Spotlight On... Gout

Sometimes you’ve got to just take a chance on something – and that’s exactly what Glasgow’s core. festival of noise did when members of Lucia & The Best Boys and The Ninth Wave got together to form Gout in 2024. Since then, the four-piece have whipped up quite the storm for their abrasive and pummelling, yet quite melodic brand of sludgy doom-metal, that sounds nothing like the sum of what you'd expect from their component parts. Following the release of their debut EP, Born Rotting, last year, their latest record – Actual Bastard – arrives this Friday with a headline show at The Flying Duck set to take place on the same night in its honour. We catch up with Calum Stewart and Ally Scott from the band to find out more.

Delighted we're finally getting round to having a proper chat: firstly, I'd love to know how Gout came about? What pulled the four of you together to create this outlet for unrelenting but melodic doom-metal?
Calum: We all play in other bands together. One of them is Lucia & The Best Boys. We were away doing a writing session in 2024 and we were just chatting about heavy music and all kind of realised we'd like to try and make something pretty heavy. We did a few rehearsals and put together a short set. Based on some dodgy phone recordings, the guys at core. festival in Glasgow put their faith in us and put us on the bill that year, which was pretty mad because, when starting the band, playing core. was on the list of things we'd like to achieve.

Your latest EP can, at times, be quite a hard listen, but I love the discordant tones, deeply honest lyricism, big riffs and hooky melodies. So I’d love to know who/what some of your influences are as Gout, in particular when it came to writing and recording this EP?
Calum: Thanks very much. There are honestly loads of influences that go into it, either consciously or subconsciously. We all listen to a very varied catalogue of music. I think some of the obvious influences are sludge bands like Crowbar and Eyehategod, as well as some early nu-metal acts, especially Korn. Doom bands like Thou are high on the list of influences, too. We like our fair share of hardcore as well – bands like Scalp are really good. For this EP in particular we felt like the songs were really beginning to sound like Gout songs, rather than an amalgamation of influences, so we made a bit of a conscious effort not to namecheck other bands too much and kind of just go with what felt good in the moment when writing and recording.

Lyrically, Ally, you’ve used Gout as a way to reflect on what you describe as “some of the most uncomfortable aspects of self”. What was that process was like for you, digging into such serious themes that most people would find hard to talk about?
Ally: To be honest, most of the lyrics aren’t too premeditated. Parts of them have come from things I’ve written down before but the vast majority are just me blurting out whatever's going through my head. I find that more natural than spending hours writing lyrics and refining them and dressing them up to make them more poetic. I think it’s more honest and I like the vulnerability that comes with that.

Some of my biggest influences when it comes to lyricism and writing in general are artists like Leonard Cohen or Elliott Smith; I love how their words sometimes feel like they’ve just been scribbled down and forgotten about. For me, I find that’s almost more poetic in itself than labouring over how something sounds and refining and diluting what you really want to say. I guess there’s a tongue-in-cheek aspect to a lot of what I write, but it still carries the same sincerity.

I feel like being more direct with the lyrics and the delivery really lent itself to the recording process as we did most of it live. There wasn’t really any opportunity to go back and redo things, whether I wanted to or not. Having the vocals on the tracks being as raw as possible feels like it adds to the record for me.

What was it like to then take these quite challenging lyrics and build these musical worlds around them? Or did the music come first?
Calum: The music tends to come first, but in fact most of it happens at the one time. The music is aggressive but kind of emotive in parts, especially on this EP, so it tends to fit Ally's lyrics really well. Usually we're all in the room and someone will come with an idea and we'll play around the idea for a while and see what comes out the other end. While we're working through parts, Ally will be there putting vocals together. So, in practice, it all tends to happen at the same time, and we refine the song in each rehearsal session.

With the tracks are recorded live, that really does come across – the EP feels raw, exposed, confrontational, cathartic and claustrophobic all at once. How did you decide that’s how you wanted to record, and how did you ensure all of those feelings were captured in the recording?
Calum: We knew from the start of this project that we wanted most of our recordings to be live. In every other musical project we've done, we haven't done much live recording. That's been sensible for those projects, but for Gout we felt that if we didn't track this stuff live we might lose some of that direct energy. With this EP, we were also really keen to start doing things as DIY as possible.

That meant using all our existing mics and borrowing some drum mics from a pal and setting up in our cramped wee rehearsal space and recording live over two days. The lighting in the room is really harsh and bright – not relaxing at all – and the room is not really the kind of space you'd normally want to record something to make it sound good, but I think that is part of the whole thing. We did some minimal guitar overdubs but that was it, really. I then spent a bit of time mixing the songs but I was conscious not to spend too much time on it, because there's always a tipping point with recording and mixing where you naturally want things to sound 'good' but I had to stop myself a few times from polishing things up.

You’re launching the EP with a headline show at The Flying Duck on Friday night. What can people expect on the night and what do you hope the experience is like for people?
Calum: Yeah, we're putting the EP out on 17 April and the guys at core. were really good in setting this show up with us. We've pressed 100 vinyl records, with this EP on the A-side and our last EP – Born Rotting – on the B-side. It's the first time we've done a physical release as Gout, and actually our first time in any project doing an independent physical release like this, so it's been really nice and we're extremely excited about it. The show is going to be really good. We have two truly amazing and inspiring openers – K.yalo and Mrs Frighthouse. It's going to be loud and cathartic for sure. It'll live long in our memories and I hope it'll do the same for the folk that come.

Finally, what does the rest of the year have in store for Gout?
Calum: We're hopefully recording our first album over the summer, with a big emphasis on 'hopefully'. Other than that, we have a bunch more shows to play, some of which are very cool indeed.

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Actual Bastard is released on 17 Apr; Gout play The Flying Duck, Glasgow, 17 Apr

Follow Gout on Instagram @__gout