Metal Riot

Our friends in Heavygrinder have collaborated on a track with Threat Signal’s singer Jon Howard. HG comments “Break Free is coming out June 8th, as a Beatport exclusive for two weeks, on our very own label, Onfyr Records. It’s actually our debut release and it also marks the beginning of Heavygrinder as a duo. What that entails — besides being two people in the studio — is a revamped live performance that we’ll hopefully bring to the road later this year. But you’ll have to wait to know more!”

For Jon Howard’s involvement she tells me “He wrote the lyrics, came up with the vocal melody and recorded all the takes himself. It was the easiest collaboration possible — he loved the instrumental we sent him from the get go, and we loved the vocals he sent us back just as much. The instrumental took about a week to compose and produce with another for mixing and mastering after we got the vocals. On Jon’s end, it was about a week to get a nice little folder with all the amazing vocal stems ready to rock!”

“Break Free” drops next week, but you can preview it here!

I think metal moves us all differently and every metalhead is their own unique beast. Some like it blackened and slathered in Satan, while others like it detuned and AxeFx’d. The thirty plus years of metal have spawned so much fucking innovation and diversity, that people take to their soap boxes and denounce what doesn’t move them. Yeah, I have to write a shitty review now and then, but that doesn’t make me right or that band terrible. People are out there buying albums and merch, keeping that band on the road. It is for those people that musicians and bands stay together, not for proponents of negativity. I am now done soapboxing about soapboxes.

Heavygrinder remixes metal songs with huge drum and bass electro. No surprise that starts a fair amount of fires. “Some people are very purist and consider any contemporary interpretation of these genres as a disrespect for the original songs. However, I truly believe that what I’m doing is giving new life to amazing songs, making them accessible to a new generation of music lovers who otherwise would not be exposed to these artists.” She dropped into Brooklyn for a one night show and took some time out to talk about her “Metal+Electro” movement.

Click here for the interview and her latest remix of  “Into The Void” from my personal favorite Nine Inch Nails album, The Fragile.