Panchiko’s D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L>: That Time The Internet Brought A Band Back Together

At the turn of the millennium, four teenagers in Nottingham would finish recording and release a four-track EP, cheaply burned to 30 CDs before being boxed up and shipped out to labels and journalists. When met with silence, the dream would be hung up and left behind, instead pursuing adulthood, relationships, careers, and general quietness. Twenty years later, the lead singer, no longer a teenager but a man now working in education, would be contacted saying his old band’s degraded CD was found in a charity shop and had been put online for the world to listen to. With little to no information about the band anywhere online, a community of strangers worldwide had formed with the sole intent of pioneering a search effort to find any information about the abandoned album, eagerly waiting to hear more from a project long forgotten by its creators.

1997-2000 25 years ago, four high school friends from Nottingham, England, were in their parents’ houses, playing video games and watching cartoons while practicing their music for their modest band Panchiko, misnamed after the Japanese gambling game ‘Pachinko.’  They’d be close to finishing what was to be their debut album, stylistically titled D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L>, which was highly anticipated…by not many outside of their friends and family. 

The four-piece had formed just three years prior in 1997 while still in school and had ironed out their kinks performing at Battle of the Bands and local bars like Berlin’s, which would kick them out for ‘being too young,’ according to the band’s memory. At the time, the band consisted of lead singer and guitarist Owain Davies, keyboardist and guitarist Andrew “Andy” Wright, bassist Shaun Ferreday, and a drummer referred to by John who would choose to stay in the band’s mysterious but private past. In true basement-dwelling-teenager fashion, the four-track album would be recorded on the cheapest recording equipment they could afford, mixed with whatever tape-recording tech they could get their hands on. Song names were inspired by Ghibli anime movies and Dune science fiction books, while music took form after a mix of Radiohead, Super Furry Animals, and Nirvana, with samples from their Sega video games. The music would then be cheaply burned through low-quality equipment to 30 CDs, and while a few were given to friends and family, most were sent out to journalists and record labels in hopes of lucrative responses.

2002 Though they only heard back from one independent label by the name of ‘Fierce Panda,’ which yielded nothing more than a friendship between Owain and its owner, their excitement would fuel the work of their next EP, “Kicking Cars,” which would share similar results and never see a public release after recording only a select few songs. By 2002, only two years after their debut release, Panchiko would unanimously agree to disband, allowing their few CDs to collect dust on friends’ shelves or fold into stacks of hopeful projects on label agents’ desks scattered across the country.

2016 Sometime between 2000 and 2016, someone somewhere must have upgraded to an iPod or a Spotify account and begun clearing out their old CDs. Through a dropped-off box at a local charity shop, the band’s abandoned desires permanently etched into disc format would be received, tagged, and stocked by an Oxfam employee and put on the store’s shelves for the public. Oxfam is an England-based charity shop with the bulk of its stores being within the country (trust me, this matters). From there, a music fan in search of something new would drag a finger across the covers of the shop’s CD collection, ears hungry for a meal they hadn’t yet experienced. The cover of Panchiko’s D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L> would pop off the shelves. The name juxtaposing a girl’s wide-eyed glare from a frame of the manga, Mint na Bokura, they had to hear it and picked it up for forty-nine pence. The title track would continue this genre disagreement, offering a wonderful shoegaze indie sound with a repeating sample underlaid beyond a plucking guitar and a soft, mostly confident young man’s voice. All this existing under a grating tug-of-war between different frequencies of static, degraded artifacts of cheaply purchased bottom-bin audio equipment, and the heavy pull of years gone by. It was capturing in a way, the sound of a forgotten bowstring dragged across beautifully tuned music that was unique and promising. The outro especially had a drawing synth that accompanied a lovely, almost vaporwave marimba melody that vibrated against the static that now sat as a backing texture, distorting the time your mind wants to place it at, removing it from time altogether, and softening out as the track closes. 

The purchaser was intrigued, but after not finding any information about the band or their songs online, they reached out for help in the form of the anonymous imageboard 4chan. On July 21st, 2016, they would post a photo of the CD alongside a message, “Hey hey, I picked this up because it looked interesting. I wasn't able to find any references to it online whatsoever. Even with super obscure bands, you might expect to find some[thing,] an old MySpace page or mention in some forum. Does anybody recognize the album?” The front of the cover would offer little information besides album art, the name of the album, and some store stickers of price tags and barcodes. The back of the CD offered a track list and credited the recording artists solely by their first names: Owain, Andy, Shaun, and John. The post would receive traction with users theorizing about the distortion’s origin, spewing thoughts about the music, comparing it to Bowie and Death Grips, and some even offering to buy it off the user while asking the original poster (OP) if they could upload a rip of the CD. OP would oblige by giving this recording, but shortly after, deleted their post alongside its pictures and any trace of a head start on any more information on the mysterious album.

2017 For the next year, the recording would bounce around message boards, echoing its initial shrouds of obscurity until it was re-uploaded to YouTube in 2017. The channel it was originally uploaded to was deleted two years later, but the video was permanently reuploaded on a backup channel, by the name of Dismiss Yourself, on August 5th, 2019. The eighteen-minute, thirty-five-second, four-track album would play with the CD cover as its background. The video's description mentions that, “[t]he album was first posted onto the Internet when a user on 4chan made a thread about the album. Since then, nothing else has cropped up relating to this album and its origin.” The videos would bring the unknown songs to a newer audience, finding a home for members much more determined to find out information about its creators. 

2019 Just months after the video’s permanent re-upload, a Discord community of dedicated sleuths created by an Argentinian user going by Zod would grow in tandem with the view count of the album’s re-upload. Their goal was to find a clean recording of this lustrous album, other works possibly released by the band, and, in the best-case scenario, the band members themselves. This space provided a mutual meetup location to drop any info or theories that could then be pursued and explored by the expanding population of Panchiko fans and those along for the ride who were determined to solve the mystery of this lost media. As of now, they only knew the band was most likely in England, the year of the release, and the somewhat common first names of the band members. That’s it.

Sleuths had known of the price tag with the Oxfam name in the top right for years at this point, locking the possible location to England, which only offered a section of the hay bale to find their needle in. One anonymous user claimed they remembered seeing the disc at an Oxfam in Southampton, leading users to email that shop looking for any shreds of information, but to no avail. They knew a charity shop wouldn’t keep records of every CD they’ve sold going back almost five years, but they didn’t have many options. Out of desperation, the community would also email every musician in the surrounding area with a name that matched anyone of the four credited with the creation of the music, yet still they had come up with zero leads. But there were two stickers on the original CD casing, one with a price tag and one with a barcode. 

January 2020 That blurry barcode in the top left contained a list of fourteen digits seemingly strung together randomly. This was a gift code specific to someone who had previously donated the CD to the shop, but due to UK privacy laws, the store would’ve been forbidden to give out any of this information. This detail was assumed to be a dead end and abandoned until one user took a second look a bit closer. On January 19th, 2020, the community would receive a message from a very active sleuth, The Rizzard of Oz, reading in part, “…by looking up the last 4 digits of the code that’s on the front cover and Oxfam on Google, an Oxfam store in Sherwood, Nottingham, shows up under different articles. If this is it, then this could help quite a bit.” For the first time, the search had turned to what they wouldn’t know just yet was the home city of the band’s formation over two decades prior. The group would then revive their tactic of messaging everyone in the area with matching names to the CD’s credits, out of which ‘Owain’ seemed to be the most unique and promising. They searched Facebook to see a list of all ‘Owains’ in the area and began messaging. 

Since the band disbanded in 2002, time had worked its way between their relationships, as she always does. As they grew up, the four went on to enjoy more fruitful careers. Shaun would do a bit of traveling and become a tree surgeon, trading his bass for a chainsaw. Andy would be the only one to stay in the music field, becoming a sound mixer and master for bands while working on side projects of his own. John would lose touch with the band and seek a private life, while Owain would eventually move into a career in education. That is, until one winter morning when he woke up to a Facebook notification on an account he no longer used. Wrapped in its contents was a message he surely thought was an old mate pulling his leg. It read, "Hello, you'll probably never read this, but are you the lead singer of Panchiko?" He'd respond the next day with a simple, "Yeah." It was a message from someone he had no way of knowing and no way of believing. To Owain and Andy’s knowledge, this dream had been hung up long ago after seeing no tangible success; they didn't even know the album had ever been uploaded online before this, so why was he getting asked about it from a stranger now? Surely it had to be a joke.

The more he learned about the entire situation, the more it started to make sense, or rather, sink in. The initial trepidation was being replaced and pushed out by feelings of disbelief. “Do people really like this? Like, there’s so much good music on the internet. They’ve got so much choice. Why do people like this so much?” Owain recalled in an interview with Vice magazine. It’s an interesting thought. Why did people rally around this album so strongly? In short, the community. The confusion and excitement around finding an unfamiliar album untouched by the internet, unclaimed by its owners, and unlistened to by the general public. Together, this international group of people with one thing in common could spend hours together researching a common goal and connecting across geographical borders to find the origin of such sweet-sounding songs. It’s the same reason anyone joins a fanbase: come for the music and stay for the community. “Andy was just like, ‘Bloody Hell!’ We couldn’t believe it,” Owain continued. Shaun said he “hadn’t listened to [the track] in over 20 years,” and John was shocked all the same.

February 2020 The fans were elated to find the band's identity but equally crushed as Owain told the user, “He has no plans of releasing a clean copy,’ as he did not have the original masters saved anywhere on his systems. In fact, none of the band members did. Remember at this time, still all anyone had heard, including the band’s own members, was the twenty-year-old disc rotten churning of the tape, which Owain only just officially confirmed was due to degradation. So as fans processed the news and geared up for more searching, revitalized by the biggest break in the case yet, they’d be met with additional great news.

Andy had begun a search of his own, mirroring their investigative resources, with maybe a bit of a leg up on them. He assured fans that he “will keep asking friends and family for copies and hope that we might be in luck.” Shortly after, through a message shared on that Discord server started a year prior, Andy shared that a friend of his had managed to track down a copy they’d kept safe in their collection all those years. The CD featured a slightly different cover, featuring “even more terrible photoshop work,” as Andy had put it. This copy was in far superior condition to the Oxfam find, containing little to no disc rot, and because of this, Andy was then able to transfer the CD and remaster his 17-year-old self’s album, once again earning his ‘engineer and producer’ title originally printed on its backing. Through friends, Andy would also find the band's second EP, Kicking Cars, which never made it online. He chose to complete the same restoration and combine the two into a full-length album of the original EP’s name, D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L>. The deluxe album, made of both remastered EPs and the rotted original audios, would be freely released to the public on both YouTube and Bandcamp on February 16th, 2020. Within hours, it shot up Bandcamp’s best-selling albums of the day, and after two weeks, it was released on Spotify, garnering millions of plays from streaming listeners, most of whom were completely unaware they were listening to a crowd-sourced digital-archaeology project. 

December 2021 Now backed by a fan base their teenage selves only dreamed of, the trio decided to give live performances another shot, and what better place to debut than their hometown and their band’s birthplace, Nottingham? On December 5th, 2021, two decades after a flopped release, the group of friends would be standing backstage listening to the cheers of a crowd mostly younger than the album they were about to play. Mystery and allure lay thick in the air, as in addition to all the past mysteries, the band hadn’t shared any images of themselves publicly before the show’s commencement. Walking out onto the stage to cheers of ghosts from dreams gone by, the band thought of no better way to introduce themselves to the world than with the song that had already done it all on its own years before. They were utterly shocked to hear words sung back to them that they had long since uttered onto the recordings. After the show, they were delighted to be held hostage by a winding line of hundreds of fans that had come from all over to see the show. Andy recalls, “We thought we’d just finish the show and sign a few CDs, but I signed faces and even shoes—an hour and a half later, my hand was hurting!” Shaun added that he even saw a fan with the album’s cover art tattooed onto his arm. “It’s just so wonderful that some people have really resonated with it,” Owain would say of the whole experience. The magical night would be recorded and later released as a live album.

2021-Present Panchiko has gone on to flourish, releasing new music for the first time since the recovery of D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L> in 2023 with the album Failed at Math(s) and again earlier this year with their newly released Ginkgo. They’ve gone on to do shows across Europe and North America, headlining tours and wedging themselves onto festival lineups. They even embark on their next US tour this week, beginning in Boston and lasting through June as they crawl east along the continent toward Vegas. The band currently has 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify and shows absolutely no signs of slowing down.

It may seem as though their success can be attributed to that anonymous 4chan user who introduced the internet to their CD or the user who pushed it to YouTube seeking a wider audience, but truly, they have no one but themselves to thank. They did the terrifying part of the music dream, being vulnerable enough to try. Maybe at first it didn’t seem fruitful, but it speaks to how many extremely talented artists don’t get a chance to be heard because they have to hang up their dreams and get a job that would pay their never-ending stream of bills. The second they grew old enough, they had instruments in their hands recording music, and the second that dream became possible again, they took it and never looked back. It didn’t matter how long it had been or where life had taken them; they were ready. 

Panchiko continues to defy expectations with their stellar releases littering the years post their rediscovery. Their story is one that breeds hope and inspiration, but I hope it also breeds a yearning to discover new artists. It's challenging to get out of the habit of the top 100 or auto-generated playlists where spots are paid for or negotiated onto and to find true small artists. But the effort is worth it. Look locally at dive bars and showcases, get to shows earlier and listen to the opener, listen to the mixtape your friend made you, and share it with someone who would be into it. Their success wasn’t unfounded. They were. The internet only made those 30 CDs spread further, not introduce anything they hadn’t already done. Sometimes an artist just needs to be given a chance at your attention, and in a world where corporations and suits seemingly own most of it, don’t forget to give some to the little guys. They might just surprise you.