INTERVIEW: We’re living in a Dethklok world
Image: Dethklok is back with many projects, including a new movie, Metalocalypse: Army of the Doomstar. Image courtesy of Adult Swim / Provided by WB with permission.
Animation lovers! Metalheads! Doomsday preppers! It’s time to unite because Dethklok is back, and they’re looking for souls to claim.
Dethklok, the death metal band featured on the animated series Metalocalypse, hasn’t been around for a few years, but 2023 has changed that sad reality for fans around the world. Now the legendary fictional band is back and turning it up to 11.
For starters, Metalocalypse has returned with a new movie, called Army of the Doomstar, now out on Blu-ray, DVD and digital platforms. In the film, Nathan Explosion and his bandmates are tasked with writing a song of salvation to save planet Earth, but Salacia is standing in their way.
Other than the movie, which has been well received by fans and critics, there’s the new Dethklok tour, which features Brendon Small, Gene Hoglan, Bryan Beller, Pete Griffin and Nili Brosh singing the animated band’s catchy tunes on stage. They are currently co-headlining a take-no-prisoners concert tour with Babymetal. They make a stop Friday, Sept. 15 at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City for a sold-out gig. If that wasn’t enough Dethklok, the band also recently released a new album (Dethalbum IV) and a soundtrack to the Adult Swim movie.
These projects have successfully revitalized the little death metal band that could and kept Small, the co-creator of Metalocalypse, a busy, busy man.
“The last thing this project did was in 2013,” Small said in a recent phone interview. “It was an hour-long rock opera special called The Doomstar Requiem, and then we never heard back for a long time. And then we didn’t do anything, and it was kind of a slow cancellation — a long, slow breakup. So I got a call around 2019, and it was from Adult Swim. And they said, ‘Hey, how would you like to bring Dethklok back for a live show?’ I said, ‘Of course, I’d love to. It’s my project. I’d love to do something with it.’ So we headlined this Adult Swim festival in 2019, and it was kind of a high-stakes show because I kind of got the feeling that if we nailed this thing really well and got everybody excited, it would probably kick the door open for this exact project. And that’s what happened.”
Dethklok rocked the Adult Swim concert, and soon after Small received a call with an offer to make the movie, Army of the Doomstar. And the conversation just kept growing: How about a new album? How about a soundtrack? How about a tour? Thankfully for metal fans, the answers to each of these questions were yes, yes, yes.
“The movie part of the whole thing is really exciting because I’m a big fan of movies, and I really wanted that to be my next project,” he said. “I don’t think we would have been engaged in this crazy endeavor had the fans not been there because I don’t think anybody really takes a risk anymore. I think there has to be metrics to support everything, and this show is like a weed. It gets yanked out by its roots, but for some reason — without water, without any food — it keeps on growing. And I think there’s a good reason for that. It’s because this heavy metal community doesn’t get spoken to that often, and I’m a fan. I was thinking about this show in terms of who the audience is, and I thought, this audience is me when I was discovering music. If I hadn’t had that friend up the street who showed me who Slayer was and Iron Maiden and Anthrax and Metallica and King Diamond and all that stuff, I wouldn’t be here today. So this show has been that for other people, so I think that means a lot.”
Small’s personal musical tastes are wide and varied. He said pretty much every musical genre can be found on his dream playlist. He once attended music school, and that gave him a love for jazz guitar, like John Scofield, and orchestral music. But he’s also a lover of thrash metal and prog metal like Meshuggah, plus Gojira, Cannibal Corpse and Pantera.
“There isn’t just one style,” Small said. “And that’s what Dethklok is. It’s a little bit of a miniature celebration of anything that’s crossed my desk over the years. There’s an ode to power metal. There’s an ode to thrashier stuff. There’s an ode to epic, big, mystical metal.”
One requirement that Small had from day one of Metalocalypse was to honor the metal community. He constantly kept thinking what they would want in a TV series, and he quickly employed the help of many voices from the music scene, giving the show legitimate credibility.
“I think that was something I had to consider from the very beginning is making sure that the metal community knows that they are included,” he said. “They are part of the joke, and that meant getting voices from the heavy metal community to arrive and be funny, from James Hetfield to King Diamond to Cannibal Corpse to my guitar heroes, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, everybody that touched a guitar and played heavy metal that was influential. I tried to approach them to join us and to help legitimize the joke a little bit more.”
Those who catch Dethklok on their current tour should expect a different concert experience than anything else out there. First off, they are a four-piece band, featuring Small, Hoglan (Dark Angel, Death, Strapping Young Lad, Testament) and Brosh, plus Beller and Griffin trading off bass duties. They are themselves, but they are also the characters from the show.
“We’re meant to sound like Dethklok, and then we’ve got a gigantic movie theater size screen that is completley curated to play in lockstep with us,” Small said. “So the drummer, Gene, has a clip track running to his headset, so every down beat coincides with a cut. So you get this great synergy between visual and audio, and what it feels like when you’re in the room is it feels like a ride from Universal Studios or something, like the Terminator 2 ride. Bad guys come out, ‘Boo!’ Good guys come, ‘Yay!’ … It should feel like you’re on a ride. That’s the feeling we’re going for, and that’s what we’ve gotten in the past. There’s no show like it, and between us and Babymetal, who we are headlining with, there’s a theatricality. There’s a theatrical element in heavy metal that kind of drew me to it in the first place. If you’ve ever seen Iron Maiden, King Diamond live, it’s pretty bombastic.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Dethklok and Babymetal are currently on tour, and they will play Friday, Sept. 15 at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
