Making It Her Own: Lee Aaron Is The Metal Queen And So Much More
While watching the music video for “Metal Queen,” Lee Aaron reveals that being set on fire somehow wasn’t her biggest concern on the day it was filmed. “The funny thing is I was more nervous about the snake,” the legendary Canadian rocker says over Zoom regarding the various perils that popped up during that 1984 shoot. “The thing about being 21 years old is you are kind of scared but you’re kind of fearless. You’re like, ‘I can’t die.'”
The Metal Queen character, which Aaron portrayed in both the video and the equally notable album cover, seems similarly immortal. Forty years later, it’s still on the minds of many. The Manowar-esque outfit is enshrined in The National Music Centre at Studio Bell in Calgary. There have been endless fan tributes, from cosplays to Lego figurines to Funko Pop!-like characters made out of fondant. “One time, I went and saw a drag queen in Vancouver dressed up like the Metal Queen,” Aaron notes proudly. And there’s also quite a unique item in Aaron’s collection of Metal Queen trinkets.
“Hold on. I have the ultimate thing,” Aaron says, briefly leaving the screen and returning with her prize. “There is a guy in Halifax here in Canada who makes marionettes of famous people.”
It’s surreal watching Lee Aaron move the Metal Queen marionette, dexterously controlling its stroll across the desk, a layers-upon-layers scene worthy of M.C. Escher. Then again, it makes perfect sense. This impromptu scene encapsulates the career of an artist who has cannily moved through many spaces, from a multi-platinum Canadian rocker to a rebirth as a jazz and blues singer and back again, each step expanding her profile beyond the ’80s sexism and stereotypes the boys-club music industry saddled her with. It’s also symbolic of her breakout, “Metal Queen,” a song of empowerment with a video that is the epitome of heavy metal.
That video is a document of its time that’s also timeless, a metal marvel complete with fire, snakes, swords, assassins, a laser-eyed robot, and a giant metal spider, all of which perfectly balances the genre’s dualist nature of kitsch and coolness. After a few viewings, one realizes that it’s Aaron who is controlling it. Thanks to her larger-than-life performance, the video transcended its original marketing intentions, turned its gaffes and tropes into gold, and became a guiding light to a generation then coming of age.
And so, 40 years later, here’s Lee Aaron, the celebrated figure who might as well be Canadian royalty, pulling the strings and once again using her boundless performing talents and charisma to bring the Metal Queen to life.
Recently, Aaron has also been breathing new life into some other classics. Her new covers album, Tattoo Me, out now via Metalville Records, partly derives its title from the track that kicks the collection off, an alternately more muscular and slinkier take on the 77s’ “Tattoo.” “I’ve always thought songs are like tattoos,” Aaron said in a press release. “Tattoos are permanent on the skin, but songs are permanent on the soul. When I heard this tune about a decade ago, I knew I wanted to record it one day. It had a gritty, Stonesy, glam-rock vibe, and I loved the sentiment tattoo me on YOU. Over the years, I’ve had many fans get tattoos of my signature, and that’s about the highest compliment they could ever give me besides loving the music, too.”
During the COVID lockdowns, Aaron and her band became adept at recording at home, a process that carried over to Tattoo Me. “We decided we were going to just do this album on our own because we wanted the luxury of not being on the studio clock,” Aaron explains. That time allowed for an attention to detail that manifests in a myriad of ways. For one, Tattoo Me plays out like a lovingly constructed mixtape, utilizing keen sequencing that amplifies and helps connect its eclecticism.
“I didn’t start out being a rock singer,” Aaron notes. “I grew up in musical theater. I was well-versed in a lot of jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley writers, and classic theater stuff. It’s not like in the ’80s I only went home and listened to my Mötley Crüe albums, although they’re fabulous in their own right. So the album itself is kind of a reflection of my somewhat eclectic taste.”
Thus, Tattoo Me features classic rock staples one might expect Aaron to slay, such as Led Zeppelin’s “What Is And What Should Never Be” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way,” but there are also surprises, such as Elastica’s wired “Connection” and a gender-flipped version of the Undertones’ eternal song of the summer “Teenage Kicks.”
“We were done recording. We had 10 tracks. And I was listening back to them and thought, ‘Man, we just need one more banger on this record,'” Aaron says. “[My guitarist and I] were brainstorming and bouncing tunes back and forth. Out of the blue, he just said, ‘Whoa, what about ‘Teenage Kicks’ by the Undertones?’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, I just got chills.’ We literally recorded it the next day, because, you’re right, it’s one of the great power pop songs of all time. And I love the idea of singing that song from a female perspective, the ultimate teenage sexual angst tune.”
So, what makes a good cover? “I think you have to obviously choose material that resonates with you, number one,” Aaron explains. “Number two, I think it’s funny: I was in an interview yesterday, and this interviewer said [we’ve] pulled [some of the material] further away from the originals than others on the album. And I think to me, the art of being a good interpreter is knowing how far to take it. [For] some of the tracks on this new album, we didn’t change all that much other than we added a bit of feedback and a female voice. [On] others, we pulled further away from the original and really changed a lot of the instrumentation, the approach, and made it our own.”
One could say, as a modus operandi, “making it her own” has defined Lee Aaron’s career. After all, it’s what helped set “Metal Queen” in motion.
“The song was co-written by myself and George Bernhardt. George and I were in a band when we were 15 and 16 years old,” Aaron remembers. “He was from a neighboring high school. They asked me to come and audition. They picked me as their singer. So we were sort of like the prodigy kids from a couple of different high schools locally in Brampton, which is just outside Toronto. And he and I wrote that song in 1983 when we were on tour across Canada.”
That early ’80s hard rock world wasn’t exactly the most hospitable place for women. “This was the era where guys would slap you on the ass, and you were supposed to take it as a compliment,” Aaron says. “And I was just like, fuck that. Pardon my language. I was really struggling with a lot of that.”
Another struggle was the way Aaron was marketed. “I started in this industry when I was fresh out of high school. There were wonderful things about my first manager in terms of being an ideas guy, but there were also some not-great things. ‘We’re going to get bookings if we tape your breasts together and show lots of cleavage in this poster.’ And I was just a kid. I thought, ‘Well, he knows better than me.’ I didn’t really understand I could say no. I didn’t really understand what was being created and also the power of my own sexuality.”
And so, “Metal Queen” became a way to pour all of those frustrations into a song, therapeutic catharsis by way of a pummeling hard rocker. “When George and I wrote that song together, it was supposed to be like, ‘No, women can rule the world,'” Aaron explains. “‘Women can do everything a man can do and women can be the boss.’ The song was about the matriarch, and it was supposed to be a real feminist statement and pushback against that ’80s sexism, which was rampant in the world of hard rock.”
“Metal Queen” starts pushing back right from the start, opening with a statement of intent:
She comes like thunder, rising from the ground
She’ll bring you under, she moves without a sound
She holds a passion like no other could.
Now when she talks, the word’s understood
Now, whether anyone else grasped the song’s meaning during the album cover or music video shoot is another matter.
“I showed up at the photo session, the video shoot, and because there was so much money to be made in the music industry [in the ’80s], everybody had a job,” Aaron recalls. “I didn’t get to pick my own costume. I showed up, and the art director, said, ‘This is what we’re doing, and here’s your wardrobe girl, and this is what the vision for what we have see you wearing.’ I thought, ‘OK, I like the idea of being the queen, but the fur bikini, I was struggling a little bit with that. It was like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. ‘Let’s make you look like this.’ So yeah, I think the initial narrative and meaning behind the song was completely eclipsed by the ’80s marketing of women.”
Of course, that pervasive dehumanization wasn’t only in the marketing. “A lot of us were treated like novelty acts,” Aaron says about the women in hard rock. “I loved the Wilson sisters [of Heart] because they played their own instruments. They wrote their own songs. They were musicians who were respected. They were part of a band, and they didn’t trade on their sexuality. And that was everything that I wanted to be. I was struggling constantly to wear the clothes I wanted to wear. I don’t want to wear the really revealing pair of shorts. But because there was so much money to be made, you were battling against the powers that be that thought they had better ideas about how you should be marketed. It’s like, ‘How can we maximize this female commodity and make the most money we can off it?’ It was a struggle to be taken seriously, not only as a musician, but also in the boardroom. I’d go into meetings, and they’d be like ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. All of us men have ideas.’ And I know it’s not that way anymore, but 40 years ago, it was.”
Much like “Metal Queen”‘s lyrics, one peak at the Metal Queen album cover shows Aaron asserting her will where she can. With art direction by Dean Motter, who was fresh off of winning an album cover design Juno award for Anvil’s Metal on Metal and would later create and write comics like Mister X, Terminal City, and Batman: Nine Lives, Metal Queen’s sleeve contains some of the label-mandated trappings: Raquel Welch? Check. Provocatively placed short sword? Check. However, Motter and Aaron make a subtle but wise choice: The Metal Queen’s eyes are shooting daggers into the lens, projecting a sense of strength, a real ‘I’ll lop your head off with this sword with the macaque skull pommel’ stare. “In the face of all of this,” those eyes say, “I’m going to sell the hell out of this theme.” Also, for…uh…reasons, there’s a taxidermy alligator in the background.
“You mean an alligator doesn’t make me more badass?” Aaron offers as a playful rebuttal.
When it came to the video with a $10,000 budget, “badass” was the original pitch. “The way that it was presented to me was it’s going to be comic book stuff, right?” Aaron remembers. “At that point in time, Conan The Barbarian, the movie, had become hugely popular, and they were sort of saying, ‘You’re going to be like a female superhero. You don’t take any shit from the guys. This super-powerful matriarch is going to rise from behind this mountain with all this smoke.’ And I’m thinking in my head, it sounds great. ‘We’re going to have a guy that does fire there. We’re going to have this scene where they’re going to try to capture you. You’re going to break free and you’re going to be the triumphant comic book hero in the end.'”
The promises kept rolling in. “My manager at the time said, ‘I’m having this amazing drum rise built by a company that does airline stuff, and it’s going to be a massive metal menacing-looking spider.’ We were so excited. We’re like, ‘Oh, this spider’s going to be badass.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to be able to take it on the road, and we’re going to have a big parachute. It will look like the spider is right behind you.'”
As it often does, reality started to creep in when the band got to the studio. “We get to the ‘Metal Queen’ shoot, and I’m like, ‘That looks like a big turtle,'” Aaron says about the supposedly massive metal menacing-looking spider. “‘Why is the head so big?’ And [our manager] was just like, ‘Well, somebody got the specs wrong.’ It was seriously a Spinal Tap moment for sure.”
While getting the specs wrong is a disquieting bungle for a company that “does airline stuff,” the dimensions of the big turtle turned out to be the least of its problems. “They couldn’t stop the riser. It was so unstable. My drummer, Atilla [Demjen], he’s drumming, and the whole thing’s going all over the freaking place. So they had to try to secure it down with sandbags and guys holding the legs to get the shots of him.”
Aaron’s riser also required some movie magic. “I’m on some dodgy scaffolding with spotters being lifted up on a forklift. They’re like, ‘Stay super still. Hold onto [your] sword for balance and try not to breathe in too much of the dry ice.'”
Huffing dry ice wasn’t the only potential danger on set. One of Aaron’s animal co-stars had a history. “They brought a python in. The guy who was a snake wrangler limps over to me. I’m like, ‘What happened to you?’ He said, ‘Oh, Betsy coiled on me one day.’ And I’m like, ‘This is the snake that I’m going to [shoot a scene with]?’ I was almost messing my pants when I was doing that scene because I was so freaked out after I saw the wrangler. They had five or six guys holding the snake straight to prevent him from coiling while we were doing that shot.”
The animal hijinks didn’t stop there. While far more docile, the marathon shoot, which started at 8AM and ended at 10PM, was held up by a dove that didn’t want to take directions, chewing up double-digit takes of the 16mm film stock thanks to a bevy of bloopers. “There were outtakes of me, the last scene where they’re sending in the dove to land on my arm,” Aaron says. “Well, that dove would not land on my arm. Oh my gosh. I got my arm out, and it went ‘coo,’ landing on my other shoulder. So there’s a bunch of outtakes of trying to get the dove to land on me. It was pretty funny. I was making a bunch of funny faces.”
Speaking of funny faces, there’s the video’s unexpected co-star, a little metallic welding failure that can charitably be called a robot. “This was my manager’s big vision, which we, of course, all went along with because we thought it was going to be super cool,” Aaron remembers. “But I didn’t know he was going to have gigantic par lights for eyes. I thought they were going to be little laser beam things. Those are like gigantic thousand-watt pars.”
Unfortunately, her bright-eyed robot pal didn’t have much of a career in showbiz. “I believe it got recycled for scrap metal back then,” Aaron recalls. “I think it was stored in a warehouse for a little while, and we were just like, ‘There’s just no way that this thing can come on the road.’ We did pull it out for one showcase, and that was the famous El Mocambo where the Rolling Stones played in Toronto. I did a showcase for this album. We pulled it out for that, but there was no fire coming out of the mouth or anything like that because that would’ve fried somebody’s hair off in the days of dangerous pyrotechnics.”
Surprisingly, the least volatile part of the “Metal Queen” shoot was the fire. In one scene, a monk is engulfed in flames. “So there was a guy who was a fire expert there,” Aaron says. “They did do that professionally. They’re like, ‘[The actor] can only be on fire for a maximum of six or seven seconds, so you’ve got to get this shot.’ The cameras got in place, they set [the actor] on fire, he stumbles, they film him, and then a bunch of guys come over with fire extinguishers and put him all out, and his skin was protected.” (The same couldn’t be said of his robe, which contributed to a minor continuity flub in an earlier scene: As the monks brandish chains to shackle our hero, one of their hoods is already singed.)
And then it was time to set Lee Aaron alight. “Setting my arm on fire was kind of like an afterthought. I knew there was going to be fire bars, and I knew that there was going to be a guy set on fire, but I believe this was kind of like, ‘How do you feel about us setting your arm on fire?'”
Before the fire gel went on, Aaron received some crucial instructions regarding her Styrofoam surroundings. “I was worried. They said, ‘Pretend like you’re really struggling, but don’t pull too hard on these chains because you’re going to pull the columns down. You don’t want to pull a column over on yourself.'”
Aaron got fewer instructions when it came to the swordplay. “I remember getting there — nobody thought things through back then. I’m 21 years old, and I’ve never swung a sword around. I’m going to try to remember my baton classes when I was five years old.”
The suggestions from the director’s chair didn’t help much, either, forcing Aaron to do what she calls a “Pete Townshend” in one shot. “I think I was just singing, and they were like, ‘Well, do something. You got the sword. Swing the sword around.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, here I go.’ Honestly, in the modern world now, if you were doing a movie, they’d send you to work with a sword master. Back then, everything was just winging it.”
And yet, despite the big turtle blunders and too-close-for-comfort Betsy encounters, despite the potential dry ice inhalation accidents and uncooperative doves, despite the robot with the AMC Pacer headlight-looking eyes and the star doing sword windmills that would’ve beheaded her band if it wasn’t a prop, despite the narrative being cobbled together in editing and just the general sense of winging it that pervaded the entire production, the video for “Metal Queen” rules.
“Metal Queen” operates with an epically hazy, dreamlike logic, the kind of thing your subconscious manifests while your corporeal form drools on your math textbook. The synth-scored opening scenes foreshadow the eventual fate of the Metal Queen: villainous monks, spiders, snakes, chains clipped to columns conveniently outfitted with carabiners, and an assassin who looks uncannily like Udo Dirkschneider. With a scream, the song begins, a gloriously thudding rocker that could make earthquakes jealous. Within the Metal Queen’s sanctum, guitarists duel, the bassist bangs his instrument, and the drummer twirls his sticks before riding atop an extremely dodgy big turtle crying out for an OSHA complaint. Between the band’s theatrics, Aaron rises from the ground armed with a sword and delivers the song’s hook with powerful belting. But all is not safe. Despite fending off the creeping assassin, the Metal Queen is overpowered by chain-wielding monks who knock her weapon out of her hand.
Reminder: Keep your head on a swivel, which is the most important thing one can learn in Metal Queen School. Soon, the captured queen is in chains, licked by a gas range blaze near a suspiciously flammable-seeming diaphanous sheet. Nevertheless, worry not: the eyes of her rescuer shine dimly in the background. Right when it seems like our hero will be flamb%d worse than an arsonist making Bananas Foster, a robot that looks like a William Hartnell-era Doctor Who production ran out of money appears. As an appropriately fiery solo roasts a fretboard, the robot quickly dispatches the monks with an oral firestorm, thus securing 18 billion dollars in US Defense funding. It then cuts the Metal Queen’s chains with a Pink Floyd laser show. Now freed, the Metal Queen can safely return to hanging out with snakes and spiders and making metal with her mates, which is all any of us can ever hope for in this life. The video closes with a dove earning a peck from Lee Aaron for finally landing on her arm.
While the “Metal Queen” video might’ve been seen as an embarrassment during the dour grunge years when anything ’80s was tipped into a landfill, it has aged well thanks to adhering to one of metal’s prime visual tenets: It can be goofy, but it’s awesomely goofy. In a world that increasingly seems to demand conformity, being awesomely goofy is almost an act of defiance. And so, it scratches the part of metalhead’s brains that thirsts for an escape from the strictures of normalcy. It’s five minutes of a good time offering a break from a reality that provides too few of them, especially for those who feel cordoned off from the mainstream. In a way, then, “Metal Queen”‘s visuals are the lingua franca of metal, an unselfconscious yet winking paean to the incongruous extremes of the style. The videos for Immortal’s “The Call of the Wintermoon” and Meshuggah’s “New Millennium Cyanide Christ” are cut from the same cloth. This is metal in all of its intentionally contradictory glory.
But that’s not why “Metal Queen” endures. It endures because Lee Aaron imbues the Metal Queen with strength. Sure, if you watched the video on mute, it might turn that strength into subtext. But it’s there in Aaron’s eyes and loud and clear in the song.
“In recent years, I’ve been able to have these conversations around the true narrative of the tune,” Aaron says. “I got a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame last year, and their take on it was, ‘Wow, we didn’t know the true narrative. And you were such a pioneer to be doing a feminist song in 1984 when no other women were doing it. And you might laugh at it now, but we look back, and it was super cool for us when we were young.’ So many people have told me over the years that that song has become a real theme of empowerment for them, an anthem of empowerment. And so I might look back on it now and giggle about it, but I know that it was very meaningful for a lot of people. So, I try not to make too much fun of it.”
Naturally, that reframing helped Aaron recontextualize her relationship to the Metal Queen, too. “There was a time in my life and career where I felt so stereotyped by that image and by that song that I didn’t even want to play it live in the late ’90s and early 2000s. And then again, the more I got to talk about the true narrative of the tune, the perception shifted, and it certainly has shifted for me and the lens through which I look at it now. Because people view it as iconic now. When you’re a young person and in the moment, you don’t realize that you might be creating something that is going to be viewed one day as iconic.”
And that’s the story of “Metal Queen,” really: The word is finally understood. —Ian Chainey
FOUL EMANATIONS FROM THE VOID
10. Fellwarden – “Exultance”
Location: United Kingdom
Subgenre: atmospheric black metal / epic black metal
There’s always a higher peak to aim for in epic black metal. How do you make something even more epic? Fantastical themes (Tolkien first and foremost, though in this case, it s the British author David Gemmell who, of course, channeled Tolkien), choirs of clean vocals, noble, doomed riffs aimed at the horizon, booming drums, horns — these are all tools of the trade in creating songs that have the awe factor of a time-weathered Ozymandias. Fellwarden, from Fen frontman the Watcher and former Fen member Havenless (and many other projects each), craft songs that are about as epic as epic gets, and rather than veer into the fabled realms of Casio, they stick to a rock solid atmospheric black metal base.
The mission is clear from the get-go of “Exultance,” when a cloud-parting choir gives way to a call and response with the Watcher that narrates the journey to come. The riffs are ripping, but the melody they carry is bold and moves deliberately, carving lines in stone. The 10-minute song at first unfolds under troubled skies after that initial chorus, with passages of toil and revelation and sheer will shaping a song that feels like it should be a feature film (or thousand-page-plus novel). As the first track off the forthcoming seven-track Legend, a title it shares with Gemmell s debut novel, you can expect that the journey is just getting started and will tread ground reserved for the heroes. [From Legend: Forged in Defiance, out 6/14 via
9. Uhritoimitus – “Inho”
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Subgenre: grind
That Uhritoimitus is a one-person grinder is kind of unbelievable in the “I’m extremely jealous of said one person, Tomi Salmela” sense. The Finnish musician, who is also in Fading Trail, has an acute understanding of what makes this kind of Euro-style grind work and the ability to play it. Paine, the project’s third EP since forming last year, sounds like the product of a well-traveled band born alongside Nasum or fellow Finns Rotten Sound. The blasts are on point. The pummeling grooves are on point. The searing screams are on point. It’s 13 minutes of grind that will rocket up the wishlist of good-guy short-song enthusiasts and frequent Noisy Neighbors meme sharers.
But of course, I’m not just recommending Uhritoimitus because I’m a bloated-wishlist-having mega mark for this kind of grind. Paine differentiates itself from the pack. Lord knows the ’00s glut of Nasumites caused many to tire of this formula. (Let me introduce you to an entire CD booklet of promos I got from this period. To anyone born after 2010, a CD booklet is a-you know what? Nevermind.) An underlying punkiness to tracks like “Inho” reminds me a bit of something like Infest or Iron Lung, a tense aggressiveness that sharpens the riffs. And there’s a freewheeling, exploding-head extremeness that boils over in the same way that the wilder Blastafuk bands, such as Internal Rot or the criminally overlooked Roskopp, were able to harness. So, Paine hits the grind spot but also slightly expands that spot, making me even more jealous of Tomi Salmela. [From the Paine, out now via the band.] —Ian Chainey
8. Hekseblad – “A Grain Of Truth (Nivellen’s Waltz)”
Location: Michigan / Massachusetts
Subgenre: black metal
You know what you re getting into when you see a purple album cover covered with crags and castles, and Hekseblad makes no false pretenses, in their bio paying paying homage to the masters in Emperor, Dissection, and Obtained Enslavement. Reliably full of blazingly intricate and icy black metal with theatrical, scale-running regal synths, purple-black metal albums more often than not hit the spot. Hekseblad sure do, but look a bit closer at the cover art on Hekseblad s new album Kaer Morhen, and you might notice the white half-up-half-down ponytail of the one and only Geralt of Rivia.
Where there s a fantasy series, there’s usually a black metal band (see elsewhere in this column), and Hekseblad use The Witcher’s lore as a canvas to play ripping, windswept black metal. “A Grain Of Truth (Nivellen s Waltz)” is a riff buzzsaw, shredding across frozen valleys and icy peaks before winding up in a haunted ballroom for a little slow turn on the dance floor. The guitars are everywhere, working in and out of malevolent melodies while the drums blast and send out barrages of high-impact fills. Vocals are as raspy as you’d like ’em. It’s a shredder, a great work from a band of the purple-black metal persuasion that s indebted to the greats and mining a new theme to fun effect. [From Kaer Morhen, out now via
7. Nerve Debt – “Binding”
Location: Greenville, SC
Subgenre: sludge
I don’t know if you can tell a lot by Bandcamp tags, but Nerve Debt have some fun ones: chaotic doom, funeral hardcore, hospital punk. However, “noise metal” might its most accurate substyle Frankenstein. That fusion hints at the trio’s bona fides: Alex Angell and Zach Newton play in the doom/sludge band Waft, Brad Elrod drummed on Today Is The Day’s Amphetamine Reptile material. There’s your metal, there’s your noise. But none of these cut-up tags prepare you for the head-in-a-vice crush of Nerve Debt’s debut, Pleural Hymns. And they don’t hint at how varied these four songs are, either.
Now, I don’t want to misrepresent Nerve Debt’s stylistic diversity. When I talk about the three-piece’s range, it’s not like it’s a mountain lion with wanderlust. Its heterogeneousness is specific to sludge and will only be discernible to sludge sickos at that. That is to say, if you’re unfamiliar with sludge, these differences won’t register in much the same way that all metal sounds the same to a dog. But when has the Black Market ever not catered to the sickos? Away we go, then.
“I Always Forget, I Always Survive” has the same crawling-upon-broken-glass miserable masochism as Abandon. “Skin Worms” is a comparative speedster that’s like Sulaco covering Kiss It Goodbye. “Binding” is, to nick a phrase from Crowbar, repulsive in its splendid beauty, like how street lights can turn a grimy alley into impressionistic art. And “With Empyema,” with its noise layers and hypnotic repetition, is like a sludge band with Indian inclinations trying on Through Silver In Blood Neurosis.
What unites these songs is Nerve Debt’s uncompromising heaviosity, a compulsion to crush. While existing in different worlds, Pleural Hymns reminds me of Buried At Sea’s Migration, a loud-ass album that would’ve been delighted if it were the last thing you heard. Maybe that has always been the aim of chaotic doom, funeral hardcore, and hospital punk: pounding a listener into dust. If this is the music playing me out, I accept my fate. Ashes to ashes. [From Pleural Hymns, out now via the band] —Ian Chainey
6. Intranced – “Switchblade”
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Subgenre: heavy metal
Someone get Intranced a time machine because if these guys could travel back to the ’80s, they’d probably be rolling in it. In the MTV era of yesteryear, “Switchblade”‘s licks and earworm chorus were catnip, and today, the song s a delightful track keeping the flame of hair and trad metal and hard rock burning bright. Hailing from the land of the Sunset Strip, of course, Intranced moves at a thoroughly approachable and respectably rocking pace on “Switchblade,” and they draft a blueprint for how to hit 1988 airwaves.
Singer James-Paul Luna brings a raspy frontman swagger while telling a charged ode to the hair metal vocabulary, and as the song rocks along on the back of rollicking riffs, you get a tasty dose of “wooooaaaaahs” and wailing guitars that hit emphatically on the refrain. This is the work of pros, and the guitar theatrics come out toward the end of the track when gliding noodly solos put on a show. It s a fun listen, and on the other single, “Muerte y Metal,” you ll see a different side to Intranced that similarly bottles a spirit of a halcyon era while headbanging into the future. [From Muerte y Metal, out 6/7 via
5. Wretched Blessing – “Spurious Ovation”
Location: Chicago, IL
Subgenre: death metal / black metal / hardcore
Maybe we shouldn’t be so beholden to “members of”-think, the idea that members of good bands will carry that goodness over to their next bands. But it’s hard not to get excited when you see the names Kayhan Vaziri (guitars, vocals) and Rae Amitay (drums, vocals), players who have been in these pages before for Yautja and Immortal Bird, respectively. (Many, many moons ago, Amitay and I wrote for the same website. I’ve also seen Immortal Bird play a set at a bowling alley, which isn’t a disclosure so much as I’m still amused Immortal Bird played a bowling alley while families were still trying to bowl.) These two have formed a power duo named Wretched Blessing, a fittingly wretched blessing in the form of an amalgamation of death metal, black metal, and hardcore. Surprise! It’s good.
“Spurious Ovation” skitters out of a wormhole as a Total Dissonance Worship-style black/death writhing mass. Soon, it evolves, or de-evolves, into a big ol’ chugger with the same bodies-flying power as a brontosaurus entering the pit. That’s two sides of Wretched Blessing’s coin: the brainy beast and the brutal battering ram. What’s infectious is how much fun it sounds like Vaziri and Amitay are having playing this stuff. And yet, true to the multifaceted nature of the music, the lyrics and themes cut to the bone.
“This one is coming from a place of desperate contempt and irritation, like shaking someone by the shoulders who you wish you didn’t have to touch at all,” Amitay told Flood Magazine in a track-by-track breakdown. “It opens with the line, ‘You will regret all of this time/ Wasted/ Watching others living‘ and gets progressively more frustrated with disingenuous and ‘chronically online’ behavior and people from there.”
What’s fascinating is how naturally these riffs and themes connect with each other. Like, you shouldn’t be able to start a song with an Artificial Brain-doing-Demilich alien transmission and then segue into a blackened jud that could incite a circle pit atop a medieval castle’s parapet, not to mention sneaking in a killer line like “watching others living” that could trigger an existential crisis if heard during a particularly dispiriting Instagram reel scroll. But “Spurious Ovation” flows like blood from a fresh wound. It’s as natural sounding as wind blowing through tree leaves. And I have to think this ability to align all of these competing thoughts and styles and Tetris them together is because Vaziri and Amitay have such a good understanding of both themselves and their bandmate as musicians.
“This is the first song we wrote together,” Vaziri said in the aforementioned Flood Magazine breakdown. “I think this is the only one that came from us just jamming in the practice space not coming in with any riffs/ideas/parts.”
Just from a jam! Imagine that. I guess “members of”-think can continue to survive as long as it’s applied to these two. [From Wretched Blessing, out now via the band.] —Ian Chainey
4. Sunrise Patriot Motion – “My Father Took Me Hunting In The Snow”
Location: Beacon, NY
Subgenre: experimental black metal
Sunrise Patriot Motion’s debut Black Fellflower Stream was one of the strangest and best metal albums of 2022, a hypnotizing work of goth-y black metal filled with both distended and warped melodies and delicate beauty. Unusual is to be expected from the brothers Sam and Will Skarsgard, who make delirium-inducing black metal in their longrunning Yellow Eyes. Sunrise Patriot Motion entered into mythmaking, though, on Black Fellflower Stream, and crafted a fantastical horror premise where the album told the story of a man in the throes of mania searching for salvation and oil in a field.
“My Father Took Me Hunting in the Snow,” the title track from the follow-up EP, picks up the story on the same day in the same place but with a new fever dream narrative, and the music and the surreal wonder it conjures is as bizarre and enchanting as ever. Pounded out at a mid-tempo pace, the track is incredibly catchy, with a shouted chorus that hammers it home over an invigorating rhythm section accented with sparkling ethereal tones. Elsewhere, the song meanders through a netherworld full of dark magic and twisted visions, guided by wonky exploratory lead guitars, a delightfully lively bass, and, when present, big chugging riffs that can hit an overdrive speed. Vocals are tortured and powerful, possessing a crazed strength that carries a maniacal conviction. The story they tell is of an imprinted memory, both fond and haunting. [From My Father Took Me Hunting in the Snow, out now via
3. Coffin Curse – “The Dead’s Deafening Silence”
Location: Santiago, Chile
Subgenre: death metal
Coffin Curse are death metal. “From the beginning, we put into practice the simple task of only creating the most ruthless and hostile Death Metal possible,” the Chilean duo said in a 2020 interview with Deadly Storm Zine following the release of its debut full-length, Ceased to Be. “No cliché, no guidelines or rules, no bullshit.”
The Continuous Nothing, Coffin Curse’s second album, continues on that path. Similar to Inanna, the acclaimed band that Max Neira (guitars, bass, vocals) and Carlos Fuentes (drums) play in, this project, as evidenced by the intentional genre capitalization in the quote above, is obsessed with its quest to maximize the necrotic potential of the form. But where Inanna have progressive inclinations, Coffin Curse set their sights on a more embryonic vision of death metal.
“We are very in touch with the music we listen to in our early teen years when no one used that bullshit term ‘old school,'” the band said in that same interview. “The majority of our rage and death comes from American bands of those years, such as Morbid Angel, Immolation, Autopsy, Monstrosity, or Death. Some European madness [is] there too, like Asphyx, Pestilence, Carcass, Abhorrence, etc.”
Coffin Curse talk that talk. But more importantly, they do what many new school OSDM bands don’t: They walk that walk. There are times when the two-piece sounds like if Necrovore kept it together long enough for a world tour that saw it picking up deathly influences ranging from pestilential Dutch depravity to South American breakneck barbarity. But more than their influences, Coffin Curse go hard as hell. Similar to albums from bands like Conjureth, Sickness, and Glorious Depravity, three other ripping entities that take a classic US death template and bolt on a whole lot more, The Continuous Nothing’s most salient trait is its ferocity. It reinforces the maxim instilled by Deicide’s Legion: death metal gets better the more demented you make it.
Take “The Dead’s Deafening Silence,” the nine-and-a-half minute closer with an awesomely nonsensical song title worthy of Asphyx. Despite being the album’s slowest song, clocking in at a Finnish death/doom trudge, the dual-tracked vocals and discomforting leads sound lustily evil. When the band starts blasting under pained yells and Exorcist-esque vomitous expulsions, that feels doubly so. Again, it’s not that Coffin Curse are reinventing the wheel — if anything, “The Dead’s Deafening Silence” could fit nicely onto any legendary death metal album. But the difference is Coffin Curse want to break your body with the Wheel of Catherine. That’s the lesson: Reverence alone can’t blow the dust off death metal, but the power of your playing sure can. [From The Continuous Nothing, out now via Memento Mori.] —Ian Chainey
2. Nimbifer – “Der Wind”
Location: Hannover, Germany
Subgenre: black metal
It’s refreshing how free Der böse Geist, Nimbifer’s full-length debut, after two well-received EPs, is of black metal album artifice. There are no whooshing intros, synth segues, field recording interstitials, or the kind of ren-faire breathers when a bro of the band sits in for a few minutes on a lute. Not that there’s anything wrong with that stuff. I have no qualms when they’re used tastefully, or the concept demands it. But Der böse Geist is an album where two Germans, Windkelch (guitars, vocals, bass) and Sturmfriedt (drums), beat the hell out of their instruments and find transcendence in the deafening storm of distortion and blasts. Beyond some medievaly stuff happening in the margins, that’s the concept. There’s no need for anything else except good riffs, and oh, these riffs are good.
We begin with “Der Wind,” which is German for (*Chris Farley voice*) “The Wind.” Compositionally, it demonstrates what Nimbifer excels at: building and releasing tension with tempo dynamics. This band doesn’t just blast. It can deliver a pounding mid-pace stomp that maintains the intensity. Sometimes, the effect is subtle because Nimbifer expertly carry me along, allowing me to not think about their inner workings. I don’t notice the rise and fall, much like I might not notice the 18th punch during a beatdown. But I certainly feel it. And thus, I’m rapt for the entirety of Der böse Geist’s 36-minute runtime despite the album not looking like much on paper. Band blasts. Band slows down. Riffs a similar riff. But damn, that riff never fails to hit its mark. And jeez, do these two rip it up.
Here’s what I mean: Curiously, while Der böse Geist could be characterized as castle metal, with production that sounds like a cold wind blowing through a keep, the leads are actually pretty inviting, maximizing their hooky humability. The bracing aspect, then, is Windkelch and Sturmfriedt’s playing, which must’ve cost each musician a pint of spilled plasma. In tortured music critic speak, this is a spirited performance. Less euphemistically, goddamn, this stuff is mean. If Final Eclipse’s The Dark World, a killer record that pairs well with this one, was an album you could scale a mountain to, Nimbifer’s Der böse Geist is when the post-blizzard rescuers find your body, and you’re wearing a mask of ice. Absolutely intense, biting stuff. [From Der böse Geist, out now via Vendetta Records.] –Ian Chainey
1. Lust Hag – “A Deep Gouge”
Location: Missoula, MT
Subgenre: black metal
“A Deep Gouge” is full of swagger, a killer black metal track that floors it out the gate and never looks back. The riffs: mean. The vocals: grim (and with a really nice touch of buried reverb). The total package: ripping. But there’s a sense of playfulness to it all that might go some way to turning painted frowns just a little upside down. The riffs sometimes take on a surfy vibe, with a low-end chug-a-chug section a little more than halfway through the track that will get your head bobbing. Punk energy courses throughout the whole thing, giving it bounce. This is all couched in three minutes and 23 seconds of black metal wizardry replete with stylish blasting, a riff masterclass, and passages of controlled chaos. It makes for one of the more invigorating tracks you’ll hear anytime soon. It’s all the work of Eleanor Harper, who, after a series of splits and shorter releases, is unleashing her self-titled debut. With Lust Hag, she’s making waves out in Missoula. [From Lust Hag, out now via
HYMNS OF BLASPHEMOUS IRREVERENCE
