GILT: “I’m learning that grief isn’t a linear line of healing”

Grief has no respect for boundaries. It is a constant companion and a stifling, upsetting, irritating, even moreish thing. It can often be beneficial to place it in some sort of wider context or framework, and also to understand it not as a monolith but as a tangle of competing feelings and emotional misdirection. Conceit, the new EP from Florida band GILT, attempts to do that in real time, fusing some teeth-bared excavations of vocalist Ash Stixx’s mind with squalling post-hardcore noise.

The ambitious release is GILT’s second in relatively quick succession following 2021’s In Windows, Through Mirrors three-tracker, which found Ash trading drums for fronting the band, and it’s a huge leap forward for the duo. These songs are at turns crushingly heavy, richly melodic and dynamic, with guest vocalists – among them Kind Eyes, Doll Skin’s Syd Dolezal, Carson Pace of Callous Daoboys and The Holy Ghost Tabernacle Choir’s Nat Lacuna – popping up on each one to add outside voices and perspectives on Ash’s lyrics, which investigate grief from all angles following the death of their father.

“I actually never knew what that word meant before doing any of this or finding a way to start coping and living with this new part of my life,” Ash says. “Recording the songs got frustrating at times – it’s already recording, you’re in a different headspace, but dealing with this lyrical content, there was a lot of repetition. As much as I was trying to get the words and the inflection, I was also trying to emotively put a lot of myself into every single phrase. It was definitely a really good release. A lot of things had been building up prior to going into the studio. It felt really good to just have the bubble pop.”

Having spent much of the past few years crammed into a van together while out on the road Ash’s bandmate ​​Tyler Fieldhouse, who handles guitar and bass on the EP, was able to tune into the weight of the songs quickly, helping to flesh out the structure and snarling changes in sound that make Conceit tick. “I wish I could be like, ‘Yeah, we’re geniuses and everything we did was really smart and very poetic,’ but it was just what we were talking about at the time,” Tyler shrugs.

“We’re an emo band, we’re always talking about sad stuff, but I think we got to a point where even with stuff that I was writing, which I thought was about me, [in reality] our lives were bleeding together. It's just what was happening. We realised we were tackling it from a little bit of a different angle than we were on previous material. I feel like this was a lot of things, but it was a lot angrier.”

To help sculpt that anger into something tangible and visceral, Ash and Tyler leaned further into the hardcore side of the post-hardcore spectrum than they have before. There is a febrile spirit behind The Shape Of Tools and a similar vein of chaos running through 209, with echoes of Glassjaw and Thursday butting up against an ongoing appreciation for bands such as Have Heart and Turnstile.

“All the good post-hardcore bands are hardcore people who are trying to be more creative,” Tyler says. “I think we also get branded as a punk band a lot, because of the way we go about things and the way we’re political, but I don’t necessarily want to actually be making four-chord punk rock music. Before Ash was around, I was just doing whatever I wanted. And Ash was like, ‘Hey, here's a way to introduce structure, but also increase the intensity,’ and that really appealed to me.”

Intensity is a good word to use when you’re talking about Conceit. It’s a record where GILT have obviously, and quite deliberately, chosen to dial things up a few notches. That comes through in the high-wire balance of hooks and jarring, abrupt tonal shifts, just as it comes out in straight up, no-holds-barred fury. “There's a way to properly scream and, you know, not strain your voice,” Ash says, before Tyler cuts in. “…and then there’s the way you do it,” they add with a smile.

“I’m trying not to [do it like that] anymore,” Ash continues. “I want to put as much emotion into it as possible and I don’t care about the smart way to do it. I think the way Tyler put it before is that it’s screaming like you’re actually screaming at someone across the room and you’re just pouring everything out into it.”

The next step is to take these songs out and see how they change and evolve on the road. A natural sticking point, though, is the toll that singing these words night after night might take given the heaviness of the subject matter. But if Conceit is part of the process, then so is learning to carry that burden around with you, passing some of it on to listeners so that they can figure out some stuff on their own time.

“When I’m introducing the songs, it’s hard every night to talk about the thing but sometimes it’s important to do it,” Ash says. “I have to sometimes push through it. I get a little bit vague with it sometimes because I just can’t get into it. But if I want to get into it, I will talk about my dad and his passing and how it affected me, and how I’m learning that grief isn’t a linear line of healing. People will come up to us after the set, and they'll be like, ‘I just recently went through a death that really affected me,’ or like, ‘This is my first show since someone really close to me has passed and this really made me feel connected.’ It feels really good to know that that’s the direct impact we’re having.”

GILT’s Conceit EP is out on May 6 through Smartpunk