It is a great shame that Dale Cornish’s cackle cannot be effectively transcribed. It is bright and explosive and lights up a room like a bolt of lightning, even over Zoom. Between cackles we are talking about the albums that have influenced him, from those that held a mirror up to his own creative ambitions, and the music that triangulated a space in which to develop his own sound, which manifests more acutely than ever on his new album Altruism, out on Death Of Rave.
If Cornish’s music always sounds like him, his listening habits and history in music are anything but narrow: “For me there isn’t this tribalism about music… I showed my friend the list and he said: only you could write this,” he cackles.
Altruism draws on a palette established in 2022’s Traditional Music Of South London, pulling on a history of listening and playing music that has spanned electroclash DJing and harsh electronic music, among various other bands, projects and cameos. His current palette fuses the snap and tickle of electroclash and the grit and grind of Pan Sonic; plastic synth stabs and brittle rattlings punctuate his swaggering South London invocations, which often sit front and centre. “I wanted to do something that combined a bit of everything I’ve done,” he explains. “So there’s these big pop songs, really short etudes, brief spoken word and sung bits.”
In Altruism he is more present as a personality than he has been before. His South London drawl can flip cliche into caustic aphorism; he spits out phrases with an electric charge. “For me this record makes complete sense,” he says. “The way that it’s sequenced, it tells a tale, whether or not other people pick up on that.”
The album’s beating heart is ‘New Chest’, a brutalist banger eviscerating wellness culture while simultaneously celebrating finally getting surgery to treat his gynecomastia. Its first performance was at Rewire in 2023, when Cornish had the music but had written the lyrics on the train. During the performance he realised he’d borrowed a line from HTRK – with Jonnine Standish from the band in the audience. They are both friends and a favourite band so consider it a tribute. He dressed for that show, he says “like an avant-garde town crier,” in a Supreme North Face gold jacket and metallic gold baseball cap, Issey Miyake trousers, a neon vest and trainers, with black mesh wrapped around his head. His entrance, in this getup, was what birthed the album’s standout opener: ‘Bring Out Your Dead’. “I really wanted an entrance,” he says. “I’d bought this tiny hand cymbal, and so I got a spoon and went around the room ringing the cymbal, saying ‘bring out your dead’.”
“Bring out your dead / bring out your gripes and grievances, bring out your near misses / drama, emojis…” Cornish intones, dry as a desert. “That track contains a lot of the themes of the album,” he says, “talking about relationships with people and your body… the things that you do for other people that they just don’t notice”. These lyrics carry through after ‘New Chest’, into the quietly melancholic ‘Erase’ and the regretful hindsight articulated on ‘Blindspot’. On both these tracks his vocals are recorded close and are untreated, lending an exposed kind of raw emotional charge to the lyrics, as if he were on stage under too-bright lights.
Much of his youth Cornish spent inhaling influences, listening across the frequency bands and DJing. He didn’t play an instrument (unlike his grandfather who was a professional string musician) but gravitated towards electronic music and sources unusual to him at the time, and says he recalls feeling that he knew he would make music at some point, it was just a question of when. “I didn’t really know how to do it. I knew it would be a bit electronic, but when you’re young, you want to experience things more than work out how to make music – to coalesce this knowledge. I knew it would happen eventually. That’s so precocious, but it’s true.
“All of these records I genuinely love, and they’re all different, but they share a commonality… Life’s a bit of a jumble sale, isn’t it? So if my choices are a bit of a jumble sale, that’s fine, because that’s exactly what life is.”
Dale Cornish’s new album Altruism is out now via Death Of Rave. To begin reading his Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Selection’ below
