With The Wound, Qlowski brings us an album that’s as raw and intense as it is compelling, blending sharp-edged post-punk with stories of resilience and rebellion. Every track captures a moment of tension, whether it’s grappling with love, loss, or just navigating the chaos of modern life. The band draws on everything from gritty field recordings under a Greenwich bridge to reflections on personal and political upheaval, making this album feel unusually lived-in and unfiltered. Ultimately though, The Wound works so well because it’s less ‘statement’ and more an invitation — to sit with the uneasy and the unresolved, and in doing so maybe even find a bit of hope in the company of others who are demanding change.
In this exclusive track-by-track, Qlowski shares the stories and ideas behind each song, taking us through the album’s layers of emotion, defiance, and a few surprises along the way.
The Wound
“From the bits. From the scars. —There is no beauty without the wound”
Thirteen
Thirteen is a factual title. It’s literally how many times Cece plays those two chords on the synth. There are also some field recordings Christian took from under a bridge right around the corner from the studio where we wrote most of the album, in North Greenwich, South East London. We wanted it to be rooted geographically to a specific place and time. The keyboard part on this track is reminiscent of ‘A Woman’ from our debut album Quale Futuro, so it serves as an echo of the previous LP while setting the scene for a more ominous and dark second record.
The Wound
‘The Wound’ is like our ‘Plainsong’ (The Cure). You might struggle to see it but the idea was to have a long instrumental introduction (together with ‘Thirteen’) that would set the tone for the rest of the album. It’s one of the first songs we wrote after Quale Futuro? Sometime around the end of 2021, looking back at 2020, the pandemic, George Floyd and the BLM movement and what was left a year or so later of that period, and the main feeling was hopelessness and a sense of defeat. In a way, this track contains all the themes we developed throughout the album: defeat, grief, trauma, the body as a place of capitalist and imperialist coercion, but also bodies as tools of resistance, and finally, the big questions – can we generate resistance and beauty from wounds, trauma, grief and defeat? Can we transform personal and individual desire and love into collective action?
Desire
Desire is a tricky thing. It’s one of the most personal of human experiences and yet it can’t be resolved in the individual. That’s why neoliberalism is so fucked and can’t work. Desire needs to be, and is, a collective force. We tried to create a sort of “club” song because the club to us was the spatial representation of what we were trying to say, togetherness, bodies and movement. The chorus is a euphoric explosion of layers of synths, referring to protest chants ‘What do we want? When do we want it?’ Because protests and direct action are the other spaces where desire becomes a collective force.
Stronger Than
This is a love song. This is a dream pop ballad or as close as we can get to that. Love as a revolutionary act. Love that builds a house, a world big enough where everything is for everyone. That takes back what’s ours, the space, the time, the streets. Take it all!
Surrender
This is our single. We wrote this song with that intention. The physical album comes with a beautiful A1 poster-zine, huge! There’s one passage in one of the texts there that goes ‘And still you might say we are resolutely in the camp of the defeated, but you should know, defeat has nothing to do with surrender’. Which was inspired by an interview with Mahmoud Darwish. An incredible Palestinian poet. We are living through a genocide, while we can’t afford to pay rent for our mouldy rooms despite working two jobs or full time. There’s a war happening on the bodies of the Palestinian people and on the bodies of trans people. The situation never looked as grim, and yeah it seems like we’re losing, but defeat has nothing to do with surrender.
Mastering The Motions
Like ‘Surrender’ and ‘Desire’, ‘Mastering The Motions’ revolves around the bassline. It’s in a way a more joyous song that plays on contrasts. The second bridge is one of everyone’s favourite moments in the album. Everything goes quiet and soft, just bass and drums and almost whispered spoken words, before erupting into the chorus: “Take them down / hang them up upside down”, which refers to the people of Milan hanging Mussolini upside down after he was captured and executed by the partisans.
It May Change
This one was the very first song we wrote after Quale Futuro. We abandoned it for a long time until we rediscovered the demo not long before going into the studio to record The Wound. In a way, it still deals with some of the themes and sonic influences of Quale Futuro? But I think for us it functioned as a bridge and we thought that that drum fill at the beginning was perfect to start side B on the vinyl after the slow disintegration that ends side A.
A Vision
We wanted it to sound as disturbing and dissonant as possible. It’s a song about landlords. They are the wolves and vultures feasting on our flesh. It’s also about how psychologically destabilising it is to literally live in mould and at the same time being terrified you could get evicted at any moment. That’s why we should all join our local tenants union. That’s the light that Cece’s keyboards bring at the end, in contrast with the lyrics crying ‘No Resistance’. Solidarity and collective action are the only hope.
Praxis
The Wound is in many ways about grief. Collective, societal and personal. This one specifically is about Cece’s grandma. She was a fundamental presence in Cece’s life. More generally, it’s about motherhood and transition, about death and life, about receiving and giving back. How do we transform love into action? That’s why it’s called ‘Praxis‘, in particular referring to the way Marx uses it, “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice”. Grief and the process of dealing with it can become a revolutionary practice, a force of change, personal and within your community.
In Cold Blood
The Italian government and Europe are responsible for the death of more than 3,000 people every year trying to reach our coasts crossing the Mediterranean Sea. On the 26th of February 2023, a boat carrying migrants sank amidst harsh weather conditions while trying to land on the coast near the town where Cece was born. At least 94 people died, including at least 35 children. The West is a rotting death cult.
Can You Tell? (Love song for N.K.)
N.K. is Nadezhda Krupskaya, a Russian revolutionary who married Lenin in 1898. She was one of the key organisers of the Russian Communist Party, and she and Lenin worked closely together until Lenin’s death. At the time Mickey was reading a biography of Lenin and was inspired by one of the letters Lenin wrote to Nadezhda after the 1905 Revolution failed.
Off The Grass
It’s once again about love and relationships. It’s about failure and building something from the bits and scars you’ve been left with. Them wounds eh! As soon as we were recording it we knew it was going to be the closing song for this album. One final long exploding, melancholic but euphoric outro. We started the album with noise and we finished it with noise.
‘The Wound’ is out now on Maple Death Records
