SPILL FEATURE: NEW CHAPTERS, WRITTEN IN ICE AND LIGHT – A CONVERSATION WITH LEFT TO SUFFER GUITARIST PETER HIGGS

NEW CHAPTERS, WRITTEN IN ICE AND LIGHT

A CONVERSATION WITH LEFT TO SUFFER GUITARIST PETER HIGGS

Stepping into a new chapter with Unwelcome Guest, everything Left To Suffer has been through has led to this moment, when their careers have shifted into extreme clarity. That clarity comes after a period of holding in anger, exhaustion, fear, and, underneath it all, the raw ambition to keep going despite it. This has become the story that has built Left to Suffer’s new album, Unwelcome Guest. This isn’t just a more thought-out, heavier, more polished, and more experimental path for the band, it’s about coming to terms with parts of yourself that you often keep hidden in the dark. This time around, and with their new signing to Hopeless Records, Left To Suffer steps into a new era, with a “go for the jugular” attitude and their hearts exposed. For guitarist Peter Higgs, this was not about leaving the past behind; it was about having the courage to fight back against those that didn’t believe in them or their dreams.

“So, we’ve all known each other for a while, and a lot of our formative years in the industry happened when we were still in our early 20s, and it’s grown since then,” says guitarist Peter Higgs. “I was in my mid-20s. They were in their early 20s, but you know, same difference. But we just weren’t mentally where we are now. We didn’t deal with people who were there to take advantage of us, so to speak, or we didn’t deal with just people who weren’t even trying to take advantage of us – just negative people that we kept around in our lives that we just didn’t understand, like how to break these ties, I guess. And just sometimes, like when you’re younger, you don’t even understand that these people that you have around are the problem at all, and it can take years to do these things. It’s just a culmination of the years we’ve stuck together as a band, and the problems we’ve had internally as well. Still, we get through because all of us are here for the greater good, but the unwelcome guests are just the people who were not part of our tribe for the greater good.”

Knowing all of this, Unwelcome Guest feels deceptively oversimplified. But as you listen, you notice the sharp edges: the intrusive thoughts that always have access to your headspace, and the resentment you tell yourself isn’t there but lives rent-free in your mind. It represents the dark parts of yourself no one bothers to see. Left To Suffer doesn’t frame “Guest” as an opposing force. It’s more complicated than that. It’s a sentient being you learn to coexist with, even when its negative energy threatens to destroy you from within. Left To Suffer’s musical soul has always existed in the epicenter of such concepts, but here, the rage is deeply personal, and the vulnerability is braver. While the brutality still hugs its feral riffs and suffocated low-end vocals, something else has crawled out of that brutality, and the emotional architecture holding Unwelcome Guest together has changed. A melodic cadence floats within the anger, and its atmospheric passages give voice to the chaos. This doesn’t mean the band is softening; they have been sharpening the blade for years, and Unwelcome Guest cuts through that with unique, pointed precision.

“So, whenever we started writing, conceptually, we just wanted to make something that was very, you know, in the eyes of somebody hunting somebody, like one of the unwelcome guests that we spoke of. But instead of, like, the professional way of having a conversation with somebody and saying, “We’re not working out; I need to do my own thing,” we express it in this art form. The intrusive thoughts, getting bloodthirsty, you know what I mean? So, it’s a dark portion of, like, that kind of thing. None of us have been treated those situations like that, haha,” he laughs. “But that’s the way we wanted to write the music.”

PURCHASE UNWELCOME GUEST VIA BANDCAMP

If Leap of Death gave way to their transformation through intensity, Unwelcome Guest gives it to them through honesty. The themes that coat Unwelcome Guest – revenge, patience, internalized pressure, and the fear of overcoming personal obstacles have never been new to heavy music but Left To Suffer approaches these themes through older eyes. This album asks a simple, but still complicated question: What happens when the things you have been avoiding run out of excuses to hide behind? Unwelcome Guest in that right is not seeking to generate an answer to that question. Instead, Left To Suffer gives us space to sit with it, and even understand it more than we did before.

“This album is built with a type of person in mind. It’s an angry person who looks for negative, hateful things to latch onto. It’s just an angry mob mentality. Once they see somebody has a little backing for these harsh opinions, and you’re an outlier, it’s easy to jump on that,” says Higgs. “Some people have negative energy and are just looking for somewhere to put it; instead of processing their emotions properly, like your anger. Like, there are plenty of ways to do it. I don’t think telling somebody that their art sucks is a proper way to process your negative emotions. And the people that get it out like that, there’s a lot of them out there- and they have internet access, and they’re hard to ignore sometimes. I feel like most of the time, it’s pretty underwhelming. The ratio of people who we’ve made genuine friends with as much as we’ve toured, and as long as we’ve been doing this, versus the people that are just like that. It’s like, nah, fuck these guys. Like, dude, no one in this band is a saint. Right? We’ve all done wrong, and we’ve all tried to rectify it, and some people won’t let that go. People should get second chances and listen to multiple sides of a story. When you see one side of a story, and it’s negative, people take zero time to consider anything else that’s going on; it becomes a witch hunt. You’re not trying to find the truth or see who’s in the wrong and who’s in the right. So, it’s for all those people who want to spray negative energy. The answer to that problem was finding out that the unwelcome guests were the problem. Everyone has their family, whether it’s your chosen family or your parents and stuff like that. You try and have that circle, your trust system. Within all of those trust systems, people try to come in and do negative things. Getting those unwelcome guests out was exactly the answer and you can see that rage throughout the songs on this album.”

If anything, this album is proving something vital in music and in society: People are exhausted with the idea of over-embellishment – emotionally, socially, and artistically. What people want is honesty, even if that truth doesn’t come through in the cleanest of deliveries. Unwelcome Guest arrives at a time when people are willing to confront their own darkest shadows and Left To Suffer is one of the bands leading the charge in this social movement. Unwelcome Guest acknowledges that the world and its people are far more complex than music can articulate in one album, especially in a world that always demands something newer, bigger, or better than what’s been done before.  Unwelcome Guest invites people to look at this again through the eyes of those who know what it’s like to be rejected by the many and welcomed only by the few. Unwelcome Guest reminds us that you don’t have to be okay or do something grandiose for it to have meaning; you just have to be honest.

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Photo Credit: Ana Massard