Martyrs are Jon and Michael, originally from Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, now residing on the Kent coast in England. They first played in a band together when they were just 15 years old an reconvened years later to begin Martyrs. Their 2022 album Un Diavolo In Casa was a lo-fi electronica tribute to Giallo movies while their follow-up, 2024’s Luminism, was a bright an shiny piece of post-yacht, which gained over 100,000 streams and sold out of physical copies.
Their last single, ‘The View From A Memorial Bench‘ found them airplay from over 100 radio stations worldwide, which was a nice surprise considering it sounded like a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs. They also released another bold offering ‘Pin Blue Sometime’ earlier this year.
Proudly DIY in every aspect, Martyrs write, record and release all of their work from the relative safety of their living rooms. Unwilling to be confined by genre and unbound by external expectations, Jon and Michael shift restlessly in whichever musical direction the mood takes them, the only constant being their innovative and distinctive songwriting and the world they create around it. They draw inspiration from professional wrestling, Dario Argento and cold brew coffee.
Michael from Martyrs talks us through their latest single ‘Night Shift’ and the accompanying video:
“We’ve all had shit jobs. The ones that drain the life out of you, suck away your time and leave you hollow. Jon, my musical partner in Martyrs, had a particularly rough one back in the day. Working overnight as a security guard at a warehouse, he whiled away the small hours walking the aisles, listening to John Peel on the radio, drinking endless cups of instant coffee. Soon after he was hired, the warehouse closed and he was the only one kept on, or that’s how it seemed. So there he was, guarding an empty building without even the occasional late delivery or pick up to punctuate the boredom. Between the unsociable hours and the isolation, he started to feel like he was losing his grip on reality. About 6 months later he resigned and discovered that the company hadn’t realised he was still working there. They’d just accidentally kept him on payroll and probably would have indefinitely. He could have been at home watching WCW Worldwide the whole time.
So, I thought, there’s a song in that. Exploitation of misery is a songwriter’s duty, surely. In ‘Night Shift’, our narrator isn’t just alone in the dark, they’re completely forgotten, and teetering on the brink of madness. Jon sent me over a fantastic, fast, furious piece of music he’d written; brief, brutal and a sharp contrast to the lyrics I had in mind. What could, or perhaps should, have been a slow, sad song would be crafted into something frantic and frenetic instead. So we went in that direction, taking our musical cues from Faith No More, Manic Street Preachers, Green Lung and, perhaps surprisingly, Richard Dawson. I really admire the way he brings unconventional subject matter to his music, and it’s something I strive for. Traditional indie rock subject matter is very dull. There are already too many straightforward love songs, too many party songs, too many self-pitying songs. Our songs are often musical short stories, with quickly sketched characters and ambiguous endings. There are sometimes supernatural elements, and there were on early versions of ‘Night Shift’, but we soon came to the conclusion that it served the song to steer away from that and stay focused on the psychological side of the narrator’s experience.
Our process is something I really enjoy. We’re very much DIY, so the only limitations on what we do are the ones we impose on ourselves, and we don’t really impose any. We pitch increasingly ludicrous ideas to one another and the one that wins out is often whichever we deem the most ridiculous or most challenging. We might focus tightly on one genre while we’re making a particular song, but we move on pretty quickly to the next idea. Even when we’re working within the confines of a specific style we try to approach it from a different angle. There’s not much appeal to just trotting out the old tropes and that’s how we end up with weird songs like ‘Night Shift.’
We’re not particularly concerned with alienating an “audience” by constantly shifting our musical parameters. We’re really happy to have a very small, appreciative audience and I think they get that Martyrs is never going to be one thing, set in stone. We’ve got about as much interest in the music industry as I’m sure they would have in us, so we’re not obliged to do anything but strive to make the best version of the music we want to hear. Because we’re completely self-sufficient, writing, recording, releasing everything ourselves, we’re on an island, and it’s an island I’m very happy to call home. The mangos are delicious.
One of the b-sides for ‘Night Shift’ is ‘The Clinic’. It’s partly inspired by Olga Tokarczuk’s novel ‘The Empusium’, which I can’t recommend enough. Jon wrote this beautiful, eerie, atmospheric piece of music, and I built a spoken word and field recording sound collage around it. We’d planned at some point to make a complete track in one day, and that’s what we did with ‘The Clinic’. It’s an unusual song, unlike anything we’ve made before, but we like it, and I hope you do too, as there’s a lot more where that came from, it would seem.
In terms of the video, that’s where we decided to lean in to the otherworldly elements we omitted from the song itself. I took some of Jon’s footage, some of my own, some found footage and put together something I thought was… quite funny. It’s a figurative descent into madness that races from the optimism of brightly lit summer roads to the bleak nether regions of church burning and a barrage of Satanic imagery. It’s been a learning curve, making these videos recently, but DIY means DIY and you’ve just got to work it out for yourself if that’s the road you want to go down. Or the island you want to be on. Or the warehouse you happen to be stuck in.
Enough pretentious waffle, again I hope you enjoy the songs and video. There’ll be a lot more to come this year, though at this point we have no idea what any of it might sound like – which is half the fun really, isn’t it? Thanks for reading, thanks for listening.“
Bandcamp Free 3-track download embed link:
