Before See You Next Tuesday’s Chris Fox and Chop — the one-man noisegrind act from New Haven who operates under the name Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop — settled on adapting Jeff Grubb’s 1998 novel “The Brothers’ War” for their new collaborative EP, Chop pitched pro wrestling. He also floated kaiju. The book was incidental. What he actually wanted was a two-sided conflict that two people could split down the middle and then leave each other alone to write.
“The conflict architecture definitely came first,” Chop says. “As a way for each of us to just write independently, we had the idea of telling a story of a conflict from two different perspectives.”
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The book — first in the Magic: The Gathering Artifacts Cycle, covering the war between brothers Urza and Mishra on Dominaria — got the call because both of them had read it. Fox is deep in Magic: he plays cEDH three to six nights a week over Spelltable, started a token company called Fox’s Trash Tokens last year, and has recently been dabbling in making alters.
The Brothers’ War was the first MTG set released after he got into the game, and he picked up the Artifacts Cycle novels as an entry into the lore. Chop played Magic from Tempest through Time Spiral and read the Urza books, the Weatherlight Saga, the Phyrexian invasion arc — all of it, back in the day.
They split the sides clean: Fox wrote side A as Urza, Chop wrote side B as Mishra, and at no point during the lyric writing did either of them hear what the other was working on.
“Lyrically, there was no back and forth. That’s why we chose this type of story,” Chop says. “We wanted something that we could each pick a side of and sort of be left to do our own thing. It was just a way faster way to get that part of the project wrapped up.”
Fox echoes it: “After we decided to split the viewpoints we both just did our own thing. I actually hadn’t read Chop’s lyrics until I was assembling the album artwork.”
For Fox, the split format pulled the writing somewhere he hadn’t originally planned. When he first picked up the novel with the intent of using it for a SYNT album, he figured he’d narrate the whole thing in third person as a full-length. The collaboration flipped it.
“Until we actually decided to split the sides into the different viewpoints of the characters, I had never considered writing AS Urza,” Fox says. “Doing it this way, although I didn’t get to write as much material based on the story as I would have liked to, gave me the opportunity to consider and channel specific emotions that I wouldn’t have been able to if I was just acting as a narrator of a story as I originally intended. With what little I was able to write to fit into these songs, I feel like trying to convey those emotions helped what I was able to write be slightly more impactful.”
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Chop had to re-read the book knowing he was writing Mishra. The re-read changed the read.
“I’d read the book once before, but a long time ago and I remembered Urza being the good guy and Mishra being the bad guy,” he says. “Rereading it knowing that I’d be doing the Mishra side, the story felt a lot more ambiguous as to who is bad and who is good, at least in the first half. Mishra was honestly kind of in the right at the beginning. Urza was a bit of a jerk and Mishra gets a pretty rough go of it. Eventually he falls to paranoia and outside influences, but I think he’s more of a tragic figure than an outright villain.”
The bio-mechanical body horror stuff — Phyrexia’s influence creeping into Mishra — was the other pull. That’s what Chop wanted to work with on his side.
“Brothers” is produced, engineered and mixed by Drew Slavik, and mastered by Jeff McKinnon at Controlled Sound Studios. Sundown Records releases the EP physically on April 20th, 2026; digital follows on May 15th.
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Some context on the two acts: See You Next Tuesday is a grindcore quartet from suburban Michigan, founded for a laugh in 2004.
They built a real following quickly enough to land on Ferret Music and release their debut “Parasite” in 2007, went on hiatus in 2010, and regrouped in 2022, putting out a run of albums that included an electronic-forward remix and a drum-swapping collaborative double EP.
Chop — aka Chop7Times, Chop7x, Chopx7 — has been running the noisegrind operation solo out of New Haven, CT since 2019, building tracks out of digital drums and bass, walls of harsh noise, and violent screams.
See You Next Tuesday upcoming shows:
June 20 — Toledo, OH @ Ottawa Tavern — Toledo Death Fest
June 28 — Milwaukee, WI @ Xray Arcade — Metal Pride Fest
August 28 — Fort Wayne, IN @ Piere’s Entertainment Center — Midwest Death Fest
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