Show Me the Body are rewriting the language of strength

I stop to smell a rose on a shrine mourning Foxy, a fluffy white cat and local celebrity. Just as a man leans out a window and smiles, eyes closed,  towards a flock of birds harmonising over the streets of East London.

Show Me the Body are waiting for me in a studio at the bottom of Mount Pleasant Hill, the perfect setting for a conversation with the New York hardcore, banjo-wielding, hip hop punks on the brink of releasing one of the year's best albums, pushing radical love to maximal volume.

“I used to be guided by fear, hate and aggression, and that’s how I led people. That was really like my - what do you call it? - my vernacular, you know, and how I showed strength. But now I’m learning how to show strength through love” frontman Julian Cashwan Pratt says on an IG reel that I watch as the final flashbulbs of their cover shoot fire.

Outside, the whole band is coming together around a picnic table, eating sandwiches and rolling a spliff. They're fresh off recording a cover of Amerie's "1 Thing" for BBC radio, and gearing up to pour their hearts into the first live performance of their new record Alone Together at The Cause later this week.

I start off by asking them where they’d like fans to listen to the album, and how they hope it makes them feel. “I’ve never thought about that before,” the Pratt begins. “If you have a car, bump that shit super loud, driving alone. When you're ‘doing your thing’ or when you're working hard, put headphones on and listen to it; that would be cool. Honestly, as far as feeling goes, I hope that we can communicate a message of militant love and understanding at such high levels of conviction that it’s like, a scary amount of love.” 

Alone Together is an album about praxis. It’s about putting belief into action and community first. It’s written and produced to unfold like one of their incendiary live gigs, opening with the 32-year-old Pratt belting Show Me the Body's credo full-throttle “radical love compels me to fight” — a line rooted in lived experience, about riding hell for leather for one another and uncompromising love.

The first time I interviewed Show Me the Body was in 2023, over ultra-violent Zoom rays from Pratt’s kitchen counter as the band geared up for a victory lap tour of their critically lauded LP Trouble The Water. Oregano, cracked pepper and brown eggs flew over the screen as he whisked breakfast, topless, for his soon-to-be pregnant partner Asha Maura, the photographer and art director behind Show Me the Body's album covers, and also the band's manager. We talked about building a global family of feel-good freaks through his youth crew CORPUS, finding peace in the pit, and the band's natural affinity for cross-pollinating genres in a way no one else was. 

We chopped it up about New York, martial arts and just as I was recounting my own stint scrambling around Spanish Harlem Orchestra gigs as a salsa dancer, the line cut. Pratt DM'd me afterwards to hear the rest of my story, telling me how his cousin had introduced him to salsa dura, Fania and Nuyorican records. He also shared facts that Bruce Lee was the 1958 Crown Colony Cha-Cha Champion of Hong Kong and kept a notebook detailing more than 100 steps to master rhythm and footwork. 

The man in front of me today is a loving father and ferocious frontman with his heart on his sleeve. But he's also a wounded soul…and so am I.

Around the same time Show Me the Body started writing Alone Together in 2024, I got a phone call from my friend on a Friday night asking me to meet for a drink. I couldn’t go, and she later walked off Westminster Bridge. Since then, I’ve watched my dad have a stroke and two seizures, and witnessed my mum endure two life-threatening brain surgeries. I’ve also fallen in love in a way so wildly beautiful I never thought it existed.

In so many ways, I’m the luckiest girl in the fucking world, but I’m scared shitless half the time, I might lose it all. Continually haunted by grief-stricken clocks, thumping out precious minutes, urging me to make each one count before there aren’t any left. A gnarly monster chomping at my happiness with its ticking teeth: “don’t miss a minute, missy.”

The morning of our interview, my internal timepiece was torturous. But I watched Pratt’s six-part ALONE TOGETHER YouTube series, then played the new record twice, as loud as my eardrums could take it, cried and felt happier than I had in a long time.

His vulnerable conversations at Joe’s Ginger in Chinatown with mentors, creative peers, best mates and characters from New York's underbelly reflecting on life, loss, family and the intersection of art and action moved me deeply. When I tell him, he humbly beams: "Dude, God bless, man. That's very kind of you to say. I'm glad you feel that way. I don't share my feelings a lot. On tour, we check in on each other and ask, 'How you doing?' but it's difficult to find those spaces to really express yourself.”

“The series was Asha’s idea. I flew home for one day and we shot all six episodes. It was really cathartic. Speaking to people I love and look up to gave me strength. They all gave beautiful advice. This is the first tour I've been on without my friend..."

Pratt tears up, looks down and no one says anything for a moment. "I'm having a very difficult time."

When pressed to reveal their proudest accomplishment, Pratt goes first, “In life? Making a child and raising her for two and a half years. Becoming a father has undoubtedly taught me how to lead with love.

“I think that also plays into my biggest feeling of accomplishment with the band and the second family we’ve created with CORPUS. For me, that’s been our greatest achievement as human beings in a band; making bonds and establishing true friendships with folks and other  musicians around the world.” 

Bassist and band co-founder Harlan Steed adds, "I’m very much the same. One of the things that's made me feel most successful is hearing that we've inspired other people to make and play music. I feel like that's what got me started, and that's what I want to do."

Having only been in the band for a year, Show Me the Body's newest member, Baltimore hardcore drummer Nijol Benjamin, takes a moment to think: "It's a hard question. My biggest achievement? My proudest achievement? Oh boy. As a musician, it's playing drums at this level, with these guys. In life? Just making it to the point where I'm picking grey hairs out of my beard." He pauses. "I didn't plan on making it this far. So it's cool to be, you know, here. Alive and doing well."

"Hell yeah. Amen, for real, man," Pratt and Steed reply in janky unison while hyping the skills Benjamin brings to the group.

Show Me The Body’s blend of hardcore and hip-hop is a sonic elixir for people under the same pressure and desperate for release. Their shows are akin to a spiritual offering or ceremony. Propelling devotees to rip off their tops, toss tins of “holy water” and erupt into a sweat-drenched euphoria while hurling each other to the Gods. With each body slam to the pavement, there’s an outstretched arm from a smiling punk. 

From the first chord, Pratt preaches about radical love, community and the socio-political hellscape we exist in;  he has his believers by the balls while continually tugging at their heartstrings, while they shout the lyrics back into his face. 

One of the breakout belters on Alone Together is "Dance In The USA", a song about embracing struggle and "the dance" we all do: how we hustle, and the good and bad things we get up to just to make it through the day. The idea is amplified in a music video that fuses freestyle street dancers, each flexing regional and cultural styles over thumping bass and banjo.

"Is it cool to dance?" I ask.

"Dude? Yeah. Dancing is the best!" the whole table agrees. Pratt takes the floor: “I think one of the tenets of Show Me the Body is that it's got to make people dance,” he tells me. "Whether that's hardcore dancing or people just throwing ass, it's got to be one of those. That's the first rule when we make stuff. A lot of ideas get thrown out because of it. We make demos all the time, and there are definitely moments where Harlan will be like, 'Dude, this one's just not hitting.' The funk is highly important."

After all, this is a man who once said to me, “We don’t play shows so we can stand up there and play rock star.”

“There’s no icon shit,” Pratt continues. “Our shows are a volatile ceremony where we’re all just freaks in a temple trying to feel something together and, hopefully, we feel something greater than our individual day-to-day experiences. The pit is a dance.

"I think sometimes people think of Show Me the Body as a 'message band,' and that's like the most embarrassing, terrible thing to me, you know what I mean? We have messages, but no more than other humans have messages, right? No more than anyone else singing a song and communicating something."

“I'd rather speak about how we feel so that people aren't confused, and then the music can stand alone. You know what I mean?I feel a responsibility to say things that I know only I can say but when we started Show Me The Body, in no fucking way did I think, ‘I’m going to make music and it’s going to save people.  Only now can I look at our music and feel so much joy seeing how kids connect to it” 

Pratt digs deeper: “For example, I don't like Phil Ochs. God bless. My dad loves Phil Ochs, and respect to Phil Ochs, but I don't like that stuff I feel like calling someone a 'message band' puts them in a box. It's not a cool club to be in. It's highly pejorative and waters down their lyrics."

Pratt waxes lyrical about trans-feminist hardcore punks G.L.O.S.S. “For example, that's not a message band. That's just a sick band. People could argue their 'message' is about being trans in America when they holler, 'We're fucking future girls,' but that's just what they're talking about, and they're so sick.”

Benjamin chips in: “Rage Against the Machine is a message band. I think that's a band that wouldn't be offended to be called a message band, straight up.”

The first hard song Pratt ever learned on guitar was “Bombtrack” by Rage Against the Machine. He was eight, and his life would never be the same. “My mother started sending me to Michael Pestalozzi’s apartment after school,” Pratt says. “He was this crazy badass guitar player, session musician and songwriter who was homies with my mum. God bless him, he’s not with us no more.

“I’d gotten kicked out of third grade because I had a lot of learning disabilities, serious behavioural issues and shit, and I was highly dyslexic. I think the reason my mum brought me over was because Michael was highly dyslexic too. He was able to talk to me about it — like, ‘Yo, what’s going on?’ He had his own struggles, too. He was the first ‘weirdo’ I met who got me, and one of my first mentors. He taught me so much. A really smart guy — a scary-ass, six-foot-four skinhead, badass dude who showed me a lot of love.

“He’d ask, ‘What do you want to learn? What do you want to listen to?’ That’s how he taught me guitar, and that changed my life. He gave me something I could try to be good at. 

"I was listening to The Ramones, and then he showed me The Cars. He put me on to Rage Against Machine and I think sometimes he was like, ‘I’m gonna make you into a sick guitar player,’ and I was like, ‘Okay… that’s not what I am.’ I’m not that good a guitar player to this day, but I still play in his memory. I feel blessed to have spent so much time with him.”

Pratt grew up in a family of music fanatics and great talents. His mother was an opera singer,  he has relatives who followed the Grateful Dead on tour and his dad introduced him to what he calls “freaky stuff” like Tower of Power, The Meters and Grateful Dead.

He became engrossed in New York’s hardcore, underground, and punk rock scenes after he volunteered at the Lower East Side’s ABC No Rio social space, and found a positive outlet through martial arts training.

“When I was like probably like 14 or 15 or something, I met David Kaplan," he tells me. "He was a fellow Jewish dude from Brooklyn and Shaolin Kung Fu master based in Chinatown. He noticed me and said  ‘Yo, you got to chill out with all the dumb shit and come train with me.’ I would train with him every day before high school. I'd give him like 20 bucks a week, and he was just like looking after me. He was a huge influence on my life who taught me a lot about discipline and self-respect.

“I don't know if martial arts plays into our music but it definitely does to how we perform. Show Me the Body plays the same way for two people as we do for, like, 2000 people. We do it the same way with the same high level of commitment”

Show Me the Body paid homage to the Kung Fu teacher in their “One Train” music video which shows the duo training and roaming downtown New York. Pratt marked a tender full-circle moment recently by flying to Rome to introduce his daughter to Kaplan and his family: “That was such a huge deal to go over and be all hanging out together. That was so special.” 

At the age of 12, Julian used to stand outside gigs delivering “gibberish vocals” and hardcore ad libs over top of the bands who were playing. “At first, people were upset because they thought I was making fun of their homies,” he says. “But I just wanted a band and I wanted to sing!’”

He met bassist and Queens native Steed at Elisabeth Irwin High School, the 1920s “progressive commie school” once attended by Robert De Niro. The pair clicked over thrash-funk outfits like Lightning Bolt, Primus and Wu-Tang.

“I’ve been playing music with Harlan for more than half my life,” Pratt says, lighting up. 

“It’s been about 16 years. We started in high school when we were 14. There were only two bass players in the school, including me, so he didn’t have many options,” Steed jokes.

“The other one was actually in the band for a second too,” Pratt recalls, surprised. “That bass player is the person who designed the coffins. That’s funny—we never put that one together.”

“When I joined the band, I just wanted to play in a band,” Steed explains. “I didn’t really have a prerogative to play hardcore. I loved punk rock, and Julian had maybe written four or five songs before I joined. I learned those, and then started bringing in my own ideas.

“We work on each other’s music. One of us might bring a riff or a main idea, but it goes through a filtering process where the other person arranges or reshapes it. That’s what makes it more dynamic—and what makes it sound like Show Me the Body.

“I always like to think that the illest shit is something neither of us could imagine on our own, you know, I mean? Like with all art. Unless you're some goddamn Mozart-level visionary, if you can already see it fully in your mind,  imagine every element, it must not be so dear or so sweet to get to.” 

Everyone nods and Steed continues: “For me, I think when folks can come together to make a new, third entity that's the dopest shit”

By 2009, Show Me The Body and CORPUS – their artist collective and creative community – had formed. They exploded onto the hardcore scene and independently released two EPs, Yellow Kidney and SMTB, while gaining traction and a cult following from notoriously raucous, guerilla-style DIY shows. They played in an alleyway beside Steed’s house, under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, in basements, at house parties and anywhere else they could cram in a generator and a few hundred rabid kids. 

In 2016, they celebrated a deal with Loma Vista and the release of their debut album, Body War, flanked by crab tanks in Chinatown at the Imperial Ballroom Dance Studio.

Alone Together is their fourth studio album with Loma Vista and their sonically sharpest, most vulnerable, romantic and urgent. “The album pretty much started coming together two and a half to three years ago, right when I guess, simultaneously, Asha was pregnant and another one of my mentors had passed away," Pratt explains. "So I think, the album started happening because I had this influx of grief and pain, and then this influx of responsibility, life, and eventually joy, and love.”

For the record, Show Me the Body teamed up with producers Klas Åhlund (Robyn, Ghost) and Kenneth Blume III (Geese, Fcukers, IDLES) aka Kenny Beats, who they’d previously worked with on a cover of the Beastie Boys' “Sabotage”.

Åhlund listened to the band's demos and flew out to New York to meet them at their basement studio. He didn’t hold back on advice: "He said that half of our music sounds like something only Show Me The Body could make and that we should just do that all the time," Pratt recalls. “He said the other half of it sounds like Biohazard."

The album was completed at Blume’s California studio, significantly levelling the band’s songs. “Kenny was like ‘I want you to make the best Show Me The Body record yet,' and we believed him," Steed recalls. “We had kind of gone through a process with our earlier records of doing these studio tricks to recreate our music, and Kenneth was like, ‘No, you guys are a band, you should play the songs live,' and we really liked that. The important part of that is just the symbiotic sound. There's no grid or click track. It's a vibe-based beauty,.”

“I think his approach to recording vocals is really strong and really helped our new record. He knows how to make a vocal performance sound really, really strong.” Pratt smirks “Previously, our vocal recording experiences were insane, and usually recorded after we’d be on acid for hours and finally be like, ‘we got it!’ …at 6 am when I sound insane.

“When we recorded the vocals for K-9, I sound like that because it's like 5:30am in the studio, and I was going insane. So it's cool to work with Kenny, who's like, a professional’

After working with Show Me The Body, Åhlund and Blume loved the outcome so much that they teamed up again to co-produce the new Weezer album. 

Alone Together is accentuated by evocative free jazz and bold brass on the opening, interlude and finale. “We had the idea to do the horns in the studio, and Kenny was like 'Okay, I'll get the best musicians, I know how to get it together',” Pratt explains, “But I was like, 'Yo, I don't want no LA session fucking people coming in,'  you know what I mean? So I called Gio Escobar from [avant-garde New York underground collective] Standing on the Corner and asked him if he would take the riffs from the songs, and then reinterpret them as jazz standards, themed around the film Taxi Driver. Basically that was the main references. I’ve only ever used film privately or secretly before as a theme.

“All the horn interludes you hear are based on riffs from the album. The first interlude is a rearrangement of the last riff on the record. And the finale is based on the first riff of the record. And the middle interlude is based on the middle song on the record. I haven’t broken it down this literally to anyone ebfore, so you’re getting some god shit here!”

All three members of Show Me The Body have spent as much time digging hip hop crates as they have hardcore. “Growing up I only listened to New York rap. I only really listened to New York hardcore," Pratt explains. "I've always loved underground and classic records that have a scene around them, or an intro, a narrative. They play out like stories or movies. So I guess this album Alone Together is a kind of homage to the classic, influential rap records like Roc Marciano who starts with poppin shit, Wu-Tang, Wrath of the Math by Jeru The Damaja. It’s also a crass invitation to fuck with the gang.” 

As the sun starts to set, I ask about their first introduction was to hip hop? Benjamin slyly answers: “The first time I heard rap, or the first time I cared about it? My introduction was Coolio, that was my first cassette ever. When I started to care with 50 Cent Get Rich or Die Tryin."

“Julian and I really connected in high school over Wu-Tang,” Steed adds. "I really feel the choices, musically. The sound and the attitude of the music is so New York. That’s something that resonated with me, and I think that's so powerful about hip hop, is that the voices are just the regional. Our music sounds like it's from New York because we're from New York, and that's the attitude we bring into it. The first hip hop I heard was on the radio. Z100 in the late 90s. I remember hearing Big Pun and Busta Rhymes on there, and that was influential. My older cousin played me Tribe Called Quest. But it wasn’t until I heard Big L that I started to care. I was like ‘oh shit!’ I really love Big L still and he was my introduction to like greater hip hop landscape.”

From the outset, Show Me the Body refused to fit neatly into hardcore's boxes. They staged the kinds of shows purists wouldn't dare, folding MC battling, hip hop, noise music and sludge metal into their world while building CORPUS alongside the band. What started as a crew of kids going to shows together and painting graffiti grew into an independent record label, creative collective and mutual-aid network. Today, CORPUS organises food and clothing drives, teaches free self-defence classes for kids, and hosts boxing, mixed martial arts and calisthenics sessions in the park every Sunday in the summertime. 

“Me and three other skilled folks are there every Sunday that I can make it, and we kind of run an anarchic and horizontal workout,” Pratt tells me. "Everybody has skills, and they share those together. If someone's brand new we work on footwork and striking, and see how we get with that, we might stick to that all day.  Then everybody who’s come before will start hitting mitts. Sometimes there will be people running mitts, people running hand and foot drills, so everybody gets comfortable. It’s a family affair I bring my daughter, Asha goes too… sometimes a grandparent pulls up and watches our daughter for us while we do it.“

As we start wrapping things up Pratt asks me about my father Dwight, and if he managed to sell his Harley yet? After my dad had his first stroke, he could no longer ride his motorcycle, and he was really, really low. I flew to Calgary, a rodeo city and my hometown in Canada to cheer him up because Show Me The Body were playing and the band got my mom and dad and I in. "I hope he sells it soon," Pratt kindly tells me as my own tears well up talking about it. “I saw a picture you posted and he sure looked good on that bike.” 

Pratt's instinct to nurture family never seems to end. Last August, I watched his daughter see Show Me the Body for the first time, standing in front of a heaving mosh pit at a free show on the bandstand in Southwark Park. Back home, he's deeply embedded in New York City's rooftop pigeon community, and lights up talking about the band's rapidly growing Chicano fanbase in Los Angeles.

Just as quickly as he talks about the people who've shaped him, he's eager to champion the next generation of bands kicking down doors: "There's people who are really pushing the limits of what's been done before in heavy music, and I think it's dope. It's almost like there's a weirdo heavy music renaissance right now, and we're just happy to be part of that."

Before we get up to say goodbye I ask him how he’s feeling about such a personal body of work being put out in the world and what still drives his passion to make music. "Dude, honestly, it's been very difficult for myself. Since the loss of our friend, I haven't written any new Show Me the Body music since that happened. It's extremely hard." He admits he’s scared shitless for the album to come out, but behind tearing eyes, everyone gets up to hug goodbye:  “I'm looking forward to spending time with these two assholes, because that's what feels good, and just spending time playing music.”