NO KNOWN WEAKNESS

PHOTO CREDIT: GOOD LUCK WOLF PHOTOGRAPHY (@_goodluckwolf)

1. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions! Would you please introduce yourself and what you do in the band?

I’m Lev, I’m the vocalist in No Known Weakness.

2. Can you provide us with a little context about the band such as where you’re from, how you knew each other, and how you formed?

We’re from Glasgow in Scotland and we pretty much all just know each other from the local hardcore scene up here. We’ve all been going to shows, booking shows and playing in Glasgow hardcore bands for a pretty long time now. Deakin (guitar), Callum (bass) and I actually even tried to start a straight-edge band together a looooong fucking time ago, but that never made it out the studio (also, FWIW, only I am still nailed to the X to this day). Dave (drums) and Alex (guitar) have been pretty much best friends since they were teenagers; I think they were in a ska-punk band together since high school and have been in loads of bands together over the years, including By My Hands, which is how the rest of us got to know them. A few years back, I was speaking to Callum, Deakin and Dave individually about doing a few new bands, and since we all knew each other and were looking for a new band anyway those different bands just sort of became one band and Dave brought Alex along and that was the beginning of No Known Weakness! As soon as we started jamming together we were like “why did we never try this sooner?”

3. What about your personal hardcore origin story? What attracted you to the genre and made you not just love the music but feel like you had to make it yourself?

The first music I ever loved was hip-hop for its attitude, message and ferocity, and then shortly after that I got into metal for its heaviness, so when I discovered “Age Of Quarrel” by Cro-Mags and it seemed to combine attitude / ferocity / message with heaviness I was all in on hardcore music. Another pivotal moment for me was when I saw the local grindcore band Co-Exist supporting the UKHC band Medulla Nocte at a venue called The Cathouse as a teenager; I was with my girlfriend at the time and she was saying how the bassist of Co-Exist was one of her teachers at school, and that was when I clicked that anyone can just start a hardcore band and go for it themselves. So I did! Not long after that I went to see Sepultura in London and Hatebreed were the support; this was around the release of “Perseverance” and the London moshers were out in force during their set. I’d never seen anything like that at Glasgow shows before, so that was a real eye opening moment for me as well.

4. In some ways, hardcore is a very traditionalist genre but in other ways, it’s very much about irreverence and doing your own thing. It’s an interesting tension. How do you thread the needle between knowing and respecting the roots while also carving out space for your own unique voice and perspective?

Honestly, this might sound like a cop out or like we think we are the arbiters of what is and isn’t hardcore, but we’ve all been pretty entrenched in the scene and loved hardcore music for so long now that we don’t really think too hard about respecting the roots too much… It just comes naturally. We just throw together music that we like, and regardless of how it sounds it’s just always going to be hardcore because it’s us doing it and it’s in our DNA at this point!

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5. You go into great detail on the 2025 demo here so I don’t want to re-tread too much ground, but can you walk us through the band’s first year-plus, highlights, et cetera up to the new EP, which we’ll talk about shortly?

I THINK the first No Known Weakness rehearsal was June 2024. All of us having been in many bands over the years and the chemistry of having already known each other for a long time meant we were able to come in and hit the ground running pretty fast. The first song we ever put together in the studio was “Under Their Heel”, which only just finally got recorded and released quite recently on our new EP. Our first show was in November 2024 in our hometown of Glasgow with the veteran Dutch hardcore band Born From Pain, Ego from England and our pals in Lights Out. In January 2025 we played with Ringworm and released our first demo, originally titled “Demo 2025”. Since then we’ve played up and down the UK and over in Ireland with lots of great bands, releasing a live single (“Dig Your Own Grave”) in June 2025 and then finally our most recent EP, “Tales From The Clydeside”, released just a few weeks back. I think we’ve only played like 13 shows in total at this point and we’ve been pretty lucky that they’ve all been pretty good to be honest, so hard to pick out highlights! I think we’re all pretty proud of the show we booked with Broken Oath and some other great Glasgow bands last year which raised over £2000 for cancer charities, though.

6. What was the writing and recording process like for the new Tales from the Clydeside EP? Can you walk us through each track?

In terms of writing, like I said some of these songs have been kicking about even longer than all the other songs we have previously recorded and released! “Under Their Heel” was the first song we jammed as a band, and “Venom” was pretty early as well. “The Scythe” was probably a bit more of a conscious effort to centre us as a more traditional sounding hardcore band since there was so much metal in the other songs; there’s still metal in “The Scythe” too, but the structure and pace is really modern hardcore 101 I think. “Pushed Away” was an attempt to write something that was a bit of a cross between Bolt Thrower and Merauder. “Fear Will Devour” was the most recently-written song on the EP, and in fact was so new that we’d never performed it as a band before recording it and the first time I said the lyrics out loud was in the recording studio. Most of the guitars were recorded at the legendary Audio Lounge, and pretty much everything else was done by our good friend Malcolm Abbou (from the band Heads On Pikes), who also did most of the legwork on our first demo, with mixing and mastering by Ben Jones from Pest Control. Working with so many friends and familiar faces, it was actually a pretty straightforward process and we’re pretty happy with how it turned out.

7. The cover art is sick. Who did it and how did you arrive at the concept?

The art was done by an artist known as Comic Droid, who I found via Instagram and just thought they could give us something that would look great and also stand out a bit from most other hardcore cover art just now. Glad you like it! Deakin came up with the title “Tales From The Clydeside” as a riff on the Biohazard song title “Tales From The Hard Side” and an area in Glasgow known as The Clydeside. I immediately had the concept of landmarks from The Clydeside (eg “The Squinty Bridge”, the Armadillo, the Finnieston Cran, etc.) but sort of broken down and infected with a general sinister vibe, and some monsters in there to kind of spin the “Tales” part of the title out into meaning, like, fantastic tales. As discussions with Cosmic Droid went on, we eventually decided the monsters should be influenced by the song titles (eg the grim reaper for “The Scythe”, a giant snake for “Venom”) and some of them should be influenced by monsters from Scottish myths & folklore (eg The Shetland Wulver, selkies, the Loch Ness Monster, etc.). Cosmic Droid took all these ideas, sprinkled their own unique style on it and the end result is something fun as fuck where you might notice something different every time you look at it.

8. Most likely anyone reading this knows how robust the scene in Glasgow proper is and that of Scotland more broadly, but what and/or who do you attribute this vitality and growth to? Who are some of the major players we should be aware of and following?

I’m sure most people reading this would know about the scene in Glasgow just now largely thanks to Northern Unrest and their bands, so I’ll quickly acknowledge all they have done for the scene here and leave it at that rather than tell you all what you already know. Besides that, there is a very healthy scene of up and coming similarly metallic leaning HC bands, some of the better known and more active of which include Test Of Patience (Gem, the vocalist, being one of the guest vocalists on our track “Venom”), Heads On Pikes, Bloodsport, Lights Out, Shot Down In May, Bathed In Sin, Grandslam… The list goes on and on. As well as the younger bands, we’re also blessed to have two of the best Glasgow hardcore bands of all time, Divide and Broken Oath, currently active. There’s also some great faster hardcore like Bleaks… Death metal like Suffering Rites, BrainBath, etc…. Powerviolence like Endless Swarm, thrash like Tempered… Honestly, there’s just so much happening in Scotland. I’ve not even mentioned any of the 3 other bands I’M in, so hopefully folk don’t feel slighted if I don’t mention them. There’s just a LOT to mention! I guess I chalk it up to a combination of Scottish people (usually) being pretty friendly and welcoming, and hardcore (and all DIY music scenes) being something anyone can get involved with if they really want to, so these two things combine together to make a pretty fertile ground for lots of folk to get together, put on some shows and jam out some riffs.

9. For Americans, we usually frame the following as the “Mount Rushmore of…” but that doesn’t always translate. The Big Four of Thrash (Metallica, Anthrax, Slayer, Megadeth) does. Who do you think are the Big Four of Scottish Hardcore?

Divide and Broken Oath are the unquestionable number 1 and number 2, if not for everyone in Scottish hardcore then at least for everyone in No Known Weakness. I think I can feel pretty comfortable saying they’d all agree with me on that. Not only do they make great hardcore music that still provides its own template for new GHC bands to this day, but their associations with Rucktion Records down in London probably helped put some of those bands on the radars of myself and others from my generation and helped bring in the heavier metallic influences that seem to have been a hallmark ever since.

Number 3, for me personally I’d say a band called Shank, who are often described as powerviolence though they apparently did not like that term. Shank released an LP on the infamous 625 Thrash label (originally supposed to be released on the probably-even-more-infamous Slap-A-Ham Records), went over and played Europe and I think they also played Japan and just generally were a very visible Glasgow hardcore band on the global hardcore and punk stage in a pre-social media era when it was probably very hard to do that.

Pick number 4 is a tough one but I’ll probably chuck Dave and Alex’s old band, By My Hands, in here. I was in the studio providing backup vocals when they recorded their first demo and I was driving the van for them on some of their last shows, so a lot of my formative Glasgow hardcore experiences and memories are tied up with that band and the people in it, and they have definitely been a massive influence on so many bands who have come since then (I’m pretty sure every single member of every single Northern Unrest band would have By My Hands in their Big 4).

10. What’s on the docket for the rest of 2026?

Honestly absolutely fuck all! We had a couple of shows booked for the week after the EP release (a show with Gridiron, Missing Link, SplitKnuckle & Canny See in Glasgow and then a show with Stampin’ Ground, Broken Oath and silence|me in Newcastle the day after that) but we’ve failed to really plan anything beyond that at all. The response to the EP has been great so I’m frantically sending out DMs and e-mails trying to line up some more shows and stay active while the going is good. If you’re reading this, feel free to reach out and book us or message your local promoter and ask them to book us!

11. Thank you again for the interview! Any last words for the readers?

I think I’ve said plenty already, cheers for getting in touch and asking us to do this!

PHOTO CREDIT: ZAKK WILD (@zakk_wild_media23)

PHOTO CREDIT: GREG HALL (@tofeelhealed)

You can read my interview with Greg here.