South London metal unit Burner already have the support of the biggest names in the game.

Signed to Church Road Records the band released their debut EP A Vision of the End in 2022, produced by Lewis Johns (Svalbard, Conjurer, Employed To Serve). Metal Hammer promptly named Burner one of their bands to watch, and their 2023 debut album It All Returns To Nothing cemented a brutal sound that pulls from death metal, hardcore, black metal and crust punk all at once. Now they’re back with their second album, No One Is Coming to Save Us, coming out on 25th September, and the company Burner find themselves in has jumped to another level entirely.

Lead single Sunrise, Parabellum features a guest vocal from Trivium’s Matt Heafy, a hero of vocalist Harry Nott’s, What Will You Give? pairs up with Josh Middleton of Sylosis after the bands toured together in 2024, and Cult Leader’s Anthony Lucero features on the song Kurtz. These guest features are all a result of Burner’s relentless touring, punishing live reputation and genuinely distinctive sound. The album’s release is marked with a London show at The Lower Third on 26th September before the band heads out on a full UK headline tour, and we strongly recommend you catch them in a small venue while you still have the chance.

We spoke to vocalist Harry Nott to find out more:

No One Is Coming to Save Us is a bleak but truthful title, is that the driving theme of the whole record?

It's a bit more nuanced than that. The title, I feel, is a summation of all the other themes and ideas within the album, but with more of a directive to them for the listener. That's why the record begins and ends on a reflection of what that title means.

Across the album, I really wanted to express the loss and despair I feel at the state of the world, but with a view towards the history that has led us here. I feel that others before us have sacrificed so much to create the world we exist in now, and there's a great tragedy in how we've struggled and failed to learn those lessons. The climate crisis worsens every year, the tipping points approach. Deadly wars continue to rage. We grow more cynical and self-invested, communities growing further apart. Racism, xenophobia, fear - all still in great abundance. There's a lot of pain I feel and, for me, I think a lot of the album is about my own struggle with that pain, trying to move forward.

But I'd never want to leave the album in the kind of place where someone could just call it "nihilism" and that's it. Making music is far too important to me to waste your chance to say something on cliché imagery and slogans. So, the album's title is two-fold: no one is coming to save us from the dark place we're descending into. But, at the same time, it's a call to action: it's up to you and I to make that change. We have to do it together, to make good on the promise of the world that others fought and died for: stamping out hatred, creating a safe and prosperous world for us all. It's idealism, but if I don't have that kind of hope in my music, I don't think I can expect anyone to believe things are going to get better.

This is your second album with Lewis Johns, who has been making all the best UK metal bands sound absolutely huge. Can you tell us about his process and how he’s always able to get such massive results?

I couldn't tell you too much, largely because he's a real wizard with his mixes and I just don't know how he does it. He's just got both a great ear when it comes to feeling out the impact of certain sequences, tones and textures and where he can maximise all of it for the greatest effect, but also he's very intuitive when it comes to being a collaborator on the music itself. Beyond his technical knowledge (and the great equipment down at The Ranch!), he's someone who really gets stuck into the work of the people he's with, provided you're open to that kind of approach.

A lot of my work with him was really experimentation: I had an idea of what worked, but you try a lot of different things to see how you can layer things up, or produce something surprising, or get an interesting variation in there. He's someone who pushes you to do your best, and that's what any great producer does: they come in with their own vision and work with you to help make your work the strongest it can be. That's a skill that goes beyond just having great equipment and knowing how to use it: he's a terrific creative.

How did the guest features come about, and what inspired the choice to reach out to so many other artists this time around?

Well, we always had the ambition of really making this album as big as we reasonably could. Part of that is just asking, even for the sake of it, if other artists would be interested in collaborating with us. For me, it's something I've always appreciated: a good feature can really bring a song together and take it to the next level. We didn't have any way of anticipating we'd be as radically successful with the features we obtained for NOICTSU, though. We're as shocked as everyone else, even now.

We toured with Sylosis across the UK and Ireland back in 2024, in support of A Sign Of Things To Come. From there, it felt natural to ask Josh if he'd be on a track, to which he immediately accepted. We're very thankful for his support from the outset.

Candidly, it's not too different a story with Matt, either. We had just finished our set at ArcTanGent last year when it came to me in a rush and I pitched it to the boys right there: why don't we just ask him? We knew he was a fan of us, both from playing our music on his SirusXM Liquid Metal radio show, and through a mutual contact of ours. We went through a few channels and, to our shock: he said yes! But he could only do it after the tour they were wrapping up at the end of 2025. I spent the following months up to that time hesitantly in awe - it's a nice idea, but I'm going to believe it when I see it. I asked a few people to feature on our first album and it bottomed out. We had to give him a nudge, just in case he couldn't do it...but then a couple of hours later, he sent it over. In the studio, while we're recording drums, we all take a break to listen to his take. None of us can believe it and it was unbelievable. Particularly for me: to hear him screaming the lyrics I wrote, speaking them with such intensity, is madness.

But, being honest, the feature I'm most surprised we got was Anthony. We're all big fans of Cult Leader, but I knew they weren't a band that would easily go for a thing like ours. That's partly just down to not having any features prior, but also because of the disparity in the style and intensity of our music and visibility. They feel like a very serious band, which works absolutely wonders for what they do - but it's not exactly confidence building when you're wanting to potentially break that up with something that's your idea of what serious is, insofar as our style of metal goes. Sure enough, when I pitched it to Anthony, he wrote a very polite reply that explained he wasn't fond of features, but he liked our band and would listen to the demo to let us know. We all shrugged: it was no great surprise. But then our jaws hit the floor: he's up for it. Sure enough, the take comes in (the first one we got of any feature) and it's superb. Everyone smashed their features, but to this day, Kurtz is still my favourite feature and track on the record. Very happy with it.

Take us back to the very beginning before you were gigging. What was the initial spark that formed Burner?

Telling my own story here: I moved to London in 2018 and, from my early days of making music in a crummy hardcore band, I knew I wanted to try and ignite that fire again in The City. I met our original drummer Hugo and, after some experimenting with other musicians, we eventually circled back to an effort that led us to Nathan (our superb songwriter and guitarist). I found him in a Facebook group for wedding bands, when I was posting about people who wanted to join a Dillinger-Code Orange-type band. Silly stuff. The three of us practiced everything we had, developing a debut EP. Then, when we were tight enough, we went looking for a bassist. We found Finn in March of 2020. You know what happens then.

But lockdowns couldn't stem the excitement and, sure enough, we had that EP recorded. I'd like to think it was just persistence and perseverence, especially during Covid - to be truly excited about what you're working on and taking the time to refine and work at it, to get as good as you could with it. It put us in a great position.

Church Road are a terrific label who are doing fantastic things for the metal scene, how did you link up with them so early on?

Carrying on from my prior answer: it was while we were recording drums for our first EP, with Lewis. No one had heard of us, we'd never played a show, and we were slightly taking a gamble with Lewis: we knew he'd make the drums sound great, but we also knew he had good connections. If he liked what he heard...well, maybe someone else gets to hear it. We all ended up in the studio in 2021, dying to get out of the city and to see this EP we'd prepared for come together. He made some nice comments about the songs on the first day. We all smiled and thanked him for it, but didn't think all that much of it. The next day, he tells us he'd told a hardcore band that were signed to Nuclear Blast about us, saying we should tour together. We were shocked: he really meant it! Sure enough, by the end of the recording, he said he'd send it over to Justine and Sammy, for them to see what they thought. Time goes by, we don't think much of it...but then they appear and they want to work with us. We're very grateful that we could all be in the right place, at the right time.

Who are the bands that inspired you to do this in the first place, whether sonically or in attitude?

Speaking mostly for myself here, I take a lot of influence from hardcore bands, as well as grindcore acts: Dangers, Magrudergrind, Hang The Bastard, Blacklisted, Cursed...A lot of that very direct, in your face type lyricism. I wanted to load that into the more metallic sound of what we're doing, largely because I think it's more engaging than anything else. Musically, I think we pull from a lot of different places, which is why people find it so hard to categorise us. It's a bit of The Acacia Strain, some Wolves In The Throne Room, a sprinkle of Dillinger Escape Plan, a dash of Chimaira, the dramatics of post-metal influences like Rolo Tomassi and The Contortionist, the more death-oriented stuff of a Hate Eternal or techy The Faceless-type influence. We just try to make music that we'd like and think that we'd want to listen to, if it was us from the outside looking in.

What are the non-metal influences that are most important to Burner?

It's hard to say exactly here too. All of us listen to a lot of different music and it filters down in different ways: Springsteen, Queens of The Stone Age, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Doors, KRS-One, as a quick handful...Really, I think the influences, even if they're not sonic, are structural: choruses, melodies, rhythm, climaxes - all of this adds together to an idea of how you can write more compelling music. Nathan works wonders with it, very quickly. I can't often believe how he does it.

Do the four of you come with similar music tastes or do you pull from different corners?

We all bring our own ideas to the fold, but Nathan is the one helming most of the music. When he produces a demo, most of the time it's about 85% done, or so. Then, we work on it together - he builds on it from our feedback and we dig in from there. A lot of it happens in the live room, where we shop demos into something that could have a more cohesive structure, if there isn't one already, or more surprising ideas. But having that foundation from Nathan is very powerful, he's able to process a lot of quite interesting ideas and distill them into something we can all work on, that usually has a unique approach to it already.

If you had a time machine and went back to tell your thirteen year old selves you’d one day record a track with Matt Heafy, how would they react?

I think we'd probably cram into the time machine to go see. It's unbelievable. But, as times goes by, I'm starting to believe more and more. I try to stay grateful for moments like these.

Finally, what is the ultimate goal of Burner?

It's hard to say exactly what that is. I think we all have our own ambitions in and around the band's progress. But, I think one thing we all universally would like is to be a band that other people are influenced by. To be the bedrock for future musicians to work from would be an immense pleasure and it's one that will live beyond the finite life of any one band. I think a lot of people forget that: it's not necessarily about being remembered by Joe Public - it's carrying forward the passion and music to other musicians that feels transformative and real. Again, we try to stay grateful for it all and see where it takes us.

Burner’s second album, No One Is Coming To Save Us is out September 25th on Church Road Records, and you can catch them on tour in the following cities:

• Oct 24th - Nottingham, Billy Bootleggers

• Oct 25th - Leeds, Boom

• Oct 26th - Newcastle, The Lubber Fiend

• Oct 27th - Glasgow, Audio

• Oct 28th - Sheffield, Corporation

• Oct 29th - Birmingham, The Flappers

• Oct 30th - Southampton, The Joiners

• Oct 31st - Bristol, The Croft

• Nov 1st - Brighton, Green Door Store