Q&A: SCALP Pushes Hardcore to Its Psychological Limits on ‘Not Worthy of Human Compassion’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
Photography Credit: Oscar Rodriguez
SCALP’S LATEST ISN’T JUST HEAVY, IT’S A WEAPON — SCALP doesn’t just nod to their predecessors, they forge something entirely more vicious in the process. The Southern California band channels deeply intentional onslaught and brutality of acts like Nails, The Endless Blockade, Iron Lung, and HM-2-worshipping death metal, as well as the legacy of the Burdette brothers, Craft and Dead in the Dirt. SCALP isn't simply following in a tradition of extremity, they're conceptually rooting the album in something far more unsettling: the human psyche’s capacity for cruelty. Their new album, NOT WORTHY OF HUMAN COMPASSION, is an unrelenting twenty-minute gauntlet of hatred, precision and philosophical terror.
As their third full-length album, NOT WORTHY OF HUMAN COMPASSION builds on the blunt-force nihilism of 2020’s DOMESTIC EXTREMITY while absorbing the technical prowess they displayed on 2023’s Black Tar. The result is a maximalist barrage of death metal, powerviolence and breakdown-heavy hardcore, viewed through a distorted and blood-soaked lens of negative intent.
Lyrically and thematically, the record casts a long shadow. A significant influence was The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo, a book that dissects the psychological mechanics of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. That book, and the ideas within it, were instrumental in shaping the record’s direction from the outset.
“‘Not worthy of human compassion’ is basically a descriptor of the mindset that people can get into once you're in this group mentality,” explains guitarist Devan Fuentes. “Anyone who’s your enemy—or your group’s perceived enemy—can be dehumanized, can be treated as something less than human simply because they’re different.”
Thirteen tracks blaze by in under twenty minutes, and yet the album never feels rushed. Every second is weaponized. From the venomous grind of “CONSPIRACY” to the suffocating breakdowns and blastbeats that thread the album together in “SHACKLEROT” and “CROWSFOOT,” SCALP’s grasp on heaviness is as academic as it is feral. “We took a handful of riffs and made them our own from albums like Slipknot’s Iowa or Nirvana’s In Utero,” Fuentes says. “There are so many influences that manifested in ways we weren’t aware of until analyzing what we’d done.”
NOT WORTHY OF HUMAN COMPASSION is a manifesto on the banality of evil and the terrifying ease with which empathy erodes. It's as brutal as it is cerebral.
Photography Credit: Oscar Rodriguez
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?
DEVAN: As far as the sound goes, I was really influenced by the metallic hardcore side of extreme music. Those bands would be Weekend Nachos, Nails, Dead in the Dirt and Xibalba. In the late 2000s into the early 2010s, there was a nice little stretch of bands who were creating something that was hardcore adjacent and pulled different things from different metal genres. It seemed like each one of those bands held their own genre just in having a unique sound, and once we started taking the writing process a lot more seriously with Scalp, we tried to basically do something similar and create our own sound out of a few things that we like.
LUNA: You released your third record NOT WORTHY OF HUMAN COMPASSION and huge congratulations is in order! I love the different genres that influenced the project. What is the inspiration behind the album and what themes or emotions do you explore?
DEVAN: The album title is taken directly from a Philip Zimbardo book called The Lucifer Effect, and that had the biggest impact on the initial direction of the record. That book is about Abu Ghraib and the relation between those tortures that happened and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Not worthy of human compassion is basically a descriptor of the mindset that people can get into once you're in this group mentality, anyone who's your enemy or your identified group’s enemy can treat someone less than human or treat someone poorly because they're different.
LUNA: This record is tightly compressed at under 20 minutes. How did the songs evolve from the initial idea to the final version?
DEVAN: I bring riffs to the table and then we go ahead and glue it all together and work on the structure. It's easy to come up with parts. It's a lot harder to put it all together. We definitely don't play too long. All of our songs are super fast and chaotic, so for us to have a three minute song would be pretty exhausting. To have a 30-40 minute record would just be overwhelming. When I was talking to Todd Jones from Nails, he said 20 minutes is perfect because anything past that, you're just exhausting.
LUNA: Compared to your previous records DOMESTIC EXTREMITY and Black Tar, where do you feel Not Worthy of Human Compassion pushes SCALP forward?
DEVAN: A lot of people's responses to hearing the record, they've said that it takes the best side of our first record and best side of our second record and puts them together. We actually said that before getting that feedback, and I think that's because our second record was a lot faster, a lot heavier, but it was a little bit more experimental, whereas our first record was a lot more simple, a bit slower, but was written a little bit more simple and was more focused on just catchiness and hooks. We took that heaviness and speed and still made it really catchy and don't have a lot of filler or experimentation that loses the listener.
LUNA: Do you have a personal favorite song on the album — one that feels closest to you or most revealing of who SCALP is right now?
DEVAN: That's hard because they're all so different. I'll say “80ACRESOFHELL” is a pretty good song. We took the idea of making more of a Slipknot intro, and it showcases our approach to writing the record as a Dystopia-influenced hardcore band. We wanted some risks that were more Dystopia, but also moshable.
LUNA: You guys are part of Orange County’s hardcore and DIY scenes, and for any readers who aren’t familiar with its music scene, how has the scene and its community inspired or impacted your sound?
DEVAN: I grew up in South Orange County, and it's pretty dead there as far as the scene for hardcore extreme music. It wasn't until 2018 when we could find a full lineup of band members who actually wanted to do a project like that. Now it's kind of funny, when I was younger, I would be made fun of for wearing a Dystopia shirt or a Locust shirt in eighth grade, and now, you're a loser if you don't like those bands. It's weird seeing a bunch of kids go through things that I did back in the day, and now it's almost mainstream. All these kids love powerviolence. It's so weird to see, but it's awesome. It's cool to see that the kids just fuck with every genre. Of course, each one has their taste, but just growing up in Orange County, it was always like little cliques. It was the metal heads, the hardcore kids, the hot topic kids, and it was also separated, but now it's just a melting pot of everything for them.
LUNA: What’s fueling your fire right now—musically or personally—that’s pushing you into this next chapter?
DEVAN: Whenever you release a record, it's all about expressing the years that happened before it. So you had all the influence and drive from different music, and then you have this product, and now you're, you're performing on it and you're pushing this record for maybe years. Right now, kind of not so inspired. I'm more so listening to music to tune everything out. I'm excited to finally be able to express all these different things that I've been passionate about over the years. Again, it gets a little exhausting to just be constantly writing and putting music together. It took a lot of work, so now it's time for a break.
LUNA: How are you celebrating the album release?
DEVAN: We have a secret show the same day that the record comes out, so can't say much more than that.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like that you would like to share with Luna?
DEVAN: It's really cool that we're a lot more available for shows and traveling. I'm super excited about all the opportunities that we have lined up coming this summer and fall. It looks like things are just getting better, so everything from here on is just bigger and better from the previous years. I would also like to shout out some people. Check out Dying Breath, Contract Killer and our close friends Auditory Anguish.
