words @killer.solo.music
Sass Williams and Jordan Varbaro talk twelve years of Stabbitha, songwriting, mortality, recording imperfections and the gloriously heavy new album Disgust.
“We are heavy but we are listenable.” — Sass
There are bands that get louder with age.
Then there’s Stabbitha and the Knifey Wifeys, who have spent twelve years getting better at turning all the fucked-up parts of life into something you can scream along to.
Now, with Disgust, the Adelaide outfit have delivered arguably their most ambitious record yet.
Released August 31, Disgust is an 11-track collision of punk, hardcore, metal and everything else Stabbitha feel like throwing into the machine. The album was recorded and mixed by Alex Upton, produced by the band and mastered by Brad Boatright at Audioseige. The current lineup features Sass Williams, Jordan Varbaro, Eb Tonkin and Alex Hollow.
For vocalist Sass Williams, the band’s evolution is obvious when looking back at where Stabbitha began.
“I was a much angrier person then than I am now,” she says.
That doesn’t mean the anger disappeared.
If anything, it has become more focused.
Sass still writes about injustice and the things that piss her off, but years of experience have changed the perspective behind the words. Her work in the death-care industry has also given her a considerably different relationship with mortality — something that runs throughout Disgust.
The album wasn’t conceived around a grand overarching concept. Instead, its central theme emerged organically during the writing process.
Sass explains that the subjects she was writing about weren’t simply making her angry or frustrated. They were making her viscerally disgusted. Eventually, the title became the obvious way to tie the whole thing together.
The songwriting itself was deliberately given room to breathe. Rather than hammering out eleven songs simultaneously, the band worked through each track individually, sometimes spending months refining ideas and lyrics.
There was even some Latin and Ancient Greek research involved.
Because apparently writing filthy heavy punk wasn’t complicated enough.
“This whole album… was very organic.” — Sass
Jordan joined Stabbitha after initially filling in on guitar for a Wilhelm Scream show. That temporary gig eventually became something considerably more permanent, and playing alongside the band at the Bikini Kill show became one of the moments that cemented just how much the band had grown.
That history is part of what makes Disgust feel like a progression rather than simply another album.
The record is polished without becoming sterile.
Stabbitha deliberately wanted to retain the little imperfections that happen when actual humans play instruments. A string scrape, a timing quirk, something happening in the background — rather than surgically removing every trace of humanity, they left some of it in.
As Sass puts it:
“I’m a human playing an instrument and I’m gonna… these things are gonna happen.”
That philosophy fits Stabbitha perfectly.
The album can be fucking brutal one minute and unexpectedly beautiful the next. Tracks like “Deeper Known” show another side of the band and is one of my favorite’s. The interplay between guitar and bass is amazing!
And then there are the live shows.
For all the darkness in Stabbitha’s music, Sass sees their shows as something fundamentally positive — a place where the band and audience feed energy back into each other.
The goal isn’t simply to scream at people for forty minutes.
It’s to have a fucking good time while doing it.
“It’s like getting therapy for 25 dollars a ticket.”
That’s probably the best description of Stabbitha and the Knifey Wifeys you’ll ever get.
Disgust may be about the things that make us recoil, rage and stare at the darker parts of existence.
But Stabbitha aren’t interested in leaving you there.
They’d rather drag you through the mud, scream in your face, make you laugh, blow your fucking eardrums out — and send you home smiling.
And honestly?
That’s a pretty fucking good way to spend an album.
This is the gospel.
I bite crowd surfers.
Killer.
