NEW NOISE
CAGE FIGHT
Tesseract guitarist swaps prog metal grandstanding for politically charged crossover thrash
WORDS: STEPHEN HILL
AT THE START of 2020, Cage Fight vocalist Rachel Aspe was restless and unhappy. It had been three years since the dissolution of the French singer’s previous band, Eths, and now the world was on the brink of a global pandemic.
“It was lockdown and I was superfrustrated to not be in a band,” she says. “I was doing nothing. I just started trying to do some covers and put them out on the internet.”
At the same time, on the other side of the English Channel, James Monteith had a musical itch of his own that he was aching to scratch. As the guitarist with Tesseract since 2006, he’d spent a decade and a half on the prog-metal frontlines. But now he wanted to play something simple, direct and brutal – the exact opposite of his day job.