Fresh from their most ambitious record yet, Mother Vulture’s guitarist Brodie reflects on years of grinding it out in the southwest, van catastrophes, and why their sophomore album is the first piece of work he can almost be 100% happy with.
Words by Felix Bartlett | April 14, 2026
There’s something fitting about the fact that Mother Vulture came of age in Bristol. A city that has always rewarded the strange, the heavy, and the genuinely unpredictable. It’s the kind of place that makes you earn it. And earn it Brodie and his bandmates did. For a long time, it wasn’t easy.
“Before we released the first album, I don’t really think we’d had a good Bristol show,” the frontman admits. “I think the idea of the band was as solid, but we started off a little bit more traditional classic rock. And then as we matured, I think the songwriting got better, and Bristol tried to give us the benefit of the doubt a bit more.”
That turning point came with 2022’s Rough Trace, when a sold-out show finally announced Mother Vulture as a band Bristol could call its own. Since then, they’ve done Thekla twice. Now they’re headlining Trinity, a 600-capacity room that represents everything the climb has been building towards.
“I love watching gigs there,” Brodie says. “So I’m really looking forward to getting to play one.”
“I know how it feels not to have any good bands around”
The road to that sold-out breakthrough was paved with something more personal than mere ambition. Brodie grew up in Cornwall, a place he describes with fond exasperation as somewhere the music scene had “died down a bit” by the time he was coming of age.
“The only rock band that would come near where I lived that I could go and see was Moriarty,” he recalls. “I used to lose it every time they played in Cornwall.”
When Mother Vulture finally reached the point where they could choose where to play, that early hunger shaped everything. Cornwall and the wider southwest were never going to be skipped.
“I just have a feeling like people come out and ball,” he says. “Maybe every single show we’ve played down there has been amazing. It’s just really hard not to have a good gig in Cornwall.”
Touring will reshape you if you let it. For Mother Vulture, a band whose live reputation runs well ahead of their recorded output, all sweat and conviction and the sense that every show might be their last, the road has been as formative as any studio session.
“Touring definitely changes your outlook on a lot of things,” Brodie says. “It makes you appreciate just having somewhere to hang your hat every day, because I really struggle with having consistency and routine when it ends. I think lyrically we take those themes and put them in the music, try and portray the idea that it’s not restful. It’s not always fun. It’s a hard slog.”
The van stories alone could fill their own EP. First came the breakdown, then a four-grand repair bill, then a blown head gasket on the very next drive, the van effectively dead before they’d recouped a penny. Rather than crowdfund, they bought a new one. Three months later, it was stolen.
If the road built them, the new album is where they’ve finally been able to show it.
“By the time we put the first album out, we were already thinking it didn’t quite represent us as we were,” Brodie reflects. “We already had the idea of moving past some of the more classic rock elements, making things a tiny bit heavier. None of those songs had made it onto the first album, so we had a really clear idea that the second one was going to be just a lot more up to date with what we felt like we were doing right now.”
The result is their most fully-realised work, and the rare record that, by the artist’s own admission, comes close to landing exactly where it was meant to.
“It’s the first piece of work that I can sit down and listen to and almost be 100% happy with,” he says. “You never really get that as a creative, you always think something could be better. But this really does do a good job of representing just the chaos and the band and all our different influences. It gives a good indication of the energy we bring live, which is something I think we’d struggled to capture before.”
“It’s the first piece of work I can sit down and listen to and almost be 100% happy with.”
There’s a tendency in rock and metal circles to treat seriousness as a form of credibility. Mother Vulture have never bought into it, and the new album makes no apologies for that.
“It’s a big thing with this band,” Brodie says. “A genuine part of everything we do is humour. We all we do is laugh when we’re in the van. We love comedy, which sounds really basic to say, but I’ve always struggled with bands who take it too seriously.”
He reaches for a reference point. “The Foo Fighters can write songs about serious things, but they don’t have the energy of a really serious band. And then you’ve got Tenacious D at the other end. There are times where we feel like we’re edging towards that kind of lunacy, which we love. And the songs are still good enough that the humour is just a part of it.”
It’s something you can hear most vividly on Suffering Succotash, Brodie’s pick for the album’s standout moment, and the track he finds himself returning to most.
“It’s got really fun, high-energy choruses, and then this completely ridiculous breakdown at the end that Chris basically just tacked on but it works perfectly,” he says. “It’s got Matt’s first ever vocal on a record. It’s silly and goofy and there’s just loads of stuff going on. I find myself listening to it all the time.”
The album’s creation was almost defiantly unconventional. Across the entire process, all four members were only in the same room together once, on the very last day of mixing.
“Me and Chris were doing guitars and writing music completely separately,” Brodie explains. “We spent thousands of hours just messing around with stuff, spent ten hours on one fuzz tone just getting lost down the rabbit hole. We had our own home studios, so there were no time restrictions. We just got completely lost in the sauce.”
Songs were arriving finished, half-finished, or barely sketched right up until the deadline, and some of the best moments came from last-minute rewrites, with whole choruses being reworked days before the record went off for mastering.
“That happened quite a lot, and it was really fun,” he laughs. “It was really fun getting things from Chris that I just hadn’t heard before brand new songs, and being surprised in that way. I was like, I don’t know how we’re going to do this and then we’d just get it done.”
The process stretched across the better part of two years. Drums were recorded in October 2024; guitar tracking and writing had been going on for nine months before that.
“I’m already getting a bit impatient to start working on the next thing,” he grins. “So we’ll see.”
For a band who’ve spent years earning their place through sheer relentlessness, the horizon looks bigger than it ever has. Festivals every week across the summer. Trinity in Bristol on the horizon. And somewhere down the line, the inevitable third album whatever chaos it brings with it.
Cartoon Violence is out now
Catch Mother Vulture on Tour later this year with Airbourne in Cardiff at the Tramshed
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