Put The Velvet Underground & Nico, Women, Swans, and Hijokaidan on one playlist, and you can probably already guess this album isn't going to be an easy listen. Vancouver punk band Piss landed this week (October 12) on NME's long-running emerging artist feature The Cover, written by Lisa Wright with photography by Maya Fuhr, alongside the release of a playlist featuring the music that shaped their debut album.
The album, titled You Made Me / Skin On Linen, drops October 30 via Sub Pop, and the playlist is available to stream on Spotify and Apple Music. The noise-laden lineage of the track selections isn't hard to parse—Piss frontperson Taylor Zantingh told the feature that the album stems from her own experience of sexual violence and the long-term trauma that followed.
"I keep reminding myself that this project is getting attention because there's a huge problem behind it—if this many people resonate with it, that reflects, in some way, our ability to create and express," Zantingh told NME. "But it also reflects how many people are listening to this record with painful experiences of their own."
She also spoke about the physical toll of performing the album live: "It's the most complicated emotion I've ever experienced—on one hand, being able to connect with people this way feels beautiful, but sometimes the smallest detail can suddenly make me feel really awful. This band is built on my suffering, the two are inseparable, and that in itself is intense."
NME's The Cover produces 50 features each year spotlighting rising artists, and Piss's full interview and playlist are now live.
