Meet SCALER, the Bristol band fusing dance, metal and trip-hop

After making their name as a brilliant and vicious live act – somewhere between techno DJs and a metal band – Bristol’s SCALER made the entirety of their debut album, 2022’s Void, without being in the same room once. “We didn’t know any different, but in hindsight it was mad,” the band’s Alex Hill reflects now. “We never played a single note of it together.”

For new album Endlessly, out this week (September 26), the total opposite was possible. For six weeks, the band – electronics player Hill, bassist James Rushforth, guitarist Nick Berthoud and drummer Isaac Jones – set up camp in the basement of beloved Bristol venue The Louisiana, where collaborators would come and go and a more free-flowing and natural creation of music developed.

“We’d have direct feedback from each other,” Nick says. “Before, someone would overthink [an idea] on their own for ages and then send it over on a Google Drive link.”

It makes Endlessly a more cohesive listen, despite jumping around genres more than the band have done before, from techno to trip-hop, dub and even pure pop. It’s why the band describe it as feeling like the first proper album they’ve made.

“We wanted it to be much more far-reaching, and that was always going to be the case,” Alex says. He describes an album that “takes every extreme from our previous music pushes it as far away as we can. The heavy bits are going to be heavier, the faster bits are going to be faster, the pop bits are going to be catchier. There was no such thing as saying, ‘Oh, it doesn’t sound enough like us’. We wanted to do everything and see where it ended up.”

In our Play Next interview, SCALER discuss the importance of collaboration to Endlessly, the difficulty of making simple songs and how they keep a cohesive sound and energy to their music alongside sprawling sonic experiments.

Read the interview and listen to SCALER via our Play Next playlist on Spotify below.

This album is driven by collaboration – was there something you told everyone who came in about what kind of thing you were trying to create?

Isaac: It was about letting them know not to be afraid to do things that are particularly like hooky, or not play into the idea of what we’ve been in the past. It’s letting them have free reign to lean into it being super poppy, or whatever you want to do.

James: Even though there’s a lot of complex effects and processing [on the songs], it was about trying to let them sit and be simple, in a way that could be played back with a acoustic guitar.

Nick: Well, I don’t own an acoustic guitar, so that’s not gonna happen! But I like the idea…

James: Keeping something simple at the core was helpful, to write some real songs and then work all the other stuff around it.

Is simplicity harder but also more exciting to strive for, when you’ve become known for intricate music with lots of moving parts?

James: It’s quite revealing, isn’t it? I find it quite revealing, the whole process of making simple pop songs. It’s about trying to pull it off in a way that is new and exciting, but also familiar. That’s the hard thing, because you’re just shooting in the dark a lot of the time. When you have the stems of the songs and you’re hearing it back in its simplest form, it then becomes about, ‘Okay, how are we actually going to make this sound like us?’ Now we’re approaching the live set, we’re having to work out how we’re actually going to make those songs from the record be exciting and techno live.

The genesis of your band felt like a meeting of techno and metal, but so many more sounds inhabit this record – how did those new sounds come to you?

Alex: Trip-hop and dub came to the forefront again, which is obviously a very Bristol thing to say. Alot of the music that we like, if it’s techno or post-punk, the more we dig into the trip-hop and dubby world, we see the elements of that that we like the most reflected in that music. It isn’t always immediately obvious, but that’s come to the forefront in the last couple of years.

James: Also the Travis Scott record, Utopia. The way way it’s laid out – it’s loads of features [and] really long. I always found that really inspiring, how it was so sprawling. If there are loads of people involved like that, it has a whole different set of parameters of what you can do with a record.

When you say ‘sound like us’, what does that mean to you in 2025, especially on an album that jumps around so much sonically?

James: Ideally that gets represented best in the live form. It’s still about being a band that you can go and see on a festival lineup and know that you’re going to feel like you’re going down a wormhole and still getting that dance music escapism experience.

Isaac: The instrumentation is always largely the same too. We’ve always got the core components of what we do – the live drums, the electric guitar and the way the electronics are produced. It’s unspoken – we all know what the goal is, and it’s essentially leaning towards dancier. We just know it subconsciously the whole time when we’re doing all of this. It always ends up sounding like us. No matter how many different directions we can go, because of the instruments we’re playing, what we understand in a very subtle way because of how we’ve built up over the years, it always ends up sitting right.