It’s a tired narrative, yet the headlines persist.
“Can so-and-so band save rock ‘n roll?” “Is such-and-such artist here to save guitar music?”
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Probably not. As they say, any time a headline asks a question, the answer is usually no.
It’s not because there isn’t a band out there strong enough to pull the metaphorical sword from the stone and reclaim rock music’s long-vacant throne atop pop culture or whatever. It’s just that to say rock ‘n roll or guitar music needs to be saved is to look at it the wrong way. Save it from what? Not being the most profitable and the most talked about?
All of the past benchmarks of rock ‘n roll success such as album sales and radio plays are mostly meaningless now. All of the cliches about “making it” and “getting big” that twee characters talk about in movies—it’s not real anymore. There’s no monoculture that rock music can dominate.
So does that mean rock is dead? Probably not. Who cares?
The only thing anyone needs to do with rock ‘n roll is keep playing it and keep having fun with it. You can try all of the different strategies you want to try to “make it big”—craft a song with a hook chemically designed to hit the masses in their collective Q-zone, pull off gimmicks like visual components and merch bundles. All of these have worked and do work for some bands to varying degrees of success. There’s no perfect formula—to have one would be to lose any rock ‘n roll credibility. But there’s one good starting point for if you do want to do the rock ‘n roll thing:
Do whatever you want.
To quote a moment on the Dirty Nil’s new album, The Lash: Fuck it.
Luke Bentham, the guitarist and vocalist and currently one half of the Hamilton, Ontario, rock band clearly worships at the rock ‘n roll altar. All of the cheese, all of the flash, the danger, and the excitement, all of the things that have made the genre so fun and romantic in its long history . . . he hasn’t shied away from any of that. If you’ve seen the Dirty Nil live you’ve likely seen Bentham in a stage getup with stars or shimmery studded collars. He’s doing backbends and hoisting his white Les Paul high while he shreds. And he does shred. Shredding is a major part of the Dirty Nil’s sound because it’s part and parcel to capital-R Rockin’.
Bentham and drummer Kyle Fisher form the consistent power axis of the Nil. They’re a perfect amalgam of their Canadian upbringing—surrounded by music from Sum 41, Single Mothers, Constantines, and Neil Young—and the legendary artists they absorbed from TV and radio: David Bowie, Black Sabbath, and MC5.
There’s a beautiful and refreshing lack of irony or restrictive self-awareness that’s plagued other corners of rock music over the years. But it also doesn’t go as far into rock band caricature or Flanderization where it’s taken as a joke. Those are often the bands you see along with headlines about saving rock ‘n roll. Despite the Nil’s similarities to Bill and Ted’s band Wyld Stallyns, which became the basis for all of human culture in the future, Bentham and Fisher have no delusions of such grandeur.
“I think that taking on the idea of shifting popular culture in your favor is a bit arrogant from where I’m sitting,” Bentham says from what looks like an attic home studio, with a Marshall amp just over his shoulder behind him. “I think that if you’ve got something to say and you’ve got some art to make, then you should focus on that rather than trying to shift the entire zeitgeist. I think that concerning yourself with such massive cultural trends is probably not the best use of your thinking.”
The goal for Bentham and Fisher, he says, is internal satisfaction, perhaps the polar opposite of external validation. It’s very Canadian in that regard. They don’t have that world domination gene that American or British bands have. There was never a “Canadian Invasion” despite the fact that Ontario has been churning out some of rock music’s most exciting and consistent bands for decades now. And that Northern friendliness is inherent even when the music is kicking the shit out of you with distortion and Bentham is screaming his head off. It’s a meticulous balancing act they pull off.
Now with the release of their fifth studio album, The Lash, the Dirty Nil— whittled down once again to the duo Bentham and Fisher after a few roster changes on bass over the years—have not only found something that satisfies their hunger for great, loud, fun, effective rock music, they’ve realistically just made their best album so far.
Plenty of bands say in interviews that their latest is their best thing they’ve ever done. Sometimes they’re right. Often when a band says that about their fifth album, though, they are wrong, bless their hearts. (Unless that band is the Red Hot Chili Peppers.)
The Dirty Nil introduced themselves to the masses with the 2016 album Higher Power, which starts with a wail of feedback giving way to a pummeling, all-hands-on-deck battle cry with “No Weaknesses,” a song title that plenty of other bands would’ve used ironically.
Hand to God and all the sheepish
Me and Satan versus Jesus
Now I’m sweating for a living
No end in sight
But I have no weaknesses
That album netted them a Juno Award for Breakout Group of the Year in 2017.
They followed this up in 2018 with Master Volume, a love letter to arena-ready swagger complete with a Metallica cover for good measure. Over the course of the next two albums, Fuck Art in 2021 and Free Rein to Passions in 2023, the Nil might’ve realized that other people connected with this not-too-cool-for-school approach to rock music and further explored the larger-than-life themes and sounds. Between albums, they’d release EPs with covers of bands like the Who, Cheap Trick, and Big Star. They had fun titles like Minimum R&B.
They were indulging their base rock ‘n roll instincts, but there were still nagging voices telling them that they needed to take some “next step,” maybe in terms of radio appeal or appealing to certain fanbases. Bentham maintains that those albums ended up exactly how the band wanted them to, but it was exhausting to have to fight over creative decisions instead of simply following creative sparks, be they profitable or not. For Free Rein especially, the pressure was internal, where they had taken the forced COVID hiatus that every band had to take and were worried that they sort of had to re-audition for their own fans.
“I think that bad things happen in the entire art world when you try and do something for other people,” Bentham says. “I think that we’re always considering, like, ‘What would our fans like?’ But I think that at this point, I think our fans will like what we like. And we’re very fortunate in that department that we have some very die hard fans that have stayed with us through a lot of years.”
Which brings us to The Lash. If there was any fear in Bentham and Fisher’s minds about rehashing Fuck Art and Free Rein, the album cover should be a clue. Those two were technicolor dreamscapes. Smiling dogs and dancing flowers. The Lash is a black and white drawing of two skeletons fighting over a knife, influenced by a piece of art called “The Horrors of War.”
Folks with synesthesia can appreciate an album that sounds like it looks. It’s all black and white. It’s a fight over a knife from the jump with the churn of “Gallop of the Hounds.” And while it was clearly a cathartic album to make for the band—Fisher joked in press material that this was Bentham’s “therapy record” and he doesn’t fully disagree—it’s not all punishment. Bentham has a gift for hooks deserving of the radio and arena alike. Songs like “That Don’t Mean It Won’t Sting” swing for the fences with choruses that wouldn’t be out of place as a mid-album showstopper in a pop diva’s catalog.
And there are times for pensive reflection on tracks like “This Is Me Warning Ya,” where Bentham is accompanied by only his guitar— something Fisher had to convince him to include on the album.
“I didn’t really have any part of me that thought this could be a Nil song because you know, traditionally we’ve taken a song like that and we’ve kind of rearranged it and supercharged it to be a Dirty Nil song,” Bentham says. “And Kyle just said, ‘No, you should just do that. That should be one of the songs on this record.’ Kyle’s openness to me just having a song where it’s just me playing, I think, shows where our mutual confidence was in the band and our flexibility, and that there are no rules to what we do. It’s whatever we’re feeling at the time and anything can be a Nil song. We used to be a bit more dogmatic that it’s got to be loud, fast, and fun to be a Nil song. And certain forays into other areas have shown us that, no, anything that we do that we’re excited about, that’s a Nil song.”
Even still, as “This Is Me Warning Ya” ends, the guys seem to snap out of it. Fisher reminds you of his presence with a “Fuck it,” and rolls into what Bentham sees as maybe the album’s mission statement song: “Do You Want Me?”
“I kind of sensed that we had a lot of contemplative, more delicate material,” Bentham says. “I was like, ‘OK, we need just a numbskull ripper. Let’s do it.’ And so one of the choruses of that song is just the Kyle drum solo.”
It’s exhilarating to hear a band capture their core essence like this. You hear it a lot about bands recording in ways to try to immortalize the raw magic of them playing in a room together, but it’s a tall order and doesn’t always work. But the trick of The Lash is the pure, imperfect glimpse at a band firing on all cylinders and reminding themselves why they pursued this whole dream in the first place.
Even if, at times, that dream life is brutal as hell, as evidenced on maybe the only moment Bentham’s rock ‘n roll armor shows a crack—the track “Rock N’ Roll Band,” which could have also been named “This Is Me Warning Ya.”
So you wanna be in a rock and roll band?
With your face on the Instagram?
I’ma call it as it is
It’s a hole in your pocket and you’re all out of gas
Someone else is getting rich
Someone else is getting rich
Someone else is getting rich, not you
It’s their answer to AC/DC’s “It’s A Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock n’ Roll),” but there’s no guarantee that they’ve even made it to the top, or that there is a top to make it to.
“Even on the roughest day of rock ‘n roll, it’s better than the best day that I had working at Starbucks,” Bentham says. “This is a tough line of work at times, but it’s like we always say, Kyle and I: It’s the pirate’s life for us.”
Just over Bentham’s shoulder in his attic, above the amp, a Jolly Roger hangs on the wall.
There’s room for one more crew member crazy enough to board a perpetually doomed ship, too. The band just posted a call for bassist auditions—the same way you’d see in a movie for some fledgling garage band stapling flyers on telephone poles around town—just the social media age version. Because the Dirty Nil is, in essence, still just a garage band made up of friends. That’s the mindset Bentham and Fisher seem hellbent on guarding with The Lash.
That garage mentality never burns out if you protect it. Clearly Fisher and Bentham have protected it. They’re contractually obligated to protect it together, actually.
“When we were 16 years old and we started the band in my parents’ basement, we literally signed a blood contract together,” Bentham says. “I’m not a superstitious guy. I’m a very secular person. But there seems to be a bit of power in that blood contract.”
The Dirty Nil are under no obligation to save rock ‘n roll as a business entity or wing of the music industry. The expectations set out for them are largely self-imposed. But that contract’s jurisdiction goes as far as keeping their own rock ‘n roll purist spirit alive, which shines brightest on their darkest, heaviest, most fun album to date.
Bentham isn’t sure where that contract is anymore. But you can be sure the Devil knows where it is, and the Devil keeps meticulous records. Better keep rockin’, boys. Yo ho.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
