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The first time I saw Gallows perform, front man Frank Carter—who can’t be more than 135 pounds soaking wet—was standing a scant few feet away from me. Caked in sweat and dirt, chest heaving and eyes ablaze as if staring into some other plane of reality, he looked like the scariest and most fascinating human being alive.

This moment took place seconds after Gallows’ short but electric set at the Montreal date of last year’s Vans Warped Tour, where despite being hidden on one of the smaller stages, the band attracted that day’s most curious crowd. Last year, the red hot five-piece from Watford, England, were the Tour’s buzz band—the one that we’d all heard or heard of, but not seen.

The wait proved worth it, as Gallows didn’t disappoint. And while the dust was clearing and the crowd was breaking up, even as some of us were still picking ourselves up off the ground and pouring beer on our exposed wounds and into our thirsty mouths, two crystal-clear points emerged: we were scared. We were fascinated.

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Today, just over half a year later, Gallows is picking up real steam and front man Carter, who landed the top spot on the NME’s “Cool List 2007,” is establishing himself as a bona fide new-school hardcore legend. His snarling stage persona and his penchant for theatrics—he was tattooed onstage at the Reading Festival, and often does sets from the middle of the pit—further grow his story every day. But what publications like NME are missing is the rest of the band, the lads behind Carter.

Bassist Stu Gili-Ross, for instance, is as much a part of Gallows’ attack as anyone else, and his words go a long way toward explaining that being deemed “cool” isn’t at the top of the band’s to-do list.

“The reason we write the songs that we write is because there were no bands in the area we were from—in the area we were going to watch shows—that were playing the kind of hardcore that we wanted to hear,” he says. “Bands were playing the straight up Youth Crew 88-style stuff, and there [were] a bunch of bands playing the straight up metallic chug stuff. No one was really playing the slightly more mathy stuff, or slightly more left field, old school stuff.”

“We just wanted to be a band that we would want to go and see, basically,” he continues. “That’s where we were at with Orchestra of Wolves. We didn’t think about it beyond what we would want to go and see a band do.”

In 2007, when a special reissued version of Orchestra dropped on this side of the pond, the North American music media took notice almost immediately. Many critics—including myself—rushed to call Gallows the best and most important punk band out of England since the Sex Pistols, and while Carter didn’t shy away from that in 2007 interviews, Gili-Ross seems more interested in what the music represents than in hyperbolic statements. He contends that as vicious and “masculine” as the music is, its lyrics go a long way towards critiquing tenets that construct conceptions of masculinity.

“Everyone in the band has a real disdain for that kind of socially acceptable male attitude when it comes to attitudes towards women, in a vulnerable sense as well as in a predatory sense,” he says, arguing that Orchestra contains its fair share of social commentary and criticism.

“We’re all very aware that sometimes dudes do really horrible things in the name of macho energy,” he explains. “The hardcore scene’s a place where there really aren’t that many women and there’s a lot of hollow sentiment that girls should be treated equally in the hardcore scene. But you read any message board and it just now seems that it’s cool to be a dirtbag, again. It’s cool to be sexist. And that’s not something that appeals to us.”

“I find it much more prevalent in American message boards I go to, but I don’t go to the shows other than the ones we play,” he continues. “Our shows get a healthy female turnout. In the U.K., you don’t really get that many girls coming to shows. When you do, they get given the term ‘coat racks,’ usually, which is a derogatory way of saying that they’re only there because they’re someone’s girlfriend and they’re there to hold a coat while their boyfriend goes into the mosh.”

Criticisms of this nature can be found in songs like ‘Will Someone Shoot That Fucking Snake,” and the title track, “Orchestra of Wolves.” The former, Gili-Ross says, “is about date rape,” while the latter is a satirical piece about the soulless, mean-spirited pick-up artist interested only in conquest and degradation.

That said, Orchestra is about more than just social commentary.

“The lyrics to ‘Just Because You Sleep Next to Me Doesn’t Mean You’re Safe’ come from a very vulnerable aspect, where [the speaker is] obviously devastated that his relationship has gone tits-up. And in the same way, ‘Abandon Ship’ is about a sinking relationship. There are themes that permeate the whole album.”

As cerebral and intelligent as that all is, some will only surmise that Gallows’ furious stuff is nothing more than angry music written and performed by angry young men, good for nothing more than inspired pushing and shoving inside of mosh pits. Of course, this is sad; you always hope that people will see more than the tip of the iceberg. Still, according to Gili-Ross, it doesn’t seem that Gallows is ready or even willing to be known as a political punk band.

“The word ‘political’ itself, when combined with music, makes me shudder,” he says. “It’s not something that we’re about, and we often decline to answer any interview questions based on politics and what we think. Not world politics, just scene politics. As far as scene politics are concerned, we’re kind of so old and jaded now, that we don’t really give a fuck what the scene does and it can go and choke on itself.

“We just make sure we do our thing, and we’d lead by example, but we’d rather do it subtly, in the lyrics. If people are smart enough, like yourself, to see in the lyrics that that’s there, then that’s enough.”