OOR COVER: Conjurer on Unself, understanding yourself and being the OOR sound of 2026

As one of the preeminent bands within the UK’s death metal scene, CONJURER took the heavy music world by storm late last year with the release of their outstanding new album Unself - which, amongst its many accolades, is now Out Of Rage's sound of 2026. Now, sat with Dani Nightingale (vocals, guitar) and Brady Deeprose (guitar, vocals), we took the opportunity to delve into an album that champions poignant discussions about queerness and neurodivergence in the modern age, bigotry, billionaires, and never quite feeling like you belong.

CONJURER have spent years working on this album, but that stems in part from the personal growth that all four members - particularly Dani - went through in order to get here. "I can't remember the exact time frame across the writing process where I had an idea of what the album's going to be about, like the concept and all that. But I know at one point, the things that were on my mind and that I wanted to touch on, they all revolved around the notion of the self, the Jungian philosophy, and in particular how people's senses of self are affected by the world and the systems around them."

With an album of immense breadth and depth as Unself is, where loneliness and capitalism are back to back, the album closely intertwines an understanding of both identity and neurodivergence, in relation to the startling second track All Apart. "For a lot of people, that's in school - it's the first time that you're put into a situation that isn't the comfort of your home, your parents, your family; here are all these new people, you've got to learn to get along. Learning all these things - embrace yourself, embrace your differences and each other's differences, that is not how it goes - they preach one thing and practice another. Then comes There Is No Warmth, which was based on a post-diagnosis feeling of ‘Okay, I know who I am now, but it hasn't made things any easier. I still struggle with all these things that people don't see.’ It was a documentation of the thoughts I had post-diagnosis."

Brady continues with how he relates to the record, as a self-identified neurotypical man. Having been able to know Dani through their journey of both an ASD diagnosis and exploring themself as non-binary, it’s “given [him] a chance to learn and grow as a person.” Not only has it allowed him to feel able to contribute to this record, but he’s also felt lucky in a number of other ways; “it feels like a real blessing to have been able to go through this process and get to know my friend better, and learn so much more about these struggles and meet so many of our fans that do identify with people that aren't like myself, and be able to support those people.”

Alongside the people he’s connected with, the music itself has offered a bridge as well: “It's such a privilege to be able to have contributed to a record that’s got people saying, ‘Oh no, I do identify with this, and I do feel like I've got something.’ We get so many messages on social media all the time of people sharing their stories, or thanking us for speaking about this, and it really means a lot.”

This all stems from those quintessential themes found on Unself: queerness, neurodivergence, the self, capitalism, eviction, and more. With all this complexity, one might easily mistake this record for a concept album, but in the words of the vocalist: “ I hesitate to even call this a concept album; we’re no RUSH, it’s not that kind of album.” The act are unashamed in discussing how all over the place their ideas are within the writing process, and worried if it could be considered messy, although funnily enough also had a pretty sound response for that very eventuality - “Well, humans are messy. The world is messy. We're all pretty fucked. It was going to be messy, but it was all about capturing feelings and frustrations more than anything else.” As far as a concise summation of the general state of things goes, that’s up there with the best of them.

Trying to go through everything across the album without dividing it up would be a real test, and so Dani relates the process of their songwriting to this: “When I write, I think of things a lot like films. I think of movement and pacing and things like that. And so I imagined the intro as being the prologue, setting the general theme, almost like an overture. This is the general theme, these are the kinds of places that the album's going to go.”

Eviction, queer liberation, billionaires - nothing can escape the gaze of the immense CONJURER, especially on such a profoundly powerful album. Let Us Live is a notably poignant and vulnerable song: “It talks about how trans people and queer people are constantly vilified, marginalised people are constantly blamed and vilified for the problems that are going on.”

"When it comes to the capitalist themes, it's more how, with things like data harvesting and the way that billionaires are hoarding all the wealth, they could help anyone at any point, they could end so many of the world's problems, but they choose not to. That affects your sense of self and your place in the world, because this fucking sucks. Why aren't things being sorted?”

It’s arguably a more overtly political song than the band are known for, which was something both Brady and Dani felt strongly about, with Brady first saying, “We've been the Switzerland of metal bands for quite a while, and through a lot of internal discussions, have never really been one to put our opinions out there in a big way. I think after everything recently, we got to that point where that wasn't an option for us anymore.”

Dani felt the song was almost a necessity, as a “clarion call” about the plight of queerness, and specifically trans people that they know - “I have friends and acquaintances that have told me stories of what's happened to them out in the public, when people have realised that they're trans, and it's utterly fucking heartbreaking and infuriating that these things happen. So, yeah, the song isn't so cathartic to sing and play, it's more about solidarity.”

Dani wanted the track to ultimately be a release - the band got a number of trans and non-binary friends in to do gang vocals at the end of the track to emphasise huge catharsis and solidarity. Even so, they mention that at points they feel like an imposter in the LGBTQIA+ community - “I know a lot of people have gone through a hell of a lot more physically and mentally, in terms of surgery and medication and therapies, all sorts of stuff. There are people out there who are true fucking superheroes with the shit they've unfortunately had to put up with, whereas for me, the realisation of being non-binary was just that - it was a realisation, rather than a transition. Other than putting nail polish on and makeup on every now and then - not to say that isn't enough or anything like that - but that is the only real change I’ve made. And I liked wearing that stuff when I was a kid. It's more like, ‘Nah, fuck it. I'm going to be me now.'

"I kept the non-binary thing, until fairly recently - now that it's all in the press - close to my chest. Not to say I hide myself or anything like that, but I know how people can get.” Sadly, after those stories that Dani alluded to earlier, people hiding parts of who they are is becoming increasingly common, but the best way to manage this is community - find your people, support your people, do what you can.

Of course, compressing all these ideas into one album was no mean feat, and Brady considered that exact issue regularly in the studio - “ I remember sitting down with Dani, and going, ‘Okay, I understand this is the frustration, - I think Hang Them In Your Head was one of these tracks, where I went - but what specifically? What is it that is affecting you and frustrating you?’ And we would talk about making it less general, more personal and more directly from Dani’s perspective in a lot of places. I know that we've talked a lot about making sure it’s not just a one to one retailing of Dani’s thoughts and experiences, and it being a bit more relatable, but a lot of that has to be grounded in the personal, and we didn't want to just be running off stats or having us tell you about what's wrong in the world, but more talk about how those things affect us and how we feel about them.”

Each track and each idea started off raw, but the band worked on every track with carefully considered thought and time. The writing process proved to be a work of not just musical proficiency, but also a revisitation of secondary school English classes for Brady; “The process of how I write a song is I'll write a mini essay, everything I can possibly think about on the topic, and then from there whittle it down, explore any interesting avenues, see if there are any phrases that have come out that could work. And we did a lot of that in talking about how we were feeling about the songs - I'd go into them, write more about it, and then we’d drill down into what the things are that, at our core, get us the most emotional about these topics. That really helped us focus in on the stuff we wanted to say, and tied everything together in a bit more of a personal way.”

Brady took us through how the basis of letting their music dictate the lyrics guides the whole LP, as each song becomes a part of the whole - “It’s all about what serves the album best, the guiding principle with anything is we will work on the song until it feels right, and then we choose the songs that feel best together for a record, and then the lyrics all hold on to that. It's something that I love about this band is that all of those things tend to just fall into place, even when we feel like we have no ideas. We'll be slaving away over stuff for months and months and months, and when push comes to shove, everything does fall into place in a really pleasing way. I think that is the sign that runs the right track with a song or an album or whatever it is that we're doing, is that it feels right by the end of that. I don't think anything has felt as right as this record by the time we got it down.

”From there, the final track, sharing a title with the original, was born first, when Dani was “just trying to write a doomy song, and then the lyrics just came into my head!” The act then came upon this idea of starting and finishing with those same lyrics, and then it “became the spine of the album - it tied everything together.” It was at this point that Brady made the point that, not only does the pair of tracks offer context to everything found between them, but it also allowed the album to spread out a little more across the seven songs within whilst still having a defining line that coursed throughout, and as he said, “it was the first thing that made it feel like this was an album.” Upon even the first listen, the opener feels like a precursor of things to come, but the real power comes with that final, heartwrenching rendition that hammers home all of the feelings within Unself, bringing it full circle and summing it up eloquently, viscerally, and quite beautifully.

With that, our time with the brains behind CONJURER’s breathtaking heaviness was up, and our fascinating look into the vulnerable behemoth that is Unself came to an end.

Unself is out now on Nuclear Blast Records.

Words: Jasmine Longhurst

Cover Design: Robert Halls

Photos: Mettieu Gill

With thanks to: Hold Tight PR