Few artists can claim a creative journey as varied and uncompromising as UKofA. Over the past quarter-century, they have moved fluidly between hardcore metal, experimental composition, choral music, and boundary-pushing alternative rock, always guided by a restless curiosity and a refusal to stand still. As a driving force behind projects such as Godzilla Black and Hawk Eyes, UKofA built a reputation for balancing intensity with melody, earning critical recognition, extensive touring opportunities, and a PRS Momentum Grant along the way. Yet rather than settling into familiar territory, each new chapter has led somewhere unexpected. Following a period of reflection and reinvention away from the stage, UKofA emerged with a deeply personal solo approach, embracing handcrafted releases, intimate connections with listeners, and a fresh live setup built around samplers and loops. The result is Time Will Take This All Away From Us, a record that feels both like a culmination of decades of experimentation and the beginning of an entirely new phase. We caught up with UKofA to discuss creative evolution, life beyond traditional band structures, and the ideas shaping this latest chapter.
This album feels like the result of decades of experimentation—when did you first realise it was becoming Time Will Take This All Away From Us rather than just another project?
At some point I noticed that I was leaning in to a specific set influences and more specifically genres and artists that had been formative for me but that I hadn’t necessarily taken direct influence from before. Artists like the Prodigy, Wu-tang Clan, Cypress Hill, The Shamen and lots of 80s early 90s pop. Following these intuitive choices helped show me the path I needed to follow in order to finish the project.
You’ve moved through hardcore metal, experimental composition, and alternative rock—do you feel those identities still coexist, or have they dissolved into something new here?
Those influences are still in there and I’m sure people could pick them out if they felt compelled to. There’s a sonic consistency to the album but in terms of style there’s a lot of stylistic variation so my concern when sequencing an album like this is -do these songs work together and express something different to what I’ve done before? That being said, there are moments on this record where I’ve consciously tried to marry different musical languages. For example, Gate of Flesh is essentially a folk-shanty over a hip-hop track, which on paper sounds like a terrible idea but I am really pleased with how it came out.
The album heavily uses found audio, library music, and fragmented media—what does “authorship” mean to you in that context?
I maybe had concerns about that early on – not just the moral and legal implications of sampling someone else’s work but also how much space does that put between me and the music. But I realised that what I was really trying to do was find a new way into my process and sampling is effectively an instrument that I use to write songs. And each of these tracks contains a song that I can sit and play solo on a guitar or piano – that’s where the authorship lies for me. But it is important not to overstep and present someone else’s musical ideas as your own, so I’m definitely conscious of that.
There’s a tension in the record between control and chaos. Was that intentional or something that emerged naturally during production?
So much contemporary music is, to my ears, so refined, quantized and retuned that it might as well be AI making it. It’s important to me that I put out something that represents a human situation and that includes chaos and mistakes. So, whilst it’s not intentional for me to make mistakes it is natural for me to do so, and it is intentional to leave them in.
How did your experience as a video editor shape your sense of rhythm, structure, and narrative in music?
I think it’s actually the other way round and I can edit video because I learned how to edit music first. But there’s probably some feedback going back the other way – I make a lot of videos for social platforms which tends to be an intensive process with fast turnarounds, which is great for helping with artistic discipline and decision making.
You’ve mentioned early versions were more hip-hop leaning—what changed that direction most significantly?
The realisation that I’m a white guy from Kent who can’t rap! At one point I was thinking about trying to get other people to do the vocals but then I realised that I wanted to challenge myself to find ways to present the vocals against these instrumentals. There are some tracks that I couldn’t find a way into, and I still might reach out to other people to finish those, or perhaps I’ll release them as instrumentals. Watch this space.
Some tracks feel like they’re constantly mutating rather than resolving. Do you think of this album as fixed, or something alive and evolving?
When you put an album out you try and make it as definitive a version as you can, so in that sense it’s a fixed object. However I’m currently putting together a new live set with this material which will bring back in other elements that were dropped for the album versions, and potentially completely new parts as well. Plus there will be a lot of live signal processing and randomisation, ensuring each set is different. So in that sense, this material is just the start of that process and I’m excited to see where it goes.
“LIKE WE WERE NEVER HERE” seems to carry a philosophical weight about time and scale—was that central to the album’s concept from the beginning?
That’s interesting because that was the first song to be started for the project but also the last one to be finished, and right up until the last minute wasn’t going to be on the album. But it did feel important to me that it was on there so yes and it definitely ties into the album title. So whilst I try not to be too self analytical about the thoughts and feelings going into a project, the answer to the question is probably yes… and I think maybe i’ve just learned something about myself
How do you decide when a track is “finished” in a process built on layering, sampling, and constant reinterpretation?
I don’t think it’s too different from the intuitive process of sitting down and writing a song on the piano or a guitar. If a track feels ‘complete’ then it’s done – it’s just different materials in this case. My friend Gadi Sassoon, an amazing composer and producer, once said to me that mixes are never finished, they can only be abandoned and I’ve worked by that philosophy ever since. One of the nice things about having been doing this for a while is that you learn to trust yourself a bit more and not second guess every aspect of your process.
Live drums, sampled textures, and synthetic elements all coexist here—how do you balance human performance against manipulated sound?
It’s a very loop based album, built against a rhythmic grid but there’s a lot of guitar and synth performances in there and where possible, I like to try and keep these performances as spontaneous as I can, often using first takes. Then of course there’s the vocals – I don’t use any auto tune or anything like that, I just keep punching it in until it’s right, or as good as I can get it. So it’s a symbiosis of a ‘manufactured’ sound bed and my studio performances which I think makes for a compelling sound.
There’s a strong visual component to this release, including the 3D gallery—do you see this project as multimedia art rather than strictly music?
The gallery idea came about because I’ve made all these videos over the years but no one’s ever seen them so I wanted a space where I could present them as a body of work. The gallery was not connected to the new album at all. However, once I started getting into the creation of the gallery and spending time in this liminal space, which only exists online but could in theory last longer than I will, it did start developing its own resonance with the project themes of transiency and permanency, or lack thereof. The fun part for me is that the gallery that’s gone live is only the tip of the iceberg of what I’ve built so far and I’m excited to expand it over the coming months
Which track challenged you the most emotionally or technically to complete, and why?
I don’t find I become too emotionally involved with the tracks as I’m working on them, perhaps because I have to wear so many hats just to get them finished. But the title track came about because my cat likes to come and be involved when I’m working in my studio which is at the end of the garden, so I left a little table for him to lie on just outside the door. Over the time I was working on the record the table became more and more weathered and I was looking at it and thinking that it would eventually fall apart and then disintegrate. Much like everything will. Technically, a lot of the tracks were a nightmare to mix because of the layering. Commit springs to my mind as particularly problematic because I wanted the guitars to be really heavy but not heavy metal. So there’s a lot of overly complicated audio bussing to get it to where it got to, which made it a nightmare to mix.
The album often feels like it’s dealing with decay, transformation, and repetition—were those themes conscious from the outset or discovered along the way?
This kind of goes back to the previous answer about the table but also entering your forties so you notice your body aging more and start to realise that a lot of things in life that you assumed were novel just because you never experienced them before have in fact been repeating throughout history. So not necessarily themes that I was conscious of from the outset but definitely realised along the way.
After stepping back from live performance and then returning with a solo setup, how did that shift your relationship with your own music?
This is new territory for me as I’ve never performed my own material live, I’ve always been in bands before. So far in my prep for live shows I’m pleased to say that I’ve found a new level of appreciation for what I’ve built up, and it’s nice to have a lot of material to choose from. The live set is going to contain songs that you’d recognise from the records but there will also be a lot of improvisation and spontaneity, a lot of which is me reacting to my own material in real time, which is a cool space to be working in
Looking at your wider body of work, where does this album sit for you personally—continuation, reinvention, or something else entirely?
I think all part of an ongoing process, me working things out and it all sounds like me – at least it does to me. It’s definitely what I would consider to be a ‘pop’ record as have all the UKofA releases so far, and I have wondered whether the next thing might be something very different but right now I’m focussed on this release, the gallery and with live shows.
