Exclusive Video Premiere: LIFESWALLOWER - The Trees Hide Their Bodies

LIFESWALLOWER feel like a band that’ve been simmering beneath the surface, teeth bared, ready to make the UK heavy scene feel just a little unsafe again. With their self‑titled EP arriving September 1st via Prog On! Recordings, the quartet are gradually pulling back the curtain, and The Trees Hide Their Bodies is the next glimpse into that world. It’s tense, earthy, and unsettling, setting the tone for a release that promises to be as gripping as it is heavy.

Featuring four experienced musicians brought together by a shared desire to create new music, LIFESWALLOWER began on the south coast of England as a casual project playing 1990s death metal covers. Before long, those rehearsals evolved into something more ambitious, with the band setting aside covers in favour of writing original material that reflected the broad range of influences shared by its members.

The result is Lifeswallower, the band’s self-titled debut EP. Across four tracks, the record draws from progressive metal, death metal, thrash metal and other corners of heavy music, combining technical precision with a strong focus on songwriting and dynamics.

Rather than staying within a single style, LIFESWALLOWER move between blast-driven intensity, complex arrangements and heavier groove-based sections, allowing each song to develop its own identity while remaining part of a coherent whole. The EP reflects the chemistry of four musicians pushing each other creatively and exploring new musical territory together.

Check out ‘The Trees Hide Their Bodies‘:

The band also shared some insight with Metal Epidemic into the track’s creation, lyrical content and the mindset behind it. Here’s what they had to say:

James (Vocals):

The initial riff of ‘The Trees Hide Their Bodies’ helped inspire and feed the lyrical content of the song. It was slow, steady, and unrelenting. As someone whose second love is video games, it was reminiscent to me of the Wild Hunt from the Witcher series. It brought to mind heavily armoured figures on the back of horses mercilessly pursuing their prey. But I wanted the theming of the song to speak to me personally. So rather than this marauding group rounding up slaves, they were a group of men so obscenely wealthy that they were able to release a group of people into a forest and hunt them down for sport. All the while cosplaying their own vision of the Horseman of the Apocalypse, riding atop steeds, clad in heavy plate mail, flails and swords in hand. A not-too-subtle metaphor for the wealth inequality prevalent across the globe.

The song is predominantly written from the perspective of the horseman. They are so confident, so aggressive, and lack any fear. One of my favourite lines in the song is “Deciding force, my feelings”. The horsemen are so confident in their power that how they feel is literally a profound force equal to that of nature and the gods. It governs how long these men and women have to live and the level of brutality with which their lives will be snuffed out.

Ben (Drums/Sound Design):

Well, I learn something new every day…and now I understand James’ lyrical approach to this more! I thought it was about a serial killer or something…but that is richer and darker…haha! I won’t comment further on that aspect, but for me musically, this track just moves through several different stages and really rams home, for me, what I wanted to achieve with LIFESWALLOWER in the sense that we have all these different musical sections that flow from one another. It’s progressive but not widdly-widdly “look at me” progressive…if that makes any sense!

The song was born from that initial groove I’m playing at the beginning, as I recall saying to Tom (guitar), “How about we write something along to this pattern?” and then we just jammed what Tom came up with to the drums, and that’s how we moved forward.

We had a fun way of writing on this record, in the sense that we’d conjure some fun ideas in the room, Tom would go away and refine things (or sometimes just leave them as is), then we’d gather again to work on what Tom had worked on after observing some rough demos. To me, it was a lovely collaborative approach to things and pushed things forward in the limited timeframes we could get together because we’re all busy and important, haha!

A lot of the synths on the tracks were created in my fave VST, Equator 2 by Roli, which I love creating nonsense with because of its excellent MPE hardware attributes, along with its superb wavetables, granular, FM synthesis, and sample qualities. I just love its seemingly endless capabilities to take any sound and move it so far away from its origins that it’s hard to remember where I started sometimes!

Obviously, being a narcissistic drummer, the blastbeat section at 3:13 is silly metal fun that just sums up the track nicely. There are some awesomely fun parts in this track, and I’m proud to have been a part of it.

Benjamin (Bass/Vocals):

Trees was one of the first songs that cohered and really showcased the direction we were starting to find between us. Beginning with Ben’s initial drumbeat, Tom improvised over that and we were off. It’s a real showcase of everything we all enjoy, from the groove to the blastbeats to the D-beat stuff near the end. As the bass player, I contribute less often to sheer riff creation, but I enjoy trying to fit things around the parts Tom comes up with so it’s not just ‘root note, root note’; not always easy but very satisfying when it all works.

We’d written all the music for the EP before James joined the band, so it suddenly took on an entirely new dimension once his vocals started to come in. Even from the early scratch vocals we could hear it in a totally new way, and he really smashed it on the final recordings. Very happy with this one and can’t wait to play it live and watch those heads nod!

LIFESWALLOWER’s self-titled EP will be released by Prog On! Recordings on September 1st, 2026.