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When Belfast duo Chalk sat down to begin work on their debut album – the viscerally intense, -industrial- amalgam ‘Crystalpunk’ – they wrote a manifesto for how they wanted to proceed. At the top of the list was a rule to create by: ‘This is the only Chalk album that will ever exist.’
“It was to make sure that we were being bold, taking risks and challenging ourselves, so that we would always look back and know that everything we wanted to say was there,” explains vocalist Ross Cullen, video calling in from their hometown the day after their gleaming NME Cover shoot. “You could really feel that energy in the room,” nods multi-instrumentalist Benedict Goddard. “There were times when we’d feel quite vulnerable, but having that manifesto pushed us to make those decisions. If this is the only thing we’re gonna do, we might as well completely go for it.”
Chalk on The Cover of NME. Credit: Glenn Norwood for NME
Over the past few years, Chalk have been marking themselves out as an increasingly unique proposition amongst the UK and Irish alternative scene; a band who can fit happily on a guitar-centric bill with former tourmates IDLES and Fontaines D.C., yet one who treat their live shows like DJ sets, “where it doesn’t stop and it’s relentless”, notes Goddard. Heading into ‘Crystalpunk’, these newly established creative ‘rules’ and the record’s purposefully evocative title became the framework for them to push the band’s progressively singular sound and vision to its most extreme point yet.
“We always felt like we belonged to a punk sound and an electronic sound, but we maybe struggled to articulate what that was for ourselves. But when we came up with ‘Crystalpunk’, it felt like an umbrella term that this genre of music we were making could live under,” says Cullen. “We wanted to push every aspect with the album. If there’s a super industrial techno track, then it needs to go heavier; if we’re gonna make more of a rock-leaning song, then let’s throw our hat in the ring and put a big chorus on it,” adds Goddard. “That guiding principle of pushing things further affected everything.”
Ross Cullen of Chalk. Credit: Glenn Norwood for NME
‘Crystalpunk’ does, indeed, go hard. From the opening moments of ‘Tongue’, which build from Nine Inch Nails-style, raspily whispered beginnings into a full-on onslaught of clattering, brutal noise, to the ringing, stadium-sized guitars of ‘Longer’, to ‘Béal Feirste’ – an eight-minute epic that channels the hypnotic, incantational rave of Underworld’s best moments – Chalk’s debut is a statement of a record that leans into everything they’ve spent the last half decade becoming. Its album artwork is a picture of the single spike-covered, black leather glove that Cullen wears on stage.
Throughout their recent videos, a character clad in a masked, gimp-like leather outfit inspired by a Siberian bearhunting suit – a head-to-toe spiked ensemble that looks like it’s been plucked from the world’s most dangerous fetish club – roams through their scenes. There are no half measures, but it’s also taken Cullen and Goddard a long time to reach this point.
Benedict Goddard of Chalk. Credit: Glenn Norwood for NME
Before forming Chalk originally as a trio (the pair are now joined live by touring drummer Fiontain McAleavey), neither had ever been in a ‘serious’ band before. The month before meeting at film school at the end of the 2010s, Cullen had sold his amp to buy some new camera equipment, having given up on finding a potential bandmate. But then, when Goddard spotted a Gilla Band poster lurking in the background of one of his Instagram posts, he saw a kindred spirit and reached out. “That was at a time when they were still super niche, so it was an instant connector,” the guitarist and synth player recalls with a fond grin. “We hadn’t seen each other play music, but it was enough to know we were on a similar wavelength.”
They started off playing unlikely covers a world away from the music they’d go on to make – Kate Nash’s ‘Foundations’, The Black Keys’ ‘Lonely Boy’ and Fontaines D.C.’s ‘Boys In The Better Land’. Their first gig was performed under an old name to 50 people in Cullen’s second-floor Belfast flat. It was only in 2021, when they started living together, that Chalk as an entity began to exist in a more considered and thoughtful form. “There was so much cool music coming out then, but we knew we wanted to find our niche of something that felt new to explore,” Cullen remembers. “We were leaning towards something more gothic, and then the idea of more electronic elements [crept] in. I think before it had been a hobby, but then we were trying to be artists.”
“There’s an anarchic spirit that’s shared in punk and illegal raves, where inherently it’s a reactionary, revolutionary thing to do” – Benedict Goddard
You can trace Chalk’s evolution directly through their early trilogy of EPs: ‘Conditions I’, ‘II’ and ‘III’. Where their inaugural release positioned them more in the world of a classic post-punk band, with each subsequent instalment, you can hear them bringing in new sounds, adding in electronic ideas and creating a distinct space for them all to coexist. ‘Crystalpunk’ is this journey’s natural culmination. “We didn’t want to throw anything away that we love for the sake of us now leaning in a more electronic direction,” Cullen enthuses. “We wanted to keep a bit of the grit that came first from being in a guitar band too.”
This duality also acts as a purposeful reflection of the city that Chalk reside in. Musically, it stitches together the countercultural movements that have fuelled Belfast’s youth for decades. “Belfast had an iconic ‘70s punk scene which runs so deep, and then the rave scene in the ‘90s,” says Goddard. “There’s an anarchic spirit that’s shared in punk and illegal raves, where inherently it’s a reactionary, revolutionary thing to do that [feels very natural to] Belfast. There’s a lot of similarities between the two genres; it’s just being done with different instruments.”
Credit: Glenn Norwood for NME
But it’s not just the Northern Irish capital’s musical history that the pair are considering with their debut. “When we were making the album, all I could really think of was playing it in Belfast with this history of the city,” Cullen says, “[to provide a space] where no matter who you agree or disagree with, we can all come together and enjoy music and hopefully set aside our differences.”
Nearly 30 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement that ostensibly drew a line under the elongated period of conflict in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles, Belfast is still largely divided between Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods and institutions. The two musicians’ own relationships to this segregation are complex ones. Cullen was born in Belfast to a Catholic mum and a Protestant dad, “so I grew up not really knowing [which side I belonged to],” he explains. “I went to a Protestant school, but I was half/half, so I’d go to family events and feel like the odd one out. Out of 10 cousins on my mum’s side who all went to Catholic schools, I was the one with a Protestant education, so it made me feel quite alienated.”
Credit: Glenn Norwood for NME
Goddard’s mother is Irish and his father is English. Born in London, they moved to Monaghan in the Republic of Ireland when he was a child, before moving to a small Northern Irish town for high school and then to Belfast. “In Monaghan, there’s a symbolic border that’s literally a five-minute drive from my house. There’s no signposts, but you know where it is, so you’re living literally on the precipice of this fake border where you’re basically travelling between countries,” he says.
Certain tracks on the back end of ‘Crystalpunk’ explicitly explore these notions of complex national identity, like ‘Béal Feirste’ (Irish for Belfast), on which Cullen sings “I put my fingers through the bullet holes of my father’s past” before repeating its euphoric climax: “We’re standing shoulder to shoulder”. But more than any one lyric, it’s in the attitude of ‘Crystalpunk’ – in its readiness to unite genres and tribes and bring them together in one place of catharsis and positivity – that feels the most telling.
“[We made a manifesto for our album] to make sure that we were being bold and taking risks and challenging ourselves” – Ross Cullen
“In an age where everyone’s trying to rip each other apart and your phone algorithm is telling you to hate on people, it’s about trying to see if there’s some way to create unity because it’s not each other we should be going against,” says Cullen as his bandmate nods in agreement. “It’s the people in the higher places.”
There are moments of vulnerable, intensely personal reflection within the record, too. On recent single ‘Can’t Feel It’, Cullen looks back at a first kiss shared with a male friend who “made me promise / Better keep your mouth shut”. It’s one of the moments where ‘Crystalpunk’’s manifesto pushed them to truly reach down into their depths and fully commit. “I was proud that I was able to go there and feel like I could open that little vessel that I’d been carrying for a while and put it into this song. And now, it just floats like this bubble in front of me,” Cullen smiles. “That’s why we’re proud of the whole album, because you’re taking a bit of yourself and putting it into every track.”
On the surface, ‘Crystalpunk’ with its abrasive, uncompromising sonic landscape and BDSM-adjacent aesthetic might seem hard-edged and tough. “Oh yeah, I turn into a fucking dick when I put the glove on,” Cullen jokes. “Don’t talk to me, I’m a rockstar now!” But beneath it all, there’s a softness and a willingness to lay themselves bare that makes Chalk’s world such an enticing one. Like its title, theirs is an attitude that goes all-in, but also finds beauty and sparkle within the darkness.
Chalk’s ‘Crystalpunk’ is out on March 13 via ALTER Music.
Listen to Chalk’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and on Apple Music here.
Words: Lisa Wright
Photography: Glenn Norwood
Glam: High Society Cuts Club
Styling: Olivia Creighton
Label: ALTER Music
