Meet Dying4, the new project blending the unlikeliest of genres with brilliant results

Midwest Emo meets UK garage is the way that Joe Nash – the brains behind new UK project Dying4 – describes his latest venture.

Though an unlikely pairing, it’s to the credit of Nash – best known for his work in the band Blue Bendy – that the two genres combine with fantastic results. On the debut single ‘Strafe’, the inescapable beats of UK garage are complimented by the emotional edge famously provided by bands such as American Football.

For Nash, it’s also a chance to combine the learnings of Blue Bendy with his own love of production and the full results can be heard on Perish Songs, the debut EP from Dying 4 which arrived earlier this month.

Read our interview with Nash and listen to their music via our Play Next playlist on Spotify below.

What was the genesis of this project, Joe, and how does it differ from Blue Bendy?

I’ve always been having a go at producing different types of electronic music as as well as being in a band. Because I’ve been making music on laptops through Fruity Loops since I was a teenager, fucking about with it in the way that everybody does. But when you start emerging from your indie rock upbringing you realise that electronic music’s also cool and start making that too, which has just continued. The band is this slow moving beast and it’s extremely democratic, which is brilliant, but I’ve always wanted to do my own music on the side.

The stuff I’ve been making is so different from band music, but it’s always so infectious and it’s been a hobby where I’ve had a go at making something that might sound like a Burial beat on Pro Tools or Logic and then digging into the methodology about how he was doing that.

We’d also got to the point where we’d decided what songs were going to go on the band’s second album and I had a lot of these riffs left which were informed by a lot of Midwest Emo and Math Rock and I wanted to do something with them because I didn’t want to go into a third album with these ideas left over.

So you combined big beats with those riffs?

Yeah, I had a guitar on my lap one day while the Ableton sessions were open on my laptop and I wondered how these things sound together essentially. I wanted to take a couple of hallmarks from quite recognisable genres, like emo, math rock, and then put them through two-step, garage and bits tech house. I don’t know if I’ve completely lost the plot, but I’m pretty sure these things actually work quite well together.

It’s quite exciting that I can’t put my finger on it. ‘Strafe’, the first single was the song I started with, and I kept revisiting it because a real melody started to develop and I’d always liked writing lyrics, but in the band I leave that to Arthur who sings.

That’s quite an exciting melding of genres there. How do you describe it?

The elevator pitch is Midwest Emo meets UK garage and destroying genre by taking quite well-known hallmarks of other genres, but then like, hopefully, tastefully putting them together, not just putting like a fucking donk on a jazz track or something like that!

So American Football meets DJ Luck & MC Neat?

Yeah, that’s exactly it.

You teamed up with TaliaBle on ‘Sweetheart Grips’. Is Dying4 a fairly collaborative project then?

Yes, my friend Olivia plays in Blue Bendy as our synth player and backing vocalist. She’s a brilliant producer and vocalist and I was sending her instrumental demos which she could mess about with. She’s a session music, but she’s the one that got me into Ableton and told me how to use it properly and gave me some specific advice. This whole thing’s a vehicle for unbridled experimentation, do literally whatever you want. I’m not precious!