Bristol art-rock provocateurs Erotic Secrets of Pompeii summon a crow-footed trickster on “Crowstepper,” a deliriously danceable fever dream that skewers the spiritual grifts and digital rot of modern life. Speaking with Atwood Magazine, the band reveal the grotesque mythology behind their music and celebrate the defiantly human joy of laughing at the madness rather than surrendering to it.

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“Crowstepper” – Erotic Secrets of Pompeii

Our songs are less narrative than acid flashback dream sequences! This song is like a sinister, shamanic town cryer…

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Every age gets the trickster it deserves – the sly, dark figure who crawls out of the muck to mock our fears, expose our follies, and show us all the things we’d rather not see.

On “Crowstepper,” Erotic Secrets of Pompeii conjure a grinning shadow-self for our fractured present: Part swamp prophet, part spiritual con artist, part feverish escape hatch from the dead-eyed machinery of modern life. Quirky, charged, churning, and gloriously unwell, the Bristol band’s song twists religion, self-help, online rot, and personal collapse into a delirious art-rock séance – a song that doesn’t merely stare into the absurdity of the world, but straps on talons, rings a cowbell, and dances straight through it.

Welcome to the swamp district
I’ve gone limp
I’ve been like this for fifteen years
It’s the gooseberry season
but I’ll try to be reasonable… with you

Megastore
you can buy yourself a goddess
Happy hour
full of wine and full of promise
Philistine
is a badge that you can dangle
If you can untangle pain
I couldn’t handle

Released in mid-May, “Crowstepper” marks Erotic Secrets of Pompeii’s first new music since last October’s sophomore album Pitchfork Libra, and it arrives with the full-force strangeness of a band delighted by the outer edges of its own imagination. The five-piece – vocalist/lyricist Thomas Hawtin, guitarist/synth player Tom Hackwell, bassist Louise Schwarz, guitarist Sean Jones, and drummer/percussionist Jake Cheesman – have spent the past few years building a singular, scintillating world that feels authentic, haunted, endearingly weird, and mischievously alive: Equal parts art-rock, post-punk, theatrical groove, and grotesque pageantry, stitched together with raw humanity, sharp musicianship, and a refusal to make anything spiritually dead. Their songs lurch, wink, snarl, and bloom; they sound like a band allergic to dullness.

“We’re here fighting the good fight against A.I. music and slop in general,” Erotic Secrets of Pompeii tell Atwood Magazine. “We put everything we have into our art – music, artwork, videos. If you dig it, you’re a big freak! Welcome to the family!”

 “Crowstepper” is our initiation into the band’s special universe.

Inspired by crows as tricksters, guides, omens, and shadowy myth-creatures, the song gives name and body to an unruly alter-ego – the part of the self that crawls out when the respectable version has finally run out of answers. ESOP’s crowstepper mocks the madness around him while joining the parade: Megastore goddesses, televised blessings, credit-card salvation, comment-section derangement, empty willpower, false miracles, and a culture desperate to buy transcendence before happy hour ends. In the band’s hands, the crow becomes both clown and oracle, an absurdist spirit for volatile times and the personal dark corners those times keep feeding.

“The song was inspired by different aspects of crowiness – the mythological trickster figure, psychopomp spirit guides, Ted Hughes poetry collection Crow,” the band share. “And also Jung’s shadow self – unlocking or unloading your dark side. Musically, the track started as a demo written by Tom (guitar/synth) and when Jake brought his tom-heavy groove to it, it opened up this real swampiness to the whole thing. And you can’t deny that cowbell… it’s a paid actor, as the kids say!”

“The times are pretty volatile both globally and politically and on a more personal level in society, with people getting locked into unproductive grooves, social media, etc.,” they add. “The character of the song alludes to religion, self-help, toxic online culture, and archly mocks the whole absurdity of it all. I think there’s always time for a trickster.”

There is nothing polite about the way “Crowstepper” moves. Cheesman and Schwarz lock into a dark, intoxicating groove caked in dirt and lit by neon; Hackwell and Jones’ guitars slither, bend, and scratch at the edges; Hackwell’s Moog flickers in like a strange mechanical creature briefly showing its teeth. The cowbell – bright, relentless, almost comic in its insistence – transforms the whole thing into a crooked ritual you can dance to before realizing the floor has shifted beneath you. Hawtin’s vocal performance is pure theatrical electricity: He spits, croons, taunts, and declaims his way through lines that sound pulled from a medieval carnival, a late-capitalist nightmare, and a hallucinated sermon all at once. “Due to sudden miracles I am now unkillable” is the kind of lyric that stops the brain in its tracks – ridiculous, brilliant, and somehow exactly right.

There’s nothing wrong
But I brought a gun and the safety’s off
And you’ve got to know
What I came here for
’Cause the safety’s off
Due to sudden miracles
I am now unkillable

“At the heart of the intro (and the song in general) is Jake and Louise’s (bass) dark desert groove which is topped with some disconcertingly bendy guitars from Tom and Sean (guitar) before Tom’s Moog Subsequent 37 briefly rears its head,” the band explain. “Our songs are less narrative than acid flashback dream sequences! This song is like a sinister, shamanic town cryer… but also a psychopomp leading someone to the other side, perhaps showing them the errors of their ways.”

“We like combining different ideas and creating something mad and mangled,” they continue, “and the lyrics are always packed full of vivid imagery – we try to make them the audio equivalent of a Bosch painting. This part you mention is in the pre-chorus of the song in which the crowstepper is unveiled – the shadow self is ready to come out and play. Also keeping in line with the religious themes of the song.”

That Bosch-like sprawl is what makes “Crowstepper” such a rush. Its references leap centuries in a breath – hurdy-gurdy girls, ziggurats, Elizabethan punishments, Abaddon, evensong, carrion, dog biscuits, megastores, comment sections – but the song never feels random. It moves by nightmare logic, accumulating images until the whole thing becomes its own deranged cosmology: Ancient appetite colliding with algorithmic malaise, ritual and retail locked arm-in-arm, the sacred and stupid doing laps around the same fire. Erotic Secrets of Pompeii have always thrived in this kind of collision, and “Crowstepper” distills their gifts into four intoxicating minutes: The wit, the menace, the rhythm, the grotesque beauty, the strange joy of hearing a band make art that sounds unmistakably, defiantly human.

Crowstepper
He knows better
Even on the radio
the hurdy gurdy girls

The chorus is where all that madness becomes impossible to resist. Hawtin delivers “Crowstepper / He knows better” with the swagger of a self-appointed prophet, and suddenly the song has the irresistible pull of a warped, theatrical singalong. There’s a wonderfully suspicious confidence in that refrain: Who decided this creature knows better, and why are we so eager to follow him? Even the “hurdy gurdy girls” seem to belong to his bizarre carnival procession, an old-world spectacle parading through the present. The words are deceptively simple against the verses’ hallucinatory density, giving listeners an immediate foothold in the chaos. And therein lies the chorus’ slyest trick – by the time you’re shouting the crowstepper’s name, you’ve already joined the very spectacle the song is mocking.

Please forgive my inattention,
I lost myself in the comments section
A pit of crime and insurrection
I’m home!

“There’s a lot of time travel in our songs,” the band say. “From the Dancing Plague of 1518 to the spirits of Jack the Ripper’s victims manifesting as a fatberg in the sewers of Whitechapel. I read a lot of different fiction and non-fiction and I’m interested in science fiction, horror, the occult, and history (especially medieval) – it all congeals into something vast and sprawling which becomes the cosmic tapestry of the ESOP world.”

The song’s accompanying video pushes that world further outward, shifting the spotlight onto actor and dancer Josh Ben-Tovim for a physical performance that turns the track’s twitchy, possessed energy into bodily language. Shot at Bristol’s Wardrobe Theatre, the visual feels less like an explanation than an extension – another doorway into the “Crowstepper” fever state, where movement becomes character and character becomes ritual.

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii call the song “a synthesis of everything we do,” and it’s hard to argue otherwise: “Crowstepper” is funny, grotesque, sharply played, deeply odd, and packed with more hooks than should legally fit inside one track.

It’s also a reminder that the weird still has teeth, that art can still surprise and shock the senses – wresting the body awake – and that sometimes, the only reasonable response to the horrors of modern life is to invent a crow-footed shadow-self and let him lead the dance.

If this is the trickster our age deserves, we’re glad he brought a cowbell. Atwood Magazine caught up with Erotic Secrets of Pompeii to venture deeper into their wonderfully warped world – exploring the mythology behind “Crowstepper,” the musical influences feeding their imagination, and the sheer joy of making art that refuses to behave.

Read our interview below, and get to know the brilliant minds behind the madness.

“Crowstepper
He knows better
Even on the radio
the hurdy gurdy girls”

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:: stream/purchase Crowstepper here ::

:: connect with Erotic Secrets of Pompeii here ::

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“Crowstepper” – Erotic Secrets of Pompeii

A CONVERSATION WITH EROTIC SECRETS OF POMPEII

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: We’re here fighting the good fight against A.I. music and slop in general. We put everything we have into our art – music, artwork, videos. If you dig it, you’re a big freak! Welcome to the family!

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: “Utterly Rudderless” is a fan favourite, and “Venus Ascending” goes down well live as it’s a bit more atmospheric and moodier. We love playing “Speak Medieval” as it’s full of wonky energy. If you’re feeling creepy and want something different to our usual mania, try “Auguries & Auguries” for some post-coital paranoia.

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: We have a varied taste musically, some of the big influences included Beefheart, Primus, Tom Waits, tempered with the ‘70s art rock of Peter Gabriel and Roxy Music, early ‘00s post punk revivalists like Franz Ferdinand, and plenty of world rhythms from Jake our learned drummer.

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: The characters, the imagery, the themes all fit into that – and the squonkiness of the sounds.

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: We’ve toured it round the UK and EU and are touring it again later this year. Some of the tracks from that record are now cemented into our live set – I think we’ve played “Speak Medieval” at every show so far this year. There are a couple of tracks from the record which we want to bring into the live realm but haven’t yet, notably “Count to Ten with Nobody.” I think the melody and driving rhythms of that song will be really exciting to recreate on the stage.

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: The song was inspired by different aspects of crowiness – the mythological trickster figure, psychopomp spirit guides, Ted Hughes poetry collection “Crow.” And also Jung’s shadow self – unlocking or unloading your dark side. Musically, the track started as a demo written by Tom (guitar/synth) and when Jake brought his tom-heavy groove to it, it opened up this real swampiness to the whole thing. And you can’t deny that cowbell… it’s a paid actor, as the kids say!

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: The times are pretty volatile both globally and politically and on a more personal level in society, with people getting locked into unproductive grooves, social media, etc. The character of the song alludes to religion, self-help, toxic online culture, and archly mocks the whole absurdity of it all. I think there’s always time for a trickster.

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: At the heart of the intro (and the song in general) is Jake and Louise’s (bass) dark desert groove which is topped with some disconcertingly bendy guitars from Tom and Sean (guitar) before Tom’s Moog Subsequent 37 briefly rears its head. Our songs are less narrative than acid flashback dream sequences! This song is like a sinister, shamanic town cryer… but also a psychopomp leading someone to the other side, perhaps showing them the errors of their ways.

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: That’s very kind of you to say. We like combining different ideas and creating something mad and mangled – and the lyrics are always packed full of vivid imagery – we try to make them the audio equivalent of a Bosch painting. This part you mention is in the pre-chorus of the song in which the crowstepper is unveiled – the shadow self is ready to come out and play. Also keeping in line with the religious themes of the song.

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: Haha! There’s a lot of time travel in our songs. From the Dancing Plague of 1518 to the spirits of Jack the Ripper’s victims manifesting as a fatberg in the sewers of Whitechapel. I read a lot of different fiction and non-fiction and I’m interested in science fiction, horror, the occult, and history (especially medieval) – it all congeals into something vast and sprawling which becomes the cosmic tapestry of the ESOP world.

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: We shot the video in the Wardrobe Theatre – a great performance space in Old Market, Bristol. We wanted to buck the trend of recent ESOP videos and move the focus onto a non-band member. Fortunately, the opportunity to work with Josh came up and we jumped at it. He’s an amazingly accomplished actor and dancer and a lovely chap to boot. We compel your readers to try and catch an IMPERMANENCE show – his Bristol-based dance company.

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: It’s a synthesis of everything we do – and we hope they like what they hear! What have we learnt? You can never have enough cowbell!

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: We’d like to big up some local bands we’ve been listening to of late: Mutant Thoughts have just released a new stonking album. Grandma’s House and also Mumble Tide, who most of the band went to see at Dot to Dot (Bristol) after we’d played our slot.

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:: stream/purchase Crowstepper here ::

:: connect with Erotic Secrets of Pompeii here ::

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“Crowstepper” – Erotic Secrets of Pompeii

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