Head Hunters

This time last year Scalphunter were on the road to becoming eventual winners of the Big Splash band competition, which saw them walk away with a cool $10,000. The denim-loving punk quartet were also nominated for the Punk Act Of The Year WAM Award, and released a third EP in November. Since then, the band have picked up a new manager and played at multiple festivals.

“The extra attention's no big deal for us at all,” Scalphunter guitarist Alex Cotton assures. “We don't really pay attention to any of it; we just keep going along doing what we're doing. Even with our manager Aarom getting on board and stuff, it was just like, 'Yeah, man, for sure! We'll take it in our stride and keep going!' All we really do is chill out and write music and make sure we enjoy what we're putting together. It was awesome to play a couple of festivals: [In The] Pines for us was phenomenal; none of us had been to a Pines show for years. Getting to play there was fantastic – really, we think it's a case of the bigger the stage, the better the stage for Scalphunter. It gave us more room to run around and cause havoc, so we loved it.”

The four gents have been busy recently, putting together a video for their new single, There Will Be Change, which features on their latest EP. The track provides a perfect backdrop for this masked, Scarecrow-like vigilante to pick off victims as he rampages through the woods. “We weren't really around for much of the shooting – we got in touch with our mate Steve Brown and hooked up the idea and themes we had based on the song, and then he came back with a script and we sat down and wrote it all out. Really, we kind of just turned up for the band scene and they'd built this amazing set, and we played for about five hours or something, just the same song the whole time.

“Meanwhile, the others had gone off and filmed the rest of the clip with the actors they'd got together. The idea for the film clip ties in pretty closely with the song – the track's all about being frustrated and disenfranchised with corporations and religions and governments trying to stop people expressing themselves through art and growing and all that kind of thing. The video was basically taking that and fighting for a change against the selfish and the greedy and all the people that are out there to stop this sort of thing happening. It got a bit gory, but we love that sort of stuff, so it turned out quite well, we think.”

The band are launch the clip on Friday the 13th (so prepare for gore), and then... “We're planning a tour at the moment, and we have so much new material even though we only released our last EP at the end of last year. We need to figure out what works best, but yeah, there's definitely more coming.”