Words by

Hannah Jane Cohen

Photo by

Verði Ljós

Fresh off taking first prize at the Wacken Metal Battle, the hardcore boys of Une Misère dropped their first full release on July 1. Entitled ‘01.07.17’’, the mixtape features two “sides,” with Side A featuring 2.5 original songs and 0.5 cover songs, with noise between provided by AAIIEENN. Side B features four remixes of those songs by Kuldaboli, SEINT, SIGRÚN and MILLJÓN. We sat down with them to hear about their original works—aka Side A.

1. Condescend

“Condescend” opens with a ball-crushing riff that will make anyone want to move around and hit things. It was written in our early stages of playing together, when our sole purpose was to make hard-hitting songs that would catch people’s attention right away. This song is an open letter to those people you consider friends, but when all’s said and done, are nothing but trash and would turn their back on you in a heartbeat. We dive into those feelings you experience when you’re seriously willing to harm another person, like really harm another person—that’s what this song is about. “Kill your best friend” is definitely a thing that everyone has thought of doing at one time or another.

2. Backstabbed

The intro on “Backstabbed” is actually a mashup of two songs: Slayer’s “South of Heaven” and Code Orange’s “My World.” It then feeds into an original song. “Blinded by violence” is basically the tagline for the song. The lyrics are about the harm inflicted upon one of us, and also about how words never seem to come at the right moment. “Broken mirrors,” which we say in the song, refers to those times, and “break my head” is about how you never come out winning.

3. Overlooked/Disregarded

This two-part song is about loss in three forms. The first form is about being the object that is lost and others seeming fine with that. The second form goes into the hypothetical loss of a person close to you, but at the same time actually encouraging that loss and basically saying, “I’ll do fine without you.” The third form is where you’ve lost everything but are still standing. “This is the damage done” would be a perfect tagline for the song.

We actually made a video for “Overlooked/Disregarded” back in August of last year. The whole idea there was to capture a moving story. The video starts with a girl played by our friend Unnur Snorradóttir, who has a very hypnotising look, almost like she wants you to do something, or wants to push you to your limit in her waste blackwater of nothingness. She has a hold on our protagonist, played by Jón, one of the members of Une Misère, who tries to run away from his problems, but soon they catch up.

You can download the full album for free at www.unemisere.com