"Nosotros aspire to be demonised," announces Ezra Miller of Sons Of An Illustrious Begetter, the cantankerous-genre, queer-spirited group formed with childhood best friend Lilah Larson, and their more recently-found mutual soulmate Josh Aubin.

The group are in London for the beginning evidence of a European bout in support of their second album, Deus Sexual activity Machina: Or, Moving Slowly Across Nikola Tesla. Similar much of this year'southward about resonant art, the record is characterised past a complex kind of resilience. The single "Extraordinary Rendition" takes it proper noun from a CIA-practised course of abduction, and centres the generational hurting of growing upward in the U.s.a. post-9/11. "Unarmed" preaches the power of inventiveness in the confront of the horrors of the world, just doesn't shy away from the viscera of those horrors ("Who'll stay in this fight when they start shooting… I should never say we were unarmed/'Cause we were armed with the music"). The endmost track "Samscars" is a meditative, tender cocoon; emphasising the importance of (chosen) family and community for survival: "If I cling to you lot/You cling to me/We cling to life"

The concurrent hopeless/hopefulness that the record embodies is a familiar dichotomy in 2018. Information technology feels especially pertinent to queer people, and the legacy of horror and survival that precedes us. "The meditation [that the album] came from was the opposite of a hopeful one," confirms Miller. "It was actually a meditation on despair. If you lot face despair, face up grief, face loss – and if yous permit room to actually receive all that is broken, evil, tarnished and undone – you really create room to see where the possibility for renewal and for growth lies."

The album was recorded in bursts, starting in London in 2016, and working around the individual members' other artistic pursuits: Miller's career as an actor, Aubin's visual art projects, and Larson'south solo work. "The songs have remained really relevant for us," says Larson. "There is enough paradox and conflict and contradiction that nosotros're able to always find a route to relate."

For some of the songs, the band incorporated electronic elements into their music for the first time. On "History", mechanical sounds growl and churn alongside the guitars and drums – robotic life alongside human life. "Information technology was just a natural progression of where we were headed as musicians and sound makers," explains Aubin. "We accept all of these things nowadays and we're merely surrendering to that fact rather than trying to hide information technology in any mode." Miller elaborates: "Letting the machine speak, and giving phonation to the motorcar, is a wide exercise in music, only still probably the to the lowest degree acknowledged. We really wanted to consciously and intentionally requite voice to the machines. We've been electrocuted, then we wanted to start electrocuting others."

"Representation requires some kind of assimilation – and we're not interested in assimilation" - Lilah Larson

It'southward refreshing to encounter fine art by queer people that foregrounds sex, to the extent that it is embedded in the anthology title. "Resisting rape culture while trying to remain sex positive is a complicated similitude that must be plant," states Miller. Although queer representation in culture continues to grow, there is frequently a trade-off with an old-fashioned idea of acceptability. In mainstream culture at least, heterosexual sex (whatever that means) remains the simply acceptable form, and then sex is frequently left out of queer art for the sake of visibility. "In many cases representation requires some kind of assimilation – and we're not interested in assimilation," says Larson. "We're much more interested in the other fashion that the gods of old were adopted into the new religions," adds Miller, "which is demonisation, or diabolisation."

Ezra Miller

Despite this desire to be demonised, the band are aware that being able to make this choice for themselves – and their visibility as a whole – comes from relative privilege. "We come with a lot of acceptable markers," says Larson. "For 1 affair, our whiteness. Equally we have slipped through the cleft in the door, we effort to hold that footing and ensure that that crack widens, and that all sorts of people can continue to have their voices heard in broader and more explicit ways."

"We map our own idiolect of resistance and support" - Ezra Miller

This is neatly represented in the video for "U.S. Gay" – an anthemic, angry response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting that is at once nihilistic and hopeful ("If you wanna fuck shit up I'll fuck with you/And if you want to gear up information technology up nosotros can do that too"). The video, directed and bandage by artist Mars Hobrecker, features a group of queer artists, writers, musicians and dancers taking upwards space in a society with elegance and determination. The band acknowledges the importance of the forcefulness and support of queer community, while also playing that role for each other. "Nosotros have contact with a lot of different communities of support and resistance," says Miller, "but nosotros are too not and then direct 'of' any of them, because of the way we live, work and engage with the world. We map our own idiolect of resistance and support."

Lilah larson

"This record really came from this unit existence in isolation together," explains Larson. "We go along to internally cultivate a sense of family and affidavit, and explore the many ways in which our identities are queered through our relationships with each other: what family tin can be and what partnership tin can be; what our music and all forms of living can be."

The group'due south close-knit, multifaceted synthesis is key to their conviction, and carries their sold-out Sat night prove in London. Dressed in matching velvet suits, they swap instruments and flatten on-stage hierarchies – there is no atomic number 82 singer – with the kind of cohesion that is constantly threatening collapse. The songs and the group'south bodies are pushed and stretched to the point of exhaustion. The day earlier, Miller had repeated a mantra from one of his friends, a dancer and choreographer: "The best run is the 1 where the dancers are almost falling over."

Josh Aubin

When on stage, they are locked in to a kind of sixth-sense cognition of each other; what Miller calls their "weird neurolinks." This extends to the audience – a disparate group of queer people that exudes warmth and feels immediately familiar – whose connection with the ring feels supernatural at points. Halfway through the testify, the group steps to the front of the stage for an acapella cover of Nirvana's "All Apologies". The early "everyone is gay" line is a cute knowing flash to the audience; just the residual of the song is emotionally charged, as Aubin, Larson and Miller cling to each other until the closing line: "All in all is all we are." At the guts of a set of contained catharsis, information technology feels like healing. This duality of destruction and intendance forms the cadre of the group, and their want to overcome patriarchal violence and injustice: what Miller describes equally, "the culture we seek to destroy, first and foremost in ourselves, and then – everywhere."

Deus Sex Machina: Or, Moving Slowly Across Nikola Tesla is out now