Agony Massive are being born. They haven’t stopped being born – screaming into existence all hollow-eyed and starved through sodden morass at the Devil’s Apronful, Pendle Hill – and Agony Massive won’t be done being born until they’ve dragged the world they are from through to this one. When you see them you’ll know. Agony Massive are going to kill you.

There’s a village nestled deep within the Forest of Bowland called Dunsop Bridge. It is often purported to be the centre of the island of Great Britain. For Agony Massive, the endless hillsides and limestone crags dotting the valley bowls through Dunsop Bridge, Burnley, Clitheroe and Blackburn mark it not as the centre of a single island, but as the centre of the entire world.

“Everything about the music and the act is influenced by the family, where we’re from, our upbringing. We moved around Lancashire so much as kids: Gisburn, Blacko, Barrowford, Nelson, Colne, Brierfield, Clitheroe. We can hear that in the music.” 

A self-described East Lancashire pop group, they are individually nameless by assertion – always two brothers and sometimes their wide reaching group of friends. Fresh from a headline gig at Clitheroe’s The Grand earlier this year and the recent release of their first single, “N0$3BL33D”, featuring SINDYSMAN, they are an amalgamation of hip-hop, folk horror and electronic influences driven through the heart of rural townie experience. With swathes of people in their mid-to-late 20s channeling an interest in hyperlocalism through a flimsy veil of agricultural appropriation, Agony Massive take their obsession with the conflict between the psyche of rural modernity and the expanding urbane in a different direction, all leading to the release of “N0$3BL33D”.

“It’s existed entirely live until now,” they tell me. “The first six months we didn’t ask for a single gig and we played 12. He,” he points at his brother, “was finishing off tunes on his laptop in the car on the way to shows. It’s only now that we’re starting to put music out  – which feels like ruining the magic, because then it can’t be fucked with. At the minute everything is still within our control but the second it’s out there it’s not. It’s a thing.”

My first excursion into the world of Agony was at the Eagle Inn, Salford, where the asphalt blurs the Irwell and Renaker’s name is imprinted onto the concrete foundations of vertical gulags reselling SHEIN. It’s a long way from home, and they can feel its ebb pulling at them. “Until January we never played a gig in any of the towns from which any of this influence came from.”

“All roads lead to Colne,” one brother opines.

“All the shows ended up being in Manchester and a lot of them were at art exhibitions and I think that bred a little bit of insecurity in us. There’s a lot of people in turtlenecks rubbing their chins. I want to play in an auction market in the pig pens. So many people have been very kind to us in Manchester, but it feels like there’s a limb that I’d quite like to sever.”

That night at the Eagle, this gaggle of East Lancsheads sauntered in acrimony through the crowd and plugged their laptop into the soundsystem. The crackle of an older tune fizzed upon the speaker and suddenly malign forces were made real:

“Pendle, old Pendle, thou standest alone twixt Burnley and Clitheroe, Whalley and Colne. Where Hodder and Ribble’s fair waters do meet with Barley and Downham content at thy feet.”

“Old Pendle” is a folk song from the 1940s that my Mum still sings at me – not to me – in frighteningly intense increments when Castle Cement’s looming chimneys cover the valley bowl in smoke. Through the smoke stands Pendle, and all those who have walked upon its back know that beyond the agony of its apex lies rebirth. Agony Massive don’t play it like you would play a song. It takes on new form in their twisted aberrations – a rustic edict in their hands.

“Old Pendle” fades and the barrage begins. Agony Massive attack when they play, all abrasive and strange – these dancing spirits lumbered with the weight of all dead generations. They are the thin mist enveloping both stage and crowd. You’ve no real grasp of who’s in the group and who’s not. It’s conspiratorial and you’re irked by flashing strobes. It could be her. It could be him. Your hands are getting clammy. Your eyes pour over these stranger’s faces for hints. Your heartbeat is cacophonous. That hunched over grebo on your back left side is looking at you funny. No-one would pay him any mind at a live music event put on by two DIY art magazines. He’s complicit. He fits in. Some anorak clad half-human psyop of malcontent surely sent to destroy on behalf of the all-seeing conglomerate of shadows that bears the name Agony. Then it hits you. Your eyes roll back inside your skull and, oh God, oh no. You now understand in the charred pit of your heart that you too might be the dancing puppetmaster beneath the hood of Agony Massive.

You’re back in the room and you hear them for the first time – the sound of bluetoothing tunes to your mates on Clitheroe Castle Bandstand; less Motown, more Milltown. It is incorporeal country forces manifest – winding B roads, dry stone walls, and ketamine revenge in a cow shed.

Not long before their arrival, they’d sent us a video of them ferrying their crew in the car. Their mate Josh’s head was stuck proud out the window and his teeth cut against the wind with that mad look in his eyes — the look of a foaming rabid dog about to launch itself pedestrian ways like an intercontinental ballistic pitbull. The car rattled against pothole strewn tarmac and Josh, making war with the winter night, bicced his head completely smooth.

“On a level, we just want to keep it exciting for us. The one thing that we’re keen to maintain is that it feels unpredictable. Every gig that we’ve done, we’ve rocked up with our mates. Like Josh biccing his head on the way to the Eagle gig, I want every show to feel like we’ve just been offered it and we’re like fucking hell, how do we go and do this one?”

That unpredictability doesn’t solely exist within the Agony Massive live experience. It’s embedded within the production itself. Beyond unfinished songs polished off in the passenger seat, the sound flits skittishly between Agony Massive’s commitment to being a pop group and their wider cultural draw with flashes of drill, donk, EDM, and post-punk that never venture into irony or pastiche. They cite some of their influences as Wraith 9, Paul Nataraj’s Cobblestones & Kitchari, and The Blackout Crew. Not the sound of simulacra or the dreg ends of cultural regurgitation, but a sound manufactured by obsession.

“Some of the cultures like donk can be misunderstood. Not to sound wanky, but we don’t want our music to feel like an observation of that culture. It has come from it. There’s only so much good that observing something like that can do. What we’re doing is backing that culture.”

Whilst engagement with culture is at the forefront, Agony Massive are part-product of an increasingly hyperlocal world. Within songs their observations of this are reflected back, whether it’s through benedictine or ‘catching ghost trains over the border, where Lancs becomes Yorkshire and arms become wrists.’ We deliberate on the meaning. “Is it hyperlocalism? Or is it hyperexperience? It feels like in any kind of art in the past 10 years or so, there’s definitely been more of a thirst developed for experiences.” The experiences they share aren’t disconnected images. The worldbuilding they have incorporated into the music is their grandest offering – their distorted vision of the North West as influenced by the Pendle Witches and the passing of the aux in a farmer’s landrover.

“When you’re getting fucked up as a kid it’s not hard to see the dark horror that comes with it when you’re doing it around a castle or you’re doing it on Pendle Hill. It’s not hard to see the magic. There’s a huge dose of strangeness injected to kids in tracksuits k-holing, tripping on mushrooms around an ancient castle ground or where witches were taken from to be on trial. It’s not hard to see that. When James I wrote Demonologie he said that Lancashire was a wild and lawless land inhabited by the disturbed.”

The disturbed are omnipresent wraiths in the world of Agony. Our shared inheritance is a composite of rural characters that bend their neck towards the creeping light of obsession with authenticity. “The people are more real there,” perverse urbanites fetishing pastoral flesh say, all stretched out and flattened into two-dimensional caricature. But, they tell me, the characters these songs concern are more complex than the run of the mill provincial gossip of kitchen sink England.

“We have a tune called Skenny Bones. Skenny Bones is a fictional Lancashire racehorse that in its heyday was the absolute hero of the county. Kids would run down the street after it. Everyone loved this horse but [it] had a cruel owner – a drunk — and one day he puts all his money on his own horse on the promise it would get him to Australia. When it doesn’t – it’s the only time it loses – he ends up hoisting it from a farmhouse beam and hanging it. It’s got that momentous anxiety in the build up and imagery of it all, but at the same time there’s almost something heroic and honourable within it.”

Although the characters that inhabit the world of Agony Massive have made descent into Hell, they are quick to remind me that the world itself is not that. 

“I’d hate for anyone to think it was only a place of darkness. This world of Agony — don’t be distracted by the word. You need it in order to grow. There might be a mood to the sets and there might be anger, a lot of confusion, and being scared is a big thing within them, but ultimately the overarching message is you’ll be alright. Hope is the biggest element. Anyone can write about how shit their life’s been.” 

“There’s plenty of Northern art about how grim the North is,” one brother tells the other.

The first year is behind them and with “N0$3BL33D”’s release the world of Agony Massive is no longer under their control. It is a thing. Despite this they’ve taken on the lessons of their own alter plane of existence and are hopeful for the future.

“We’re on the cusp of something that sounds closer to childhood. It feels like we’ve gone through a dark forest and there’s something at the end of it. There’s a lot more colour on the horizon.”

Have you ever stood on Waddow Fell at dawn, when the sun creeps over Pendle and eviscerates both horizon and valley bowl in thermonuclear ochre? It leaves you with a feeling that maybe Agony Massive aren’t going to kill you. Maybe you have seen the night and you, like them, will now be born. The terror subsides and in hope you are renewed, but the peat is not done with you yet and the dirt encrusted hands of Agony Massive rise up through soft-clay and drag you far beneath the asphalt, turf and mire. It doesn’t matter where in the world you go. You will always return to East Lancashire. You will always return to the world of Agony.