This week’s featured Meet The Band artist is the UK group Believe In Nothing. Their debut album is Rot. Vocalist Caine Hemingway introduces us to his band.
Chad Bowar: Give us a brief history of Believe In Nothing.
Caine Hemmingway: I recruited three friends to join me in trying to fall in love with making heavy music in a room again. After some lineup changes, position switches, some pneumonia and very nearly giving up, we pushed on through and found our sound.
Describe the songwriting process for Rot.
We wanted to focus on writing in the room as much as possible. Pulling from the gut, building tension. It’s such a powerful and primal thing when everything clicks in a room, all landing on an idea, seeing how far you can push it and just riding that wild beast. We try to replicate those moments in our songs. We tried a few different techniques, with the guys writing whole parts or songs in their DAWs, which were great but we found we wanted to capture as much energy and tension building in the room as possible.
What will be your strongest memory of the recording of the album?
I have two. My first will be doing vocals for “Complete Desolation.” I wanted to try something a bit different, layer some extra parts in and give it some different dynamics. I am a massive fan of Lingua Ignota. I wanted to try to incorporate some screams like hers, where they come from a place of pure fear and agony, far away from technicality or heavy metal tropes. Pure fucking anguish. So I gave it a go, and was really happy with what came out. What you hear in “Complete Desolation” is what came out that first time. It really shaped how I moved forward with vocals and performing with the band. Always experiment and try stuff that might fail!
The second is seeing Jasper do his drum take for the title track “Rot” in one take. It was unbelievable. It’s a real wonky song, got a lot of patience and subtle changes, and some erratic movements. He had left the studio to dep on bass for a friends band, Chub, in Brighton, came back and just dropped the perfect take. I cried. It was amazing.
What was the biggest challenge in its creation?
I moved away from Eastbourne, where the band is based, to Edinburgh which is about 480 miles away. So we had to adapt and figure out how to record the second half of the album in a couple of phases. We blasted out a load of in the room writing before I left, I laid out lyrical sketches for the tracks in those writing sessions, and expanded on them while I was away.
I ended up doing a lot of my lyrical writing away from the band and in my head, building up very vivid worlds of horror and pain up in my head and working them into and around the scraps of phone recordings we had made in the room. It was borderline obsessive. I had all the ideas for what I was going to do with my noise board, my vocal delivery, layers, dynamics purely in my head, as I didn’t bring my whole noise set up with me. When I went to record the vocals and noise parts, it was the first time I had done most of them out loud. Pretty unconventional but made it exciting. The restrictions actually boosted my creativity and let me experiment more in the recording process.
How would you characterize its style/sound?
Our style is a bit all over the spectrum of heavy music. We use a lot of noise and experimental electronic elements and mix them with sludge, doom and incorporate elements of black metal, post and noise rock. Overall our sound is uncomfortable. Nihilistic. Spiteful. It’s from a place of fear, chaos and reflective of the desperate state of failure in the world.
What lyrical topics do you cover?
Lyrically I like to focus on uncomfortable pockets of what makes people and myself truly scared. Not spooky ghosts and ghouls round the corner scared. Primal human fear. Things you don’t want to confront. Topics like being forgotten after you’ve died, failure to act, being happy to die, profound loss. I worked within a world that I’ve built up for the songs to inhabit, with the music helping to paint the color in that mental picture. A world that’s been destroyed, a broken and failed earth, total climate collapse, returned to dust and ash, how it got that bad, moments of true human failure, and what the end state would look like.
It’s less conceptual and more reflective at this point. It’s not hard to find inspiration for this kind of music. It’s a very difficult time to be living at the moment, huge tectonic shifts constantly grinding, with the worst parts of humanity so vividly documented and blasted at you. It could be me having a mental health crisis, it could actually be that bad. Maybe a bit of both.
How did you come to sign with Church Road Records?
We had the absolute legend Wayne Adams of Bear Bites Horse studios mix and master the first half of the album, and he sent it over to Church Road. It was an incredibly humbling thing, to have someone like Wayne believe in the music that much, that he would put it forward to a label. Church Road seeing something in our sound and signing us blew my mind, still does! We were complete unknowns to them, they pursued us purely off the back of the music, which felt very important to me. Never in our wildest fucking dreams did we think this would happen.
What are your goals and expectations for the album?
I personally have none. If people like it, great, if people hate it, great. Both responses are equally as valid. This music is very subjective, and I don’t make music for anyone in mind or for validation, I do it because I have to. I do it out of fear for what would happen to me if I didn’t. And spite.
What has been your most memorable Believe In Nothing live show?
The last date of our first tour this year. Moor Vaults in Bermondsey, with Kulk and Troy the Band. We had played one of our first shows at this venue the year before and I really fucked my knee jumping off a wall, later found out I ruptured my ACL. So when we returned I taped one of my contact mic noise pedals (Colossus Audio impaler 2) to the part of the metal wall where it had happened. It was a very very intense show, I wasn’t sure if I had pushed it too far. I berated and punished the room throughout the set, slashing at the wall with a hammer and chain, effectively being able to use the metal walls as an instrument amplified through waves of noise. It was incredibly cathartic and maybe a bit dangerous. Whether I liked it or not, I learned a lot from the injury, it changed the way I perform. I learned a lot about how to use unpredictable confrontation and intimidation as a tool in the set from that gig too. The band played one of the best sets, it was a very unique and uncomfortable atmosphere we built.
What are your upcoming show/tour plans?
We are preparing to do a 3-ish week tour around the UK just after the album is released, 27th November-15th December. We are just getting the new set together, adding some extra moments of tension and trying out some jump scares. Next year we are confirmed for some shows, including Masters of The Riff which is super exciting. And we’re just putting together a small tour for next spring. We would love to come and play Europe, so any one who wants to make that a reality, hit us up.
How’s the heavy music scene in Eastbourne?
The heavy music scene in Eastbourne is thriving, and doing it in the face of a town that is really struggling. Eastbourne band, and our brothers in noise Black Groove are absolutely tearing up the UK with some of the most visceral sludge on the scene. There’s special kind of fuck you to heavy bands that come out of Eastbourne. We are proud to sit in that lineage alongside past legends like Let’s Talk Dagger, Brutal Regime and Tempest, and current bands like Black Groove, Mortal Karcass, Droop, The Veltmans, The Defamation Project, Chub and more. There’s new bands being forged off the back of this vibrant scene, like new band doom sludge band Mortuary who are getting people very excited.
Myself and the rest of the band are heavily involved in, and helped found Eastbourne Music Collective, which acts as a facilitator to all things music related within the community. We have worked really hard to make viable spaces for ourselves and others to play shows locally. What is happening in Eastbourne is against the odds, sometimes not welcome and fucking hard every step of the way, but it forges the community closer, it’s a very special scene right now. Eastbourne has gone from sad fucking covers bands being the only live music available, to having bands like Blind Monarch, Healing Wound, Pascagoula, Harrowed and Inhuman Nature play our shows in Eastbourne. So proud of the scene. Eastbourne vs Everyone.
What are some of your non-musical interests and hobbies?
My whole life generally centers around music in one way or another. I recently started a Substack to be a host to some longer form music related writing, with gig reviews and diaries of the recording process with Believe in Nothing. I’m enjoying a place to express writing further and document the incredible heavy music scene. When I’m not doing something related to music or the band in one way or another, I’ll be at home with my partner, staring at my cats thinking how amazing they all are. I fucking LOVE my cats.
What’s currently in your musical heavy rotation?
The new Agriculture album is unreal. New Geese album Getting Killed is maybe one of the best albums I’ve heard for years. I’ve been stuck on Aldous Harding for months, she’s incredible and like butter for my ears. I’ve found myself revisiting some old favorites on repeat too: Captain Beefhearts Trout Mask Replica, Weedeater, Big Thief, Bob Dylan, Velvet Underground.
Anything else you’d like to mention or promote?
Come see us on tour. All tickets available at https://believeinnothing.uk/
(interview published November 1, 2025)
