There are at least five artists with the name Humanist:

1. A British multi-instrumentalist and songwriter.
2. A hip hop / rap artist from France.
3. A Serbian hardcore / punk band.
4. A death metal band from Brazil.
5. A blues rock band from New York.


1. Humanist is a project of multi-instrumentalist / songwriter and producer Rob Marshall.
The debut album Humanist was released on 21 February 2020 on Ignition Records. It showcases the vocal talents of Dave Gahan (Depeche Mode), Mark Lanegan (Queens of the Stone Age) and Mark Gardner (Ride) among others — a heady brew, conducted by Marshall (guitarist of Exit Calm and co-writer of Mark Lanegan’s Gargoyle album) who wrote, played and produced all the music.

Rob hails from Teesside in the North East of England, a land of blast furnaces, petrochemical estuaries and fiery skies, the broken heartland of the industrial revolution. He grew up in a small terraced house, with six framed pictures of Elvis in the living room, and music never far from his parents’ record player. At the tender age of eleven, Rob saw Jimi Hendrix on the telly, and his young mind was blown. He spent the next five months secretly stashing his £1.50 bus fare and lunch money by walking to school and not eating, just so he could buy the cheap guitar and amp set he’d set his heart on. He proceeded to teach himself how to play by practicing endlessly to Hendrix, T-Rex, Stones and Beach Boys records.

“I’m fairly quiet and dreamy,” he muses, “my head’s away in clouds of thoughts and imagination, but I’m driven to be as real and authentic as I possibly can musically, trying to push forward and harness all I’ve got; it was never really a choice, but the only thing I ever felt I could do - to swim with the tide, accept your fate, ride the waves. I’m a shy person but on stage my guitar leads me to a place of innate confidence, so I guess that’s where I’m most comfortable”.

Rob formed his first real band in the year 2000: genre of the music of Lyca Sleep was psychedelica. The band toured extensively with South, The Warlocks and Engineers. Later Lyca Sleep morphed into Exit Calm: "This band reclaim the guitar band as something to have faith in again,” wrote Mojo,
They released two critically acclaimed albums, played festivals including Glastonbury, V and Leeds/Reading. Big tour supports with Echo and The Bunnymen, Doves and The Music followed. After extensive tours in Europe and Japan, they split in 2015, and Rob found himself without a band.

Moved by his new surroundings, Rob eventually sat down to write, quickly developing a piece that sparked an idea for an ambitious project that dealt with the quite philosophical themes — mortality, the ways we find meaning, the liberation of the human spirit.

Humanist is also a magnum opus musically, a fully realised and rounded work — not only Rob’s first solo project, it was also the first music he’d ever fully produced, teaching himself production while making the record, just like he did with his signature guitar sound.
Rob also played and recorded nearly all of the instrumentation, but he had a vision of the album going far beyond a one-man project, opening its palate and scope by making it a showcase for many of the singers he’d always admired.

“I can sing a little, and I do sing on some of the tracks, and I’ve written some of the singing parts too, but I’ve always preferred the art of collaboration, I guess that’s being in bands your whole life…so I had this daft ‘wish list’ of vocalists I’d always loved, which I passed to my manager, along with some early demos..I had the full expectation of being told NO. To my surprise, nearly all of them said yes, and it was an enthusiastic yes too. I was blown away. I still am - to be working with some of my musical heroes”.

The first to respond was Mark Lanegan (Queens of the Stone Age), which began a deep and ongoing musical friendship. Mark didn’t know Rob’s work, but he fell in love with it, and agreed to perform on several tracks. He later asked Rob if he had any spare material from Humanist for his own album. Rob didn’t, but in a flurry of inspiration over the next seven days, he wrote and produced six tunes for Mark, all of which made it onto their first collaboration together, the much celebrated album Gargoyle (2017, Heavenly Records) which Mojo described as “A triumph”, The Guardian “A bravura statement” and went onto become Mark’s most successful record since 2004’s Bubblegum. Mark’s forthcoming album Somebody’s Knocking (Heavenly Records, October 2019) features six more co-writes from Rob, but the tracks which first inspired their bond are finally available here on Humanist.

The album features vocal contributions from Mark Lanegan, Mark Gardener (Ride), Dave Gahan (Depeche Mode), Joel Cadbury (UNKLE), Jim Jones (Thee Hypnotics), Carl Hancock Rux (David Holmes, Portishead) and John Robb (The Membranes) among others. Rob provided the finished music and song titles, which suggested the subject matter, and the vocalists responded to these themes with their own lyrics, giving the work unusual variety, providing each individual track on the Humanist debut with distinctive elements within a unified whole, united by an overarching exploration of the concept of Humanism — in Rob’s words, a study of.

“Life, birth, death, religion, mortality. A philosophical stance, looking at the value of people and what we mean to each other…It’s about creation vs. evolution, Heaven vs. Hell, the grave vs. eternal life, and how human beings react to those concepts. It’s an album about what hope means to us all.”

2. A hip hop / rap artist from France. Only an album Au Delà De Nos Différences was released.

3. A Serbian hardcore / punk band. Only an album Dehumanizacija U Toku (2009) was released.

4. A death metal band from Brazil. Only two singles Kill, Flense, Lacerate (Demo) and Extremist Scum (both in 2015) were released.

5. A blues rock band from New York. Only an album Failed Transmission (Demo Version) (2017) was released.
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