Before releasing their debut album on Sub Pop at the end of October, Vancouver punk band Piss put together a playlist for listeners on Spotify and Apple Music. It is not an assortment designed to soothe anyone. Instead, it gathers records defined by repetition, abrasion, and unsparing emotional force, outlining the musical lineage that feeds into their full-length debut, You Made Me / Skin On Linen.
The selections on the tracklist make their aesthetic priorities plain. The band pulls in The Velvet Underground & Nico, pointing back to the early collision of drone work, street realities, and pop songcraft. They include Calgary post-punk group Women, whose cold rhythms and brittle, spindly guitar lines offered an earlier Canadian model of nervous tension. Alongside them sit experimental rock outfit Swans, known for physical volume and punishing rhythmic cycles, and Japanese noise group Hijokaidan, who pushed volume past traditional song structures into raw feedback and pure noise. Considered as a whole, the playlist reveals how Piss approach harshness. In their world, friction is not an ornament layered on top of a song, but the essential medium through which direct expression happens.
That friction takes on an even heavier charge given what frontwoman Taylor Zantingh brings to the lyrics. The songs on You Made Me / Skin On Linen were written straight out of her own experiences with sexual violence and the persistent trauma that followed. Placing those realities inside an aggressive punk context gives the project an urgent, bodily weight, yet the immediate connection it sparks among audiences brings its own complications.
Zantingh does not view the band's growing audience through a triumphant lens. When addressing the reception of the material, she noted that the songs strike a nerve precisely because the reality behind them is so pervasive. "I'm always reminded that a big reason why the project is doing well is because there's this huge problem, and if so many people are resonating with it, that reflects on our artistry and our ability to talk about it," she explained. "But it also reflects on how horrible a lot of people feel that they're relating to a record like this."
It is an uncomfortable dynamic that often surrounds music anchored in extreme distress. The band communicates with absolute clarity, and audiences respond in kind. Yet every moment of mutual recognition also serves as a reminder of how widespread that particular agony remains. Success, in this context, cannot be separated from the suffering that generated both the art and the audience's identification with it.
Performing this material onstage complicates the situation further. Delivering songs rooted in violation under live conditions demands an intense physical and mental commitment, one that does not magically convert distress into peaceful resolution. Rather than functioning as straightforward therapy, live shows can leave a singer exposed, with the line between communal warmth and personal collapse remaining perilous.
Zantingh spoke directly to that delicate position when describing the experience of fronting the band. "It's the most complicated set of feelings I've ever had to grapple with because, on one hand, it feels amazing to be able to connect with people in this way, but then the littlest thing will just make me feel completely awful," she said. "The band is built on a foundation of my suffering. It's inextricable, and that's very, very intense."
Her words strip away the romantic myth that making loud, cathartic art cleanly washes away pain. For Piss, the debut record is an ongoing encounter between exposure, painful memory, and abrasive noise. Arriving October 30 via Sub Pop, You Made Me / Skin On Linen and its companion playlist confirm that the group is aligning with musicians who refuse easy answers, choosing instead to let the sharp edges stay sharp.
