The cocaine-caked, boozed-soaked hamster wheel of rock laughs mirthlessly at those who can’t keep up with its constant rotations. Gig. Party. Repeat is the deliciously enticing recipe that can turn into a destabilising prison sentence and knock a mere mortal into the deep weeds.
After touring for their debut Fear Is a Funny Thing, Now Smile Like a Big Boy, Belgian speedmetal quartet Ronker were ready to write about their experiences on the knife-edge of their rock and roll dream. Ecstatically received live show (with the revved-up, scissor-kicking energy of The Hives in their prime) and a Hard Days Night sense of mischief (see the synchronised dance moves in the gym kink video for No Sweat) are one thing. The fading out of another reality is another. “We’re in our thirties and all our friends are having kids and buying houses,” says hound-dog-moustached leader Jasper De Petter over Zoom. “We missed our life – because we did everything for rock and roll.”
The mirror had two faces: sex, drugs and rock and roll. But also overwhelm, exhaustion and burnout. Both were funhouse distortions. Recorded almost live, the Belgian band’s second album Respect the Hustle, I Won’t Be Your Dog Forever is a wild and visceral examination of those dualities. Written over 8 months in between playing 40 shows and recorded relatively quickly, it’s an album that attacks you with vigilant chords, hysterical delivery, and street poetry that cuts to the quick. “They say rock and roll’s a lifestyle…I’m a slut for the game,” De Petter sings in his hair-standing-up-on-the-ends-of-your-arms bark on the joyride thrash of sort of title track ‘Respect the Hustle’, while on the My Chemical Romance-esque pelt ‘Tall Stories’ he shrieks on burning out “like a fast flame.” There’s a manic, fevered energy to the songs and a little bit of vaudevillian mischief evidenced in the videos for ‘Limelighter’ and ‘No Sweat’, playing on the metaphors of music biz as circus and gym, respectively. Let’s get physical…
“The first half of the album is this beating heart, rock and roll monster. Like ‘I want to taste it all, let’s go!,'” he says. The hideous hustle was real but going scorched earth was only half the tale. “It’s really praising this hedonistic lifestyle,” says De Petter, “and the second half is distancing yourself from it. Like my body can’t go on like this and my mental state is deteriorating.”
The band tapped into this side by writing these songs sober. “We put the brakes on,” he says. “We weren’t drinking. We weren’t doing any narcotics. We’d get in a room, talk and play these ‘songy’ tunes. A different kind of aggression came up. It’s more like a frustration.”
Recent single, the bare boned Snuff which could be from a musical set in hell, is the most raw of these ‘songy’ tunes. “The bottle is hard to ignore,” De Petter sings, where the morning after beer fear has become the clarity of a naked desperation. While the Kyuss-meets-Bloc Party breakneck descent of ‘Disco Dust’ is even balder in its assessments that: “addiction doesn’t discriminate…addiction it doesn’t give a fuck.” It’s a cold slap in the face after the ratatat of what’s come before.
Reality and fiction blur, as the band conceptualised a soft narrative for the album, in the style of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Jesus Christ Superstar. “You have this Messiah type of figure at the centre,” explains De Petter, “and at the end of the story they realise ‘the joke’s on me.'”
But the joke’s definitely not on Ronker. Respect the Hustle, I Won’t Be Your Dog Forever is electrifying and raw, alive with spiked intensity. The cinematic quality is visible, not over-egged and it feels like a modern classic. Reality dipped in the hazy honey of a fiction.
After intense gigging and recording, De Petter says the making of it brought the band closer together. “I think we know what our band’s about now,” he says. “We talked a lot while we were making music. There was some health stuff going on for family members of the band. And it became a safe space for us.”
The morning of the first show of the new era, De Petter admits it’s “a little bit terrifying” to be playing the new songs for a crowd. But, he says “I think it’ll be fun,” and we can’t imagine it being anything but that.
Respect the Hustle, I Won’t Be Your Dog Forever is out now.
