When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, as the old adage goes. When Harvey Freeman, frontman for hardcore heroes Graphic Nature, was assaulted on a train in London last year, he was left with both physical injuries and more lasting damage to his mental health. What emerged from the incident is ‘Who Are You When No One Is Watching?’, an album that’s equal parts confessional, catharsis and scream into the black void of injustice.
“Lyrically, it’s a journey through a lot of different emotions I’ve personally been through in the space of 12 months,” he explains. “How I dealt with that was to write it onto paper and to put it into the songs. It’s my way of saying, ‘I’m not doing so good, here’s some shit I went through, here’s how I felt about it, here’s some things that have then come off the back of that.’ It’s really just about how everything can stem from one bad day in your life.”
Graphic Nature were already experiencing a meteoric rise before this incident, and the foundations for an even more brutal and experimental direction was already being laid last summer in their fantastically intense and abrasive festival appearances. If you loved them at Reading or Download in 2023, there’s good news for you. All the severity, the drum n bass exorcisms and guitar like an air rifle are there on the new album, and they’ve been exponentially amplified. The tendrils of darkness they throw out like lassos in the crowd have only grown stronger. Remember the shock and delicious intrigue you felt when you heard Korn’s ‘Freak On A Leash’ for the first time? That’s the reaction Graphic Nature are hoping for with every swipe of their emotional knives.
Musically, don’t expect choruses that stir your emotions. Or choruses at all, really. Graphic Nature have forsaken traditional structures in favour of stream of consciousness monologues that’d be classed as spoken word if they weren’t bellowed. That’s not to say there’s not plenty of chances to chant along with Freeman when they unleash this album on their next tour, but if you’re expecting a singalong, you’ll be disappointed. However, if you were hoping for more drum n bass with beats so dark that Anish Kapoor will start a lawsuit, you’ve come to the right place.
Never overwhelming the guitar, or the message, the scratches and electronica that lurks beneath the surface of Graphic Nature’s sounds have grown in importance to add an unexpected maturity to this record. ‘Breathe’ is the perfect example, blending atmospheric ripples and echoes to Freeman’s despair, and ‘Session24’ provides a pure dance oasis in the middle of the raging storm of the rest of the album. The electronica is always there, a metaphor for the anger and grief that haunt the corridors of ‘Who Are You When No One Is Watching?’.
It’s the emergent narrative on the album as a whole, the journey that Freeman takes us on through his own doubt and frustration that makes this a compelling record. He makes for a compelling narrator, staggering between eloquent questioning and gut wrenching screams to tell us the story of what’s going on in his head. This album is understandably dominated by this process though, making it a difficult listen at points when we’re being pelted the stones formed from his inner psyche. But ultimately this is an album that urgently needed to be made: for Freeman’s own peace, for our curiosity and desire to throw ourselves around a sweaty venue, and for the future of Graphic Nature. Now it’s out in the world, dragged out into the light of day, and ‘Who Are You When No One Is Watching?’ is bound to grow stronger with each listen like the avenging angel it was created to be.
KATE ALLVEY