going through a real rough patch both physically and mentally whilst recovering from Major Knee Surgery in another country, where I was incredibly bitter and isolated, I was trapped and didn’t have much of a support network to help me through & the ones I did I felt like an afterthought to them, so the two combined created the framework for what ‘Foulmouth’ is lyrically.”
Anyone recognising themselves in it has kept fairly quiet. “Haha no commentโฆ.. Nah, not really, there’s been a couple of people but it’s not something we really give a fuck about.”
Within a few weeks, “Foulmouth” had picked up tens of thousands of streams, appeared on editorial playlists at Spotify and Apple, and landed on Knotfest’s Pulse Of The Maggots playlist.
“Obnoxious” had started with Connor and DJ wanting their own “Gucci Prison”, and DJ wrote it fast. Connor has since said the song was aimed at deadbeats and only later started looking like it was about his dad and his drinking.
DJ came into “Foulmouth” with a much simpler idea. “I just wanted to write a track that was all heat. I finished work one Friday afternoon, bought myself a 6 pack of my favorite beer and Foulmouth was the result,” he said. “We always kind of wanted to have a ‘2.0’ version of our track ‘Knives Edge’ and this track captures that, we think.”
Both of them can point at the exact second where a part came from. DJ takes 0:34: “I can’t really think of any specific bands or songs as I generally just write what I think sounds cool, but there’s a section at 0.34 that sounds like Guilt by Thrown. Total accident haha, thrown was always on repeat around the time I wrote this.”
Connor takes the bridge line at around 0:50. “‘Go and cry to your Mumma’ was influenced by good friends DEFICIT & their track ‘Original Criminal’ where they have a similar lyric and I thought it was so damn HARD that I had to try use it myself, the freshness & steeze those cats bring to the genre really inspires me + they’re cool af, so when that bridge came in it just popped to my head & it slotted in really nice.”
The adlibs sitting in the hook between 1:05 and 1:15 come off hip-hop records. Connor names Schoolboy Q, Reason, Kendrick Lamar and Ocean Wisdom, and reckons the instruments underneath that section have a hip-hop feel too. “We fuck with them hard, so we wanted to have that swagger/steeze in this track.” The line at 1:25, “Since you resembled me but looking in the mirror I’m as real as can be”, came out of a film. “That wasn’t inspired by any music but rather the film ‘Fight Club’ with Tyler Durden & the Narrator being the same person & since the songs about scrapping & the visual aspect of the clip/artwork it felt like a no brainer.”
At the end of 2024 the band were in pre-production on their debut and calling “One Hitter” the entree to it. The song was originally going to open the record and set the tone, since that is where they feel they found their sound. It will stay as a standalone single now. “She’s coming! We’ve kinda changed pace & approach with how we want to release the album and how that looks, but we’re really excited for people to hear what we’ve been cooking,” Connor said. “Foulmouth” is the first single from the ten-track debut. “I cant give too much away but shits heavy & pissed off as hell!”
“One Hitter” features Aaron Matts and Luka Rozaka of ten56., and “Obnoxious” features Frankie Palmeri of Emmure. Metal Hammer made the latter a Track of the Week and called it “pure venomous rage”. Since moving to Australia, the band have shared stages with Silent Planet, While She Sleeps, Alpha Wolf, To The Grave, Make Them Suffer, No Face No Case, Graphic Nature, Ocean Grove and DIESECT.
In October they do Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne across one weekend with Deadskin and Plague of the Fallen, already carrying a handful of new songs into the set. Tickets are up. If you are on the east coast, go.
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