“An all-encompassing experience”: Speaking to Scaler ahead of their Jarred Up Fest headline slot
In case you missed it, it’s the 2026 iteration of the Jarred Up Festival on Saturday! If you’re reading our magazine, you probably don’t need to be informed about what our festival is about. However, safe to say it’s fucking great.
This year’s headliners are the incredible Scaler, and we wanted to chat to them ahead of the festival to see how they were feeling about their upcoming set. So here is our interview with them. Enjoy!
How did SCALER come together as a band?
We got together after we’d all been living in Bristol for a few years. We knew each other from previous projects, either playing together or separately. The band was really a reaction to the boundary-pushing experimental electronic and dance music we were being exposed to in the city, but approached with the tools we had from playing rock and metal, guitar music. It was about working out how to reflect what we were experiencing using the setup we already had of a more conventional band.
What has the evolution of the band been like from then till now?
It’s been broken up into a few chapters, really. We had a very busy start playing shitloads of festivals, which was then rudely interrupted by COVID for a few years. That’s when we made our first record, so it was a very weird experience coming out of lockdown and having to release an album we’d never actually played together. Then we changed the band name, which felt like a new beginning in itself, and we released our second record, which was very different to the first. That meant learning how to navigate those different palettes and translate them live, and working out what we do and don’t like, what we’re good at, and what works on stage versus in the studio. We’re constantly learning really, wanting to do things differently every time.
What can we expect from a SCALER gig?
Hopefully an all-encompassing experience, and something quite unique: a mix of sounds, textures, tempos and genres. Hopefully it’s loud and exciting, you can dance, or you can just watch. Hopefully it’s an escape from normal life, and hopefully it’s not like anything you’ve seen before.
You’re known for blurring lines and bending boundaries. How important is genre and classification in music making?
Genre classification is pretty irrelevant to us really, and I think to most people these days. People don’t stick to one genre anymore. Everyone’s listening to playlists and radio shows that cross over all sorts of stuff. It’s very different to even 20 years ago, when you had rock kids, rap kids, metal kids and pop kids etc. Now everyone’s all over the place. We have certain tools and sounds we like and keep coming back to, but we never think about what genre it is.
Endlessly (Deluxe) came out earlier this year, featuring four new remixes. What do you think makes a good remix?
I love it when you can still hear and feel the original song, but it’s been totally turned upside down. It becomes its own new thing, with a nice nod to the original. Yushh’s remix of Broken Entry, the most recent one, did that fantastically well.
Who would be your dream collaborators for future remixes, or other work?
We played at Sonar festival in Barcelona this year and saw an incredible set from Goth-Trad, who has had quite the career arc from Deep Medi Dubstep legend, morphing into an industrial- tekky-160bpm - slow/fast thing, easily the most engaging thing we’ve enjoyed as a group in a long time.
It feels difficult to commit to dream collaborators but I think seeing the length & breadth of Bring Me The Horizons career is hugely inspiring, they really have done it in a way that is incomparable, without compromising their vision. People like Gilla band, The Bug, Loathe - all very dark, twisted, noisy and chaotic in the ways that we love.
If you had free rein to remix/revamp/cover anybody else’s song in the world to make it a bit more SCALER, what would you choose and what would you do to it?
I guess if we were gonna do an official remix, I’d love to get my hands on some My Bloody Valentine tapes/stems, but that’s probably from more of a fanboy perspective. Maybe pulling apart a Slowdive song would go down a treat, anything with power/beauty or chaos.
Who else should we be listening to right now, from your hometown of Bristol or beyond?
There’s always so much good stuff happening in Bristol. I went to see Jabu and Memotone at the weekend, and they were fantastic. I’m seeing the Tara Clerkin Trio this weekend, who are also brilliant. And HAAL are supporting us on a couple of upcoming shows, they’re doing something really cool and get better every time I see them.
Rank these three seven-hilled cities for our readers: Sheffield, Bristol, and Rome.
Bristol
Sheffield
Rome
I absolutely love Sheffield, but I live in Bristol. I’ve never been to Rome, but it looks pretty good. Also we have E scooters now so hills aren’t as daunting as they once were.
What can we expect coming up in the future from SCALER?
We’ve got a few shows this month, and then our new EP is out in February. It’s a stripped-back, focused version of the band. We spent so long crafting our second record, Endlessly, it was an ambitious mountain to climb, and we did loads of things we’d wanted to do and plenty we never thought we’d be able to. So it’s been really nice to just jump in a room with some toys and bash out four tunes that get straight to the point - the meat and potatoes of the band.
You can catch Scaler headlining the Gallery stage at 9:30pm at the Jarred Up Festival ‘26. A limited amount of tickets are still available, and you can purchase them here.
Words: Edie McQueen
