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Cast your mind back to 2022. A Scottish duo with a cult following have just dropped a new sci-fi concept album and it’s set the alternative world alight with its bold, brash storytelling, unapologetic feminist allegory and mental health subtext. The duo are VUKOVI and it’s their breakout album NULA that catapults them far beyond where they ever expected to be. Off the back of that album, vocalist Janine Shilstone declared she wanted to live in the moment more than ever, something she hadn’t always done, to really reflect on the band’s newfound success.
NULA was also released on the cusp of Janine having some big realisations that led to some big life changes. “With NULA, that record was written on the cusp of me needing to get mental health help,” she begins. “It was a lightbulb moment of, ‘if I want to live a long and reasonably happy life, I need to do some work on myself and make some life changes’,” she explains as we catch up over Zoom shortly after the release of their brand new album, My God Has Got A Gun. “With NULA, I grew so much confidence and started to love myself again, and realise that I deserve to be happy. I feel like the end of that record is saying ‘okay, I know what I need to do’.”
From there, My God Has Got A Gun charts the difficult, often extremely painful, process of coming to terms with trauma. “We wrote this record during my time going to therapy. I’d never really done anything that intense before. I was really facing some shit I didn’t think I’d ever want to face.” That bleeds into the album itself, with dark subjects underpinning the album as well as railing against injustices in the world. “I think it was the ramblings of a mad man going through a lot,” she smiles dryly.
On multiple occasions during our near-hour talking, Janine makes reference to a kind of primal creativity and power that shaped what became My God Has Got A Gun, from a record-breaking storm that hit the US when they were out there at Gene ‘Machine’ Freeman’s Texas studio, to a similarly record-breaking one that hit much closer to home in Glasgow when the album released. “[Life] is very primal to our art, with where you are in your life, it seeps through to what you’re creating. Hamish [Reilly] have always been like that, more instinctual and raw with creating.”
That primal, almost feral energy, boils over as soon as Gungho bursts to life with a squall of guitars. While it softens initially for its verses, beset with pulsing electronics, Janine’s distinctly Scottish tone soon brings it to pulse-pounding life in a raucous chorus. Misty Ecstasy is all charging guitars and defiant melody, while SNO flits between colossal, slower choruses and vulnerable verses. It’s an outpouring of emotion, good and bad, as VUKOVI take stock not only of their newfound success but their mental health as the band flies far higher than they ever imagined it to.
It’s also a supremely confident album, in a way. Where NULA wrapped itself up in sci-fi tales and the plight of its titular character, MGHGAG strips away almost all of that to deliver an incredibly straightforward album. “It definitely gave me the confidence to say I’m just going to be the realest version of myself,” Janine explains. “There’s no character to hide behind here. We did isolate ourselves a bit when we wrote this, we didn’t want outside influence. It did feel like [the band] was running away from us at a couple of points… That’s when we said, we just need to be ourselves.”
It meant trying new ways of expressing themselves; Janine found herself at a creative writing class on Wednesday evenings. “No one gave a shit who I was,” she smiles of the creative class. “I wanted to be more poetic with the language on MGHGAG and I love analogies, imagery and a Gothic style of lyrics.” She also found painting after therapy sessions freeing, something that was purely for her and to help her process. “It was Hamish who said, we need to use these,” Janine recalls. “We had a whole other plan for the artwork, but he said we should definitely use some of my paintings. It’s so vulnerable and exposing,” but at the same time, she couldn’t imagine doing it any other way now.
That’s much the same view she takes as working with Machine in Texas. “Oh, I don’t know what the fuck we were thinking honestly,” she laughs. “We took some risk just to say, ‘let’s go to another country we’ve never been to before and work with someone that we’ve never worked with before, and see what happens!’” And to do it all on their most personal album to date. “The way he captured [us] in this record is exactly how we wanted it to be captured. It’s so raw.”
Did 2011 Janine ever expect VUKOVI to get here in 2025? “Not a chance. We had no idea what the fuck we were doing, we’re just a couple of working class kids from Ayrshire in Scotland. It’s rough, and desolate, and we just wrote music that connected with us. If there’s anything I’ve learned in the past 14 years, it’s just that I wish I’d enjoyed it more in the moment. But I’m doing that now.”
My God Has Got A Gun is out now via SharpTone Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS118 here:
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