"I picked this album up shortly after it came out, and at the time I was in a teenage band, who were awful, and I wanted to scream and I wanted to sing but I didn't know how to do both, and I heard this record and I just kinda gave up on the idea. I remember thinking 'Brody Dalle's doing this better than I ever will, and it's a girl,' and immediately I just loved everything about it. When you're a young teenage boy in the suburbs at some point you've got to get by on testosterone alone just to survive in that field of football games you don't want to play in. I just loved Brody fiercely, unapologetically being herself, and it just sounded like a glass of fucking acid in your face. I really like every record they've made, but Coral Fang specifically is as close to acid in the face as music gets. Every now and then you'll get a band that works purely on chemistry, and then sometimes there's a person in the band that's just magnetic, and for whatever reason you just can't get away from them. I think it's got a lot to do with that open sense of self and the confidence that comes from knowing who you are as an artist. It doesn't really matter if you've got no idea who you are as a person – I've just become a dad and that's turned everything I thought I knew about myself on my head – and she's definitely a role model in that respect, in regards to just unashamedly being herself. She sings and there's a sound, it's like an extra instrument. It's rare you can have someone who can put so much style into every word."

"I had an instant soft spot for Ari Aster when he treated anaphylaxis (in “Hereditary”) as the terror that it really is, whilst some other contemporary directors sadly still think someone’s face swelling up is hilarious. “Midsommar” really goes to places untraveled. I heard a lot about its folk-horror roots along with similarities to “The Wicker Man,” but I keyed much more into its cathartic wail borne out of grief. I remember seeing a video of the performance artist and musician, John Duncan lying naked on the floor and letting out an extraordinarily protracted primal scream and the dark heart of “Midsommar” lies somewhere within that realm for me. The film is brimming with the explosive power of grief and it’s one of the starkest examples I can think of in modern cinema. My first reaction when seeing all that verdant grass was the almost invisible menace of ticks — an anxiety that Aster quickly acknowledges. The fear of tick-borne encephalitis is not unusual in both Sweden and Hungary where the film was shot and in some askew and unintentional way, I could imagine seeing the film alternately as a fever dream of someone who had been afflicted by the disease during a meadow ritual. Of course, the front of house is hallucinogenic folk horror, but maybe I bypassed that due to my lack of knowledge, which led to a more primal and simplistic interpretation. I was also blown away by the presence of Björn Andrésen, whom I remember from Visconti’s “Death in Venice.” Aster’s film buff credentials are really to the fore here even though I’m aware that nobody sadly uses the term “film buff” anymore. The ghosts of Bergman, Jancsó and Paradjanov circle the film."