The Dirty Nil have released a mind-expanding animated video for Damage Control. The bandmembers visit a mythical wizard who shows them futures full of brutality, gold records & a plethora of easter eggs. Director and animator Greg Doble says: “Damage Control” is a song that touches upon the both the hard moments in life, as well as our individual perception of those moments. We all want to run ‘damage control’ when things aren’t going our way, but the reality of the situation is different in the minds of each person involved. I was quite drawn to the line ‘beware the things you wanna feel, ‘cause that don’t mean they’re real.’ To me, this line speaks to our ability as people to gravitate towards feelings, or our own personal bias, but in the process losing touch with a shared, concrete reality.”
The Dirty Nil – “Damage Control” Official Music Video Directed and Animated by Greg Doble
Just a few years ago, Canadian rockers and local darlings The Dirty Nil won their first Juno Award for Breakthrough Group. And there was no band more deserving. They exude the essence of a garage band, still writing and making music in a room that is entirely too loud, jamming and seeing what sticks.
The best of both old and new rock and roll, The Dirty Nil sticks to their guns and listens to no one besides each other. It’s a mentality they have stood firm with since their formation and even after accolades like Juno, they aren’t straying from. Their forthcoming album “Fuck Art” out tomorrow, is testament to that, hailing to metal and rock gods like Slayer, Motorhead and Metallica. And though listeners will undoubtedly hear those influences, if looking for it, The Dirty Nil presents a heavier music with a balanced presentation including pop-punk elements and vulnerable lyrics. But they never forget to have a good time and tear it up along the way.
Lead single, “Doom Boy” is their best effort at showing both sides of themselves in one epic song about listening to Slayer with friends in a minivan. And of course, they slipped as many Slayer nuances into the song as humanly possible, with quirky verses, thrashy riffs and percussion. And the group took the thrashy rally song further accompanying it with a video that offered the band their own 80s glam dream of destroying a van.
“We did have a conversation on how many Slayer moves we could throw into one song,” frontman Luke Bentham. But like any great rock band, they have somewhat of a more serious side, because ballads are a must. “Done with Drugs” is less of your traditional “Every Rose Has Its thorn” or “Fade to Black” ballad, but it’s the closest The Dirty Nil could get. The song mulls over important topics both relevant to the guys and society, like social media and drug use in your twenties. The song that screams, ‘I’m done with drugs, I hope they’re done with me,’ renders an equally honest and satirical portrait of an experience Bentham views as rather personal.
Accompanying The Dirty Nil’s anthemic nature on “Doom Boy,” “Done with Drugs” is the thrashiest “Ride or Die.” With lyrics inspired by Bonnie and Clyde, the song is the heaviest offering on Fuck Art. The sound is the most authentic portrayal of what comes from the band’s old-school writing approach. Playing guitar through blaringly loud amps in a tiny room together is the only way the band knows and wants to create music. And it’s almost a dying art, with so many artists stockpiling music for later and writing with a producer, which Bentham argues often leads to less-than music.
Having a producer hold your hand and make your stuff all leads to garbage music that will all be fucking forgotten, in my opinion, Bentham said. “No offense to our peers and friends that conduct their operations in that way. I think that the only way to really be a proper, really good rock and roll band is playing all the time. And that’s the only way where you really find and create moments together.”
The Dirty Nil has of course experienced the same pressure from industry folks to churn out hits and work with producers, but always said no, for a lack of better words. They would rather have complete creative control and do it their way. And jamming in a room together only utilizing a sound engineer was the way to go. But it’s not without disagreement. Happy Nil Year’s Day y’all! The time has finally come, ‘Fuck Art’ has been unleashed into the wild. ‘Fuck Art’ is about dreams, revenge, joy and death and it’s our purest glimpse of truth and beauty. We hope you love it as much as we do, please enjoy at maximum volume, and as always, much luv and hail hail rock n roll!
The Dirty Nil is sharing a stripped-down version of the band’s new single “Done With Drugs,” an infectious track about people who want the world to know they’re kicking a bad habit.
“I see a lot of people who are trying to stop doing cocaine or stop drinking rivers of liquor, or stop eating lots of s**tty fast food,” explained frontman Luke Bentham, in a release. “On Facebook, I see these posts from people declaring, ‘I’m done with this!’ — they’ll have a six-paragraph post about how they’re changing their lives.” He sings: “They been good / they been sweet / but now it’s time to get clean / I’m done with drugs / I hope they’re done with me … Maybe I’ll try origami or jujutsu / and walk around IKEA with you / ‘cause I’m done with drugs.”
Bentham insisted he is all for self-improvement – and he is not making light of anyone’s personal struggle.
“I’m just kind of amused and fascinated by that whole aspect of social media. Like someone will post, ‘I’m done drinking coffee!’ Okay, well then just stop drinking coffee — you don’t have to try to stop the internet for the day to tell everybody that you’re done with Maxwell House! . “I find that funny, and somewhat narcissistic. But that’s just my opinion, and I’m kind of an a**”hole!”
Bentham and bandmates Ross Miller and Kyle Fishe worked on new music while quarantined together during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have released “Done With Drugs” along with a video that intersperses shots of them performing on the stage of Toronto’s Phoenix Concert Theatre with scenes of a stadium full of fans at 1985’s Live Aid.
The track is also available on 7-inch vinyl with The Dirty Nil’s cover of Tom Petty’s “Even The Losers” as the B-side. Check out Bentham’s acoustic performance of “Done With Drugs”
The Dirty Nil play rock and roll. Loud, distorted, and out of control, they play like it’s a fever they’re trying to sweat out. Reveling in the din of distorted guitars, pounding drums, and desperately howled vocals, the Hamilton Ontario three-piece makes music for turntables and hi-fi’s – music for dive bars and house parties – for beer drinking and joint smoking – for road trips and barbecues – for fighting and yelling and shouting and singing and screaming and howling – for sweating and bleeding – trying and failing and trying again anyways. Gravel-in-your guts, spit-in-your-eye, staggering, bloodthirsty rock and roll. They have two 7″s available that capture the snarl and destructive noise they create. The Dirty Nil play rock and roll – cause they couldn’t do a damn thing else if they tried. The Dirty Nil present their second single Pain Of Infinity from their upcoming album Master Volume, out September 2018 on Dine Alone Records.
The Ontario band Dirty Nil’s Higher Power offers punk with high-end production values meant for big stadiums. However antisocial they may get, the music here is intended to be a communal experience.
As the name suggests, the Ontario band Dirty Nil are profoundly aware of their emptiness and impurity, and the only thing that rouses Luke Bentham and Dave Nardi out of their self-loathing is despising someone else even more. They’re professed classic rock fans and gear snobs and it shows, as HigherPower is an album that sounds like it expects to be paid for. However antisocial Dirty Nil get, the music is intended to be a communal experience.
Dirty Nil released a 7” on skate-punk stronghold Fat Wreck Chords and played the Warped Tour—both tend to be a point of no return for bands deciding between a captive pop-punk audience and critical credibility. But it’s all rock’n’roll to Dirty Nil: They boast equal facility with PUP-style beer bongin’ with the devil (“No Weaknesses”), Dilly Dally’s knee-buckling dynamics (“Zombie Eyed”), and the hectoring sing-speak of tourmates Single Mothers and Greys. Higher Power serves as proof that the boundaries separating “indie,” “pop punk” and “alt-rock” have collapsed as they’ve been drawn into closer quarters, and to send this point home, they do all of the above just within the first four tracks.
There isn’t really an original note here, but the massive hooks of “No Weaknesses” and “Zombie Eyed” are delivered with enough conviction that they end up sounding fresh anyway. As Higher Power progresses, Dirty Nil continue to expand their range, yet the sequencing makes it sound like a retreat. The satisfying brutality of “FugueState” starts a run of three songs crammed into less than five minutes; the highs of Side A were bound to make Higher Power sound frontloaded anyway, but Side B practically vanishes before get-in-the-van anthem “Bury Me at the Rodeo Show” ends the record with the closest thing to a Dirty Nil love song.
Even when the music intentionally plays dumb, Bentham and Nardi are clever lyricists, and Higher Power could almost be a narrative concept record about salvation if you play it out of order. Throughout the album, Dirty Nil search for redemption in the usual places: sex (“Wrestle Yu to Husker Du”), drugs (“Zombie Eyed”) and rock’n’roll. But they have too much fun with it all to even pretend that hitting rock bottom is actually a bad thing. “Friends in the Sky” aligns Bentham with Satan against Jesus, and it’s as close as he gets to divinity
The Dirty Nil’s Luke Bentham once said that his whole life has been spent trying to capture the essence of a photo of The Stooges he saw as a kid. In it, Iggy Pop is about to dive into the crowd while the rest of the band pounds their instruments in front of an endless wall of amps. That pretty much says it all about The Dirty Nil. Were this any other era of rock, the band would be the most famous band on the planet. They’ve got a style that could easily translate to any time period, any audience, and any venue. After years of skating by on singles and EPs, the hard-touring and outrageously likeable Canucks finally dropped their long-awaited debut, Higher Power, and it blows the fuckin’ lid off of everything else you might have heard this week.
The Fat Angel Sings 