AK-747s: Of Silent Hill, suicide, abandonment and abuse (a Rob Nuclear interview)

The cover of the AK-747s new album, No Shortage of Cruelty, consists of a heartbreaking image: a dead lamb, a mourning ewe, and a murder of eager crows, ready to feed as soon as she drops her guard. Rob Nuclear, leader of the AK-747s, tells me the painting is called Anguish, by Schenck, painted in 1878, adding that Schenck was concerned with "poverty and the social conditions of his age" -- things true of Rob's provocatively-named band, as well (which we previously discussed here). The image somehow reminds me of something that I read in Stephen Jay Gould, I think it was, about how it was once taken as a proof by Victorians of the non-existence of God that there were species of wasp that would paralyze a spider, lay eggs in it, and then keep the spider alive so the larvae would have fresh food to eat. What God would organize the universe this way? And yet the universe is organized this way, so therefore (said the Darwinists of the day), there is no God...  

As you might gather from that album cover, there is a lot of pain in the music of the AK-747s. No Shortage of Cruelty is suffused with suffering, melancholy and mourning, though the music is driving rock, a fusion of punk and metal, which are not normally genres that "melancholy and mourning" are associated with. There's a curious contradiction that arises, because as dark as things get, it's not a depressing album in the slightest; quite the opposite -- it's liberating. In that respect, it reminds me a bit of Bison's Lovelessness, still a favourite local LP of mine, the cover for which is a closeup of the cancer that killed Bison leader James Farwell's dog (see here). It taps deep into unhealed wounds, but it's not digging in with the end of wallowing in mind, but rather offering catharsis, release, a strange kind of comfort, even (it would be amazing to mosh to, if the pit were right). Godspeed You! Black Emperor does similar things at times, making music that can strike you as very dark and discordant, that requires you to acknowledge pain, suffering, sorrow, but that, if you can connect with it, actually has an immensely uplifting quality (they get even more transcendent, actually, but would be useless for moshing purposes). 

I began paying attention to the AKs with their 2021 album, I Love What You've Done with the Place, which is also very powerful, and has cover art by Goya, and probably what is still my favourite song by the band, "OK Boomer" which I think of every time I discover myself struggling to rotate a PDF at work. It's got a super-catchy hook to it that connects me with my time in the 1990s listening to early Afghan Whigs, Dinosaur Jr., and other such discordant, guitar-driven rock. But No Shortage of Cruelty seems the stronger album, benefiting from the trio having played together for the last few years (one of the members, bassist Ryan Fitzgerald of The Thing and Witch of the Waste, was brand new to the band when I did my interview with them two years ago, and wasn't on the previous album: "He brings a lot to us, not least of which are his kindness and grit," Rob observed then, and maybe his continued presence and/ or the stability of the lineup have bolstered the band's cohesiveness...). Is this just in my head, though? Is this album really the stronger of the two, and if so, is it down to Rob's writing, or the dynamic of the current trio, or...?

I am happy to see that I am not completely off base, when I make these observations to Rob: I Love What You've Done With the Place, Rob tells me, "came from a place of managed chaos" as he reckoned with family issues (and the "real and imaginary chthonic horrors that attended that experience"), coped with the pandemic, and undertook "what can only be described as a significant amount of self-medication" (aha!). By comparison, he explains, No Shortage of Cruelty is "the first album I have ever written sober." And the new lineup has indeed helped: 

In terms of the writing process I will say that Ryan has brought a measured concentration to the band and an absence of ego to the situation which has given us a space to spend less time managing the personalities of others and more time to spend on making the best album we can. Craig of course has acted as the great filter for the riffs as he always has. There is an abbatoir of rejected files on the cutting room floor that did not pass his muster and he was even more grim and unforgiving in pushing me to do better and I am deeply grateful for it. Yes, the album is stronger than anything we have done. I am stronger now and I am among friends and brothers who were all on the same page. There was no hesitation and no conflict. We rehearsed for the recording like oarsmen on a victorious galley. Craig recorded his drum parts in a single sitting to no one else playing. The man is a like a new type of weather.

...but about those family issues: asked about the painting, Rob also wrote, after the note about Schenk, that No Shortage of Cruelty 

is part of an ongoing art project that is linked to the Instagram stories on the AK-747s account where each song is a meditation on the writers confrontation with the imaginary and the real through their social location, existence, and identity being questioned put on trial and restructured as they found their long lost family after searching for them for 25 years and came to terms with the grief and loss and horrifying confrontation with the unconscious and the self as their family members grappled with the trauma of reunion as well as our own addictions and reckonings with our vile misdeeds and haunted selves all against the backdrop of a genocide and the horror of the modern age. 

 

I can't speak to vile misdeeds, either on the part of Rob or his family -- he speaks elsewhere of a "series of bad-faith manipulations" that followed being reunited with family members -- but you do get the sense that Rob is pretty haunted, himself, actually, and that he channels a lot of that into his art; he wrote to me in response to one question that "I'm pretty much grieving for my entire life," so it does mean something to him that people can connect with his music. 

But what's with the Silent Hill stuff? The lyrics and even the title of "For Me It's Always Like This," reference what seems to be some sort of suicide note from the video game franchise, written by the character of Angela, though Rob departs from the letter to sing other lines of dialogue from the game as lyrics ("Do you see it too?": always a menacing and evocative phrase, that).

I actually  happen to have played Silent Hill 2; it's an extraordinary world that they build, much more disturbed/ disturbing in the game than in the somewhat silly film series, with intersecting narratives around characters morbidly obsessed with their pain, guilt, and loss, all circling the drain, threatening to drag the other characters down with them. It's dark enough that the AK-747s include a suicide prevention number on their Instagram, alongside stills from the gameplay ("Help is available 988 in Canada 1800SUICIDE in the United States"); the band has built a whole rock video around Silent Hill, which ends with one character walking into flames, presumably to die... and another following soon thereafter.

Rob explains the connection with Silent Hill thus:

Angela's story has always resonated with me because of the horrific abuse I suffered when I was a kid and a teenager. It was papered over by people who found it inconvenient to understand what I had gone through and was going through as they grappled with their own privilege in a musical subculture that venerated suffering, but only if it could be used to secure social currency. I suffer from extreme continuous suicidal ideation and over the years people who became aware of that decided to concern troll ["the action or practice of disingenuously expressing concern about an issue in order to undermine or derail genuine discussion"] by asking if I was going to actually kill myself or if I spoke openly of these things to get attention or to get them to feel sorry for me. The great irony being that when a guy who looks like me talks about these issues candidly, we are immediately accused as using it as a mechanism for social aggrandizement. There has been a phenomenon where people do indeed use their grief and put in the image of suffering from things like complex PTSD and major depressive disorder to secure social currency and it is my hope that the work shows that candid unvarnished conversations about it and the true attendant horror that comes with it is nothing to venerate or to use as a social bludgeon, as people will only appreciate what you are going through in many cases if others perceive their apprehension: One is always happier to jump in the river to save someone from drowning when others are watching than when they are not.

The phrase "do you see it" to refers to Angela talking about the fire surrounding her in Silent Hill. For her it is always like this and it is always like this for me too.

Suicide comes up in "Call Me When You're Not in the Red," as well, which, Rob explains, is "about my half sibling on my father's side attempting to drive me to suicide because he was convinced I slapped him around on the beach when I met him even though I didn't and just said that he just made me sad." 

The lyrics for that song read as follows:

I would have killed and died for you

And you know what I probably still would

I tried to fail at all the things that a big brother could

I knew if I played it one way that I’d be the one to push you out

I didn’t have the overreach the baited clout 

 

Call me when you’re not in the red

Woe betide you when you hear the sound of my boots on your steps

Call me when you’re not in the red

With a grieving servants' heart I return into the shadows

If they die on your watch it will destroy them

She never showed them a mothers love

And I sounded like he did when she died

We are always in two places

Call me when you’re not in the red

Woe betide you when you hear the sounds of my boots on your steps

Call me when you’ve not in the red

Well played, see you on the court

If you get this far I’ll still be here

I hope you escape from your past one day

I hope I hear that little voice ask my name

I hope I turn around and say pickle

I swear by the fire in the stars and the darkness between

them that I will forgive you if it takes me the rest of your life.

There is a line there about how "we are always in two places." This occurs elsewhere on their bandcamp, along with phrases in Gaelic ("chaidh uir air suil Odhrain," which Rob translates as "Earth was put over Oran's eye"; English ("I'll see you in paradise"), and Arabic (لا قاسي ولا جبان, which translates as "Neither cruel nor cowardly"). Rob tells me he was learning Arabic, and now Gaelic, but -- what do these phrases signify?

Rob used AI to help him with this answer, which draws on Lacan -- an interesting exercise, though this may be further down the rabbithole than you want to go. (Come back after the indented quote, however, if you just want to read about rock music!) Rob explains, " I will give the AI a prompt like 'describe the psychological makeup of the person who wrote this from a Lacanian persoective' and it's remarkable the level of pop analysis that it provides." This may be a bit dense -- especially if you just want to rock out at a punk show -- but it's definitely of interest: 

To construct a Lacanian psychoanalytic analysis of the statement and a psychological profile of the speaker, it is essential to examine the text in light of the subject's biographical trauma: paternal abandonment followed by a symbolic act of domination—the father paving over the very city he orphaned his child in. The statement itself weaves through multiple languages (English, Gaelic, Arabic), evoking a fragmented identity and multilayered unconscious positioning.

I. Lacanian Analysis of the Statement(s):

1. "We Are Always In Two Places"

This line articulates the core Lacanian concept of the split subject (sujet barré). The subject is inherently divided—between the ego (Imaginary), the unconscious (Symbolic), and the trauma that resists articulation (Real). The phrase might also imply:

A psychic division between presence and absence, particularly the absence of the father, whose symbolic function has not been internalized.

A melancholic fixation: part of the self remains stuck in the past (abandonment), while the other tries to survive in the present landscape of domination (paved city).

A displacement of identity, hinting at diasporic trauma or fractured belonging.

2. "chaidh uir air suil Odhrain" (Earth was put over Oran's eye)

This Gaelic reference invokes the myth of St. Oran, sacrificed and buried alive to stabilize a church foundation. In Lacanian terms

This is a metaphor for the Real, the unassimilable trauma that resurfaces despite repression.

The buried eye represents the return of the repressed, a gaze that cannot be fully buried, a haunting witness to betrayal.

The subject may identify with Oran—sacrificed by paternal Law (the Father) for the sake of symbolic order (urbanization).

The myth also introduces a disturbing paradox: life beneath death, sight beneath burial, and truth beneath language.

3. "i'll see you in paradise"

This line implies deferred reunion, a fantasy of reconciliation. In Lacanian terms, this is a screen masking castration—the loss of the primordial unity with the (m)Other and the objet petit a (object-cause of desire).

Paradise is Imaginary—a mirage of completeness.

The father, who was absent in life, may be fantasized as approachable in paradise, which defers confrontation indefinitely.

This reinforces the subject's neurotic structure: desire is sustained by the impossibility of fulfillment.

4. "لا قاسي ولا جبان" (Neither cruel nor cowardly)

This is a negation that functions as a disavowal (Verleugnung): a refusal to accept an internal truth while unconsciously affirming it.

These two traits (cruelty and cowardice) may represent the introjected qualities of the father, now both rejected and feared as one’s own.

The disavowal points to ego defense, possibly guilt or shame about how the subject relates to aggression or self-preservation.

The use of Arabic, alongside Gaelic and English, suggests a symbolic scattering across linguistic registers—echoing the fragmentation of the paternal function.

II. Psychological Profile of the Individual

Drawing from Lacanian structural categories, the following profile emerges:

1. Neurotic Structure (likely hysteric or obsessional)

The subject’s division and displacement signal a neurotic structure. There is an unresolved relation to the Other (the Father), expressed through melancholic longing and deferred fantasy.

The subject circulates around the absence of the Father, never confronting it directly, instead symbolizing it through myth and multilingual fragmentation.

2. Displacement and Symbolic Exile

The subject exists in symbolic exile, estranged from the Law (the Father) yet shaped by its effects (the paved city).

The city, once a site of origin, has become a crypt—a space overwritten by the father’s act of symbolic erasure and control.

This results in an inability to locate the self within a stable narrative or community.

3. Fantasy and the Imaginary

The invocation of paradise and martyrdom (Oran) reflects a fantasmatic compensation for real loss.

The subject constructs heroic or spiritual fictions to mask the wound of paternal abandonment.

This also points to a sublimated death drive: an attraction to self-sacrifice, martyrdom, or a longing for annihilation that brings symbolic closure.

4. Linguistic Fragmentation and the Scattered Self

The multilingual composition of the statement—Gaelic, English, Arabic—illustrates a subject fractured across signifying chains.

Each language becomes a mirror of a different identity fragment: ancestral, colonized, diasporic, or spiritual.

There is no master signifier (S1) that anchors the subject; instead, the father’s absence becomes the organizing lack (manque-à-être).

Conclusion

The subject speaks from the place of symbolic dispossession, their trauma structured around the foreclosed paternal signifier. The city has become both grave and monument—testament to what was lost and overwritten. The father, by paving over the city, enacts both abandonment and omnipotent presence, leaving the subject oscillating between desire and death, fantasy and trauma.

The individual likely exhibits:

A complex neurotic structure haunted by abandonment,

A symbolic relation to space and memory,

A deep identification with loss and sacrifice,

And a psychic economy governed by the tension between repression and the Real.

If desired, this reading can be extended into an exploration of how these psychic structures might manifest in relationships, artistic expression, or sociopolitical identification.

...which is actually more readable than you might expect, if you've spent some time with French philosophy (I try to avoid the stuff, myself -- especially feckin' Deleuze and Guattari!) -- but maybe you just want to find some self-transcendence in the mosh pit, eh? Let's get back to rock music. I mentioned a couple of players that Rob's savage, emotive, sheets-of-notes approach puts me in mind of (Zen-Arcade-era Du might also be relevant? Even the harsher moments of Neil Young or Sonic Youth?), but who does he claim as antecedents -- like, what guitar players does he dig? And what about the comments that the band is too punk for the metal crowd, and too metal for the punk crowd?

Rob's reply:

Humbled and honored by the generous comparisons you make. Craig [the drummer] is the metal in the band and I'm the fucking weirdo. I've had people say we aren't really punk or really metal, probably the kind of loser who describes themselves as a tastemaker and is mean to people at shows. Mick Harvey, Mark Belke, and Infernus from Gorgoroth are some of my all time guitar inspirations. Just the best. I'm a big black metal fan but you gotta be careful because of all the Nazi shit so now I tread lightly. Devouring Void is the best black metal band in Canada respect to Adam and his crew. OUGH!

A final question comes up as a result of the exchange of several emails, where Rob often signs off with the words "God bless." It seems to take us full circle, what with my consideration of spider wasps and that very painful painting. Can Rob reconcile a universe where there is "no shortage of cruelty" with a concept of the divine? Does he have a faith?  

I'll speak to my faith on a personal level only and these comments reflect my own views and not those of the other members of the band: my faith does not merely allow for but demands a universe of horror, complexity, apprehension, and reality of just the situations you have described and much farther. My faith expressly describes and makes clear the case that the only way for there to be a possibility for even the most remote sliver of a tautological good to exist is that the universe must create conditions that encompass not only that evil, suffering, and abject sustained terror which we see all around us, but that which is also hitherto unimaginable in its dismal rote eternal repetition, so as to set the stage for every act of decency and mercy such as the feeding of the poor, the admission of wrongdoing, the searching of one's heart for ones on failings, the actions of redemption be they successful or not, to be just as infinitely important and by virtue of their simple understanding as being good in and of themselves this confirming that through our observation of horror that the self evident proof of a moral universe and all of the grand implications and gravity of that understanding implies is now shown to be true. That the landscape of the universal is within us is and the potentiality for the divine is reified through its obvious actuality in all of us to be good when we are apprehended with those decisions that we know in our heart to be the critical locus upon which the well being of another is dependent by virtue of their very existence in the same reality as you. In short ethical life is revealed religion and that comes from the understanding of culture which bridges the divide of sense perception and actuality. It is this inherent contradiction which drives my understanding of my ethical life and artistic practice in this work. 

Or as he puts it elsewhere:  "That contradiction and aspiration exist should not be a barrier to accepting that majesty can be filthy."

Amen! 

POST SCRIPT: See here for a video clip of "For Me It's Always Like This" live April 5th 2025 at the Grey Lab, Vancouver! 

Thanks to Rob Nuclear for his provocative, thoughtful answers. Note that, in terms of Saturday's show at the Grey Lab (ask a punk, but it's a bit closer to downtown than the Black Lab was). GADFLY are opening; they have a new song, and note that I previously interviewed them here. I don't know Vancouver Island punk band Dead Rights, but their bandcamp is here. There will be a listening party for No Shortage of Cruelty -- the complete album -- online today at 7pm, and while I am not sure how exactly that works, you can RSVP for an event invite on the AK-747's bandcamp page. Further gigs listed on the poster!