Fetch The Pliers

Photo by Tommy Duffin

Iron Lung are two moody, bearded guys from Seattle who play a kind of music called “power violence”. Pioneered in the early 90s, this genre of punk was a kick in the ass for the joke of what hardcore had become thanks to snowboarding, metalcore bands who sang about “revenge” and girls not being allowed to have abortions. Bands like Infest and Crossed Out and labels like Slap A Ham put out fast, brutal records that sounded closer to fast old punk like Siege than gay metal like Biohazard and it made everything feel exciting again. A decade on and Iron Lung are reigniting our interest in power violence by making some of the harshest, most exciting stuff we’ve heard since we first fell in love with Man Is The Bastard. They have songs with names like “Sternal Abnormalities” and “Horizontal Respiration” and the sound of them makes me dream of grabbing an enemy by the back of his head and smashing his face repeatedly into a desk until he’s begging for mercy and crying through broken teeth. Cool! Vice: So you guys sound pretty angry, eh? What’s up? Jensen Ward (drums, vocals): There hasn’t been a proper representation of anger and power in my life until now. Our music is fucking strong, just like my distaste for most of life’s offerings. For me, power violence is still a real expressive kind of music. There are a lot of jocks and fake-asses trying to dilute it these days though. I won’t name names but they need to leave this shit alone. It will never be popular and we will never look cool. We are ugly people playing ugly music. Have you seen any pictures of us? Case closed. What’s with the obsession with medical equipment, death, and the general crushing futility of existence? If you think about it, what is more brutal than the history of medical technology and practice? Can you imagine being sealed in a giant metal box and having the air smashed in and ripped out of your lungs because you caught a virus? Does trepanation cure the headache? Doctors back in the day did. Sexless//No Sex is the name of the album. What’s up with that? What’s wrong with being sexy? Love has become obsolete. I once thought, like all naive pre-teens and some members of the Beatles, that “all you need is love”. Years of physical and emotional abuse taught me the error of my belief. Also, most consider sex the best physical way to express their “true feelings” for one another. What a fucking joke. Do you think rape victims feel loved by their attackers? Do you think whores feel loved by their Johns? No, but they have all felt sex. It’s the empty, meaningless farce of sensual touch that we’re talking about. JAMIE PROCESSTER
Iron Lung’s new album, Sexless//No Sex, is out now on Prank Records.