SCALER: No Ceilings, No Boundaries – Inside the Making of Endlessly

Few bands can shift gears as dramatically — or as convincingly — as Bristol’s SCALER. Since their 2022 debut on fabric’s Houndstooth label, they’ve won over The Guardian, The Quietus, NME and beyond, released a Daniel Avery-produced double A-side, been remixed by the likes of Laurel Halo and Mogwai, and shut down Glastonbury’s Shangri-La stage in full, chaotic force.

Now, with their new album Endlessly (out 26 September via Black Acre), the quartet have distilled that restless energy into their most collaborative and intentional work yet. Recorded at Bristol’s Louisiana studio with former live member Alfie Tyson-Brown and featuring an eclectic list of contributors — from Akiko Haruna to Art School Girlfriend — the record pushes SCALER’s multidimensional sound further than ever, channelling trip-hop, DnB, techno, metal, drill, and more into something defiantly their own.

We caught up with the band to talk about creative freedom, Bristol’s musical DNA, and why Endlessly is best experienced as a whole journey.

Endlessly feels like your most collaborative and intentional work to date. How did working so closely together — after time apart — shape the direction and emotional depth of the album?

More than anything it made the whole process of creating the album more fun and more exciting. Being able to actually bounce ideas off each other in the room in real time is always going to be a better experience than sending Dropbox links around. It definitely meant we ended up in a bunch of places musically that we wouldn’t have otherwise.

You’ve spoken about making music with “no ceiling.” What does that freedom look like in practice, and how do you navigate the pressure that comes with boundless creative possibilities?

Infinite possibilities are never a good thing and we do have to check ourselves sometimes. I think the main boundaries we set ourselves at this point are sub-conscious, we know what we don’t want more than we know what we want. For the next release I’d love to set some more strict physical limitations, but we’ll see…

The album pulls from a wide spectrum — trip-hop, techno, ambient, drill, even metal. Was there a conscious effort to reflect Bristol’s musical DNA, or did those influences surface more organically?

Again this is just down to our tastes as a band; we listen to and love such a broad range of music that it’s never going to be exciting for us to confine ourselves by genre. The Bristol thing isn’t particularly conscious, but it’s unavoidable just due to how much time we have spent absorbing the music from this city - both past & present. We adore so much of the music that has come out of, and is currently coming out of, Bristol that it’s bound to seep in somewhere.

Tracks like Salt and Salvation showcase some bold left-turns in your sound. Were there any moments in the studio where you surprised yourselves — or even questioned, “Is this still SCALER?

Absolutely, constantly. I’d say our main challenge when piecing this record together was making sure it felt cohesive. As I mentioned, we were never going to just stick to one sound or genre or formula, but there were definitely times in the studio where it felt like maybe we’d strayed too far from the path one way or another but hopefully the finished product feels like a journey through a cohesive world. It’s the Scaler DNA but just pushed further in every direction.

You’ve crafted Endlessly as a full-album experience. In a singles-driven world, why was that format important to you — and how do you hope listeners engage with it?

Even though this is our second album it really felt like the first time we’ve been able to create a full body of work in one go, so we really wanted to lean into that and see how we could make our sound and palette work in that context.