“The guitar players barely holding onto control as they go into the corners at top speed are my favorite players”: How the Dirty Nil’s sound runs on vintage Marshall power and a healthy serving of the Rat pedal

The last thing Luke Bentham ever expected to find in his mailbox was a piece of Vatican stationary. But as he and his bandmates in the Dirty Nil prepared their sixth album, 2025’s blistering The Lash, the Holy See served them with a cease-and-desist letter.

Guitarist/vocalist Bentham and the boys weren’t looking for trouble – only for cover artwork vicious enough to represent the high-gain hard rock on their latest long player. So when the Vatican rejected their use of a snapshot Bentham took of a bronze relief sculpture known as “the Horrors of War,” the band enlisted an illustrator to realize their vision instead.

“Their lawyers are pretty serious,” Bentham says with a laugh. “I think that’s a career highlight for me.”

Fortunately, the brutal riffs and stark arrangements on The Lash survived the Vatican’s inquest. Recorded quickly and without agonizing over multiple takes or overwrought production ideas, Bentham, who carries the band’s guitar-and-melody engine, found himself in a rare place of momentum and freedom. “This one just felt different,” he says. “It’s the most fun I’ve had in the studio.”

Bentham says he was “on a heater,” bringing in riffs with a gnarlier edge than he’d leaned into before. The band was listening to a lot of the Jesus Lizard, and he immersed himself in Duane Denison’s thorny guitar playing.

Songs came together during hours-long jams where time evaporated. The music for opener Gallop of the Hounds materialized so quickly he had to circle back to write lyrics only after the arrangement had already hardened.

It was the opposite of their old process, where they stoked acoustic sketches into full-on ragers. This time, if a song was quiet, like Spiders or This Is Me Warning Ya, they left it quiet. If it felt punishing, they pushed it into the red.

The Dirty Nil - That Don't Mean it Won't Sting (Official Audio) - YouTube

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Part of the shift was Bentham’s evolving philosophy of what a guitar should do in a rock band. “There’s not a ton of shredding on this one,” he notes. Instead, the band focused on building “apocalyptic, cacophonous moments” together as a unit.

That doesn’t mean he denied himself all the primal pyrotechnics he’s known for. “Rest assured,” he says, “there are a couple songs on this record where I really get my money’s worth out of the entire fretboard.”

His influences map neatly onto this approach. Bentham’s north star is Pete Townshend, and he considers the Who’s seminal Live at Leeds as the gold standard of electric guitar playing.

There’s plenty of Townshend swagger in his style, but his emotional center belongs to James Williamson on Raw Power, whose riffs he calls his all-time favorites. Bentham gravitates toward bands that sound like they’re “just about to fall apart,” citing the Stooges and the Replacements as models.

“Pretty much anything that absolutely peels the paint, I’m in,” he says, “particularly anything with a really gnarly right hand in the guitar playing. That’s the stuff for me. The guitar players barely holding onto control as they go into the corners at top speed are my favorite players.”

That love dates at least to his early twenties, when he fell for Raw Power, the aptly named 1973 album from Iggy and the Stooges.

“I became completely obsessed,” he says. “I was like, ‘I’m buying a Les Paul Custom, and that’s going to be the only guitar I play for the rest of my life,’” he says. “And so far, so good. It’s been about 14 years of just playing a Les Paul Custom and enjoying every fucking second of it.”

The rest of Bentham’s rig is just as straightforward. He’s a full-blown evangelist of the ProCo Rat stomp box, to the point of keeping a bag of LM308 chips on hand to mod new pedals for more output, less gain, and a wider filter sweep.

He sets the distortion low and lets the volume knob do most of the work. “There’s so much potential clarity in a Rat,” he says.

It’s not the fuzzed-out chaos most players want from the pedal. He’s after a sort of barbed articulation cranked to stadium volume.

The Dirty Nil - Fail in Time (Official Audio) - YouTube

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For The Lash, Bentham ran his Les Paul through an A/B box, splitting the signal between his Marshall plexi rig (without the Bright cap on the Treble side) in the live room and a 5-watt Supro in the control room with a Rat in front of it.

He sat next to the smaller amp, coaxing feedback with the precision of a welder guiding a flame. “I was playing the Rats as much as I was playing the guitar,” he says.

Unlike his heroes, whose inter-band conflicts arguably fueled their biggest creative achievements, Bentham finds inspiration for the Dirty Nil in the simple pleasures of rocking out with friends.

“I’m not a big believer in the idea that tension makes good rock records,” he says. “I think that when you’re not thinking and you’re just doing it is the best stuff. I still get the same thrill when I bring in a riff that I can’t wait to show Kyle [Fisher, drummer], and we’ll just blast away.”

• The Lash is out now via Dine Alone Music.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.