Basses

“We don’t write things that would be boring live” Guilt Trip on why they’re committed to keeping hardcore as intense as possible

June 2, 2026

The next time you catch an elbow at a show, take a second to see if it’s connected to someone wearing a Guilt Trip shirt. A lot of hardcore bands have blown up in recent years, with American heavyweights Turnstile and Knocked Loose chief among them, but the Manchester upstarts typify a young, hungry breed of UK acts rapidly closing the gap, with eye-watering streaming numbers crashing into the huge circle pits they’re whipping up across festival grounds.

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Their new record Armour of Angels is intended as fuel for this fire, with the band picturing how each shoutalong hook or ignorant breakdown might spark carnage in a crowd. “We’re definitely having them conversations while we’re writing,” guitarist Jak Maden says. “We always say to each other, ‘Are you moshing?’”
And there are precious few moments on the LP that aren’t spinkickable. Vocalist Jay Valentine is spring-loaded with Jamey Jasta-esque energy, barking and snarling while bassist Lily Kilcoyne and drummer Tom Aimson lock into pummelling rhythms, with songs such as Veins getting through nu-metal atmospherics, murderous double kick salvos and a ripping skank part in a shade under three minutes. Tapping into this fast-moving sense of mayhem, Maden and Sam Baker’s guitar style is defined by muscular chug, dives, scoops and wah-laced thrash solos.
Image: Press
Brutish And Short
It feels odd to say that it’s a refinement of their approach on 2023’s Severance given the brutish nature of the record, but that’s what it is. In the decade and change since they formed – Valentine and Maden have been friends since primary school, meeting Kilcoyne, Aimson and Baker in the Manchester hardcore scene – the band have found a way to thread their influences through the eye of a needle.
In recent photos of the group, the T-shirts on display range from Staind to All Out War, Slipknot to Biohazard, and you can hear it in each change-up. In the here and now, Baker says, Guilt Trip are simply better at writing Guilt Trip songs than they were a few years ago. “This album is heavier, but not intentionally,” he says. “Especially with Jak’s writing, there’s a lot of Whammy in the riffs and I think it’s just because it’s fun [for us]. We don’t play things, or write things, that would be boring live, you know?”
Armour of Angels was produced by the band at StudiOwz, a residential facility in Pembrokeshire, Wales. “We’ve always self-produced,” Maden observes. “A lot of bands our size are clawing [their way] into that metal world rather than the hardcore world. Usually, they’ll get a producer. But we’re all so hands on — we’ve already got [multiple] opinions. I understand that having one more from outside can help calm everyone else down, but I think we would struggle with constantly disagreeing with that person.”
Jak Maden. Image: Georgina Hurdsfield
Peripheral Vision
This time, they recorded alongside engineer Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood, best known for his work as guitarist/bassist and producer with tech-metal giants Periphery. As well as playing Decapitated in the control room, Getgood had Bullet For My Valentine’s The Poison in mind as a guitar template.
For Maden and Baker, meanwhile, the holy grail was located somewhere between Machine Head’s The Blackening and Dez Fafara’s post-Coal Chamber outfit DevilDriver. “Not many bands are doing that now,” Maden observes. “A lot of them are in drop G with HM-2s on it, whereas this is literally a refinement of your stock metal tone from the mid-2000s. That’s what we love.”
Guilt Trip went in knowing this is what they wanted and Getgood helped them to get there. Crucially, they did it using the band’s own equipment. Guitar-wise, the dominant force was a Jackson RR24 Rhoads, which “won the shoot out” due to its capacity for Meshuggah-esque chug.
“Then it was a Peavey 3120, which is quite a rare guitar head, straight into the miniature Ibanez Tube Screamer,” Maden says. “That’s it for the rhythm tone. Then we discovered the [Electro-Harmonix] Electric Mistress – all the harmonics were recorded with that on, and all the leads.”
“Every harmonic on the record has a bit of chorus on it,” he continues. “Nolly basically did a deep dive into Robb Flynn’s rig from Machine Head. We found that he was using that chorus so we bought one instantly. We turned it on and straight away it was like, ‘Yeah, we found it, finally.’ We tweaked it a little bit so we’ve got our own sound with it. But all the little leads, especially on Cut From God, that cool lead part, that’s all using the Electric Mistress. That’s it, I think.” Baker confirms it. “That’s literally it,” he says.
Sam Baker. Image: Georgina Hurdsfield
Travelling Light
This is a bit of a recurring theme for both guitarists – they’re not ones for gear overkill, whether that’s live or in the studio. Maden points to a recent co-headline trek with their friends in Sheffield metalcore institution Malevolence as an example of their approach. “They had to freight their gear and had like 14 Pelicans and the guitars,” he says. “And we literally had five things on the plane.” One of them, Baker notes, was a reusable carrier bag from UK sports retail institution Sports Direct full of merch. “When we go international now, our Quad Cortex is just going in our backpack,” Maden adds, with both players leaning hard on new EMG humbucker-loaded Jackson American series Soloists for that run.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, those precision-tooled metal guitars are a far cry from the duo’s entry point into playing. For a 12-year-old Maden, the first step was a sunburst Squier Strat from Argos, complete with “little amp, cables and all that shit”. “It was Kaiser Chiefs that made me want to play guitar,” he recalls.
“Music had finally become, like, an actual thing that I wanted to put on. Before that, I was just playing out, riding bikes, playing with Lego. I think I finally found something that I liked, whereas it was always just the radio in the car before that. With indie music it was the guitars that made it different to pop. I begged and begged my mum and dad for a guitar.”
Baker was a drummer first, but guitar was never far away thanks to an older brother who practiced religiously at home. Through sibling osmosis he heard Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down, eventually deciding to set aside the sticks in favour of six strings and a cherry red Epiphone SG.
“It was a joint Christmas present,” Baker says. “But I didn’t really play it at all. I got it, and then I just stopped until I was about 15. A mate of mine knew that I played a bit, and he was like, ‘Do you want to start a hardcore band?’ I played my first gig on guitar half a year after that. I’d just turned 16. The first thing guitarist-wise that I latched on to would have been something like Gallows, hardcore punk from the UK. I saw them jumping around and I thought, ‘That looks way more fun than drums.’”
Jak Maden. Image: Georgina Hurdsfield
Running Free
Running like a thread through both guitarists’ history, though, is one small red rectangle. It’s there on the spine of The Blackening and the Slipknot records that paved the way for Baker to get into genuinely heavy stuff — the Roadrunner Records logo. Now, years later, Armour of Angels is set to be released by the label that shaped their understanding of metal, closing a loop.
“Every band that I’ve idolised has been on that label, or is still on that label,” Baker says. “My first CD was a Nickelback one, All the Right Reasons,” Maden adds. “That was a Roadrunner one. For some reason, even as a kid, I just remember that little red thing. It’s probably the only record label I knew the name of. It’s a dream come true for all of us.”
It’s not one they intend to let fade out. Once Armour of Angels is released they’ll hit the road, mixing the odd festival date with a run opening for Dying Wish in the United States, building up to a set at Sound & Fury, one of the key dates in the hardcore calendar. Then, in the autumn, they’ll play an eye-catching headline run on home turf, including the Electric Ballroom in London, before heading to mainland Europe.
At each turn, they’re keen to put on for their scene, drawing attention to the way things have changed in the UK and, more pointedly, Manchester in the recent past. Twenty years ago bands such as Broken Teeth were holding down the fort. Now, the annual fest Outbreak has an arena-sized footprint on the world stage. They’re part of that buzz. “Not many UK bands have gone to America and headlined similar caps to what they do at home or in Europe,” Maden says. “Us and Malevolence going out there has really opened the door, I hope. We really flexed that we were from the UK.”
Guilt Trip’s Armour of Angels is out on June 5 through Roadrunner Records.
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