Metalocalypse co-creator Brendon Small didn’t think he’d get the opportunity to finish the band’s story. Adult Swim canceled the show in 2014 after seven years on the air, leaving the series without a final season. Dethklok fans rallied to save the show with the Metalocalypse Now campaign. In early December 2014, an online petition appeared on Change.org, garnering 105,489 signatures. Some financial backers stepped forward with $2 million to help fund the final season, but the network said, “No, we don’t want to do any more Metalocalypse at all,” Small recalled in a May 25, 2016, interview with Metal Insider.
In November 2016, Small told Louder, “What I think really happened was [the campaign] drove Adult Swim insane, and I think Adult Swim for some reason took it personally. The truth was that people were saying, ‘Hey, what the hell? Where’s our show? And they said, ‘No.’ I think somebody is thin-skinned and somebody got their feelings hurt.”
That thin-skinned somebody with hurt feelings eventually left Adult Swim. Three years later, the network called Small and asked him to be part of the Adult Swim Festival that took place in November 2019. More than 20,000 fans filled the Banc of California Stadium in Los Angeles to watch Dethklok’s first live performance in five years.
Reminiscent of Gorillaz onstage, Small syncs the animated Dethklok band’s performance on a large LED screen with him in his live “pit band” that includes Gene “The Atomic Clock” Hoglan, a legendary thrash metal drummer from Dark Angel.
“It was so much fun and well-received,” Small says in an interview with the Observer over the weekend. “But with everything in that [Hollywood] business, there is so much changeover with executives, and I had to educate them on what they were sitting on.”
Last week, what they were sitting on led to two new Dethklok album releases — Dethalbum IV, which Small calls "more aggressive" than previous albums, and Metalocalypse: Army of the Doomstar companion soundtrack — and the new animated movie Metalocalypse: Army of the Doomstar on digital and Blu-Ray. The movie serves as the finale for Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse series.
Small is also kicking off a new tour in support of the new albums and movie with a sold-out show on Thursday, Aug. 31, at the South Side Ballroom in Dallas. He called the show an audio and visual spectacle with monster players, a place where half the crowd will be in Slayer T-shirts and the other half in South Park and Simpsons T-shirts. But he wouldn’t call it the final show for Dethklok.
“We’ll see how this tour goes,” Small says. “It’s really fun. … People get excited and really happy. The music is brutal. The images are brutal. It’s such a fun project.”
Small’s fun project began in the early 2000s. He was a music school student at Berklee College of Music when he got into comedy. He started doing stand-up at The Comedy Studio in Harvard Square and was spotted by Loren Bouchard, who was casting for what would become the Adult Swim show Home Movies. Small wasn’t sure what he would do with the music but soon realized that with animation and comedy, he could hire himself as a musician along with the voice actor.
In April 2004, the final episode of Home Movies aired. That same year, Metallica dropped Some Kind of Monster, a documentary that chronicled the departure of bassist Jason Newsted and the band’s battle with past demons of repressed anger and aggression. It became an important part of the genesis of Dethklok and Metalocalypse.
“And you get to see how this record — love it or hate it — was made and what the trajectory was and the crazy maze of logic that got us to this place,” Small told Metal Injection in an Aug. 18 report. “And you get to see Metallica go through all that stuff and have to audition a new way of communicating with their own band. … But it’s brutally honest, and I think it takes guts, just crazy guts.”
"The music is brutal. The images are brutal. It’s such a fun project.” – Brendon Small
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Metallica's Some Kind of Monster reveals a band that is more like a family than a global business machine. It’s a similar storyline that appears in Dethklok’s new movie Metalocalypse: The Army of the Doomstar. Nathan and Toki, along with band members Pickles (drums), Skwisgaar Skwigelf (guitar) and William Murderface (bass), must learn to see each other as the family they are in order to compose a song that will stop the Metalocalypse and save the world.
Metallica’s documentary wasn’t the only seed for the genesis of the show. When Small and co-creator Tommy Blancha started working on the idea for Metalocalypse, he delved deeply into his research about bands and watched several music documentaries, including one about Aerosmith, and began paying attention how they tried to find a balance between art and commerce.
He was also inspired by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s book Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, a story about the early Norwegian black metal scene and a string of church burnings and murders in the early ’90s. The film The U.S. vs. John Lennon inspired Small’s idea for the government tribunal that seeks to use and then stop Dethklok in the show. The 2006 documentary chronicles Lennon’s time as an antiwar activist and reveals that the CIA and FBI were keeping tabs on him because he was a cultural force like Dethklok in Metalocalypse.
Small’s love of Monty Python and the Holy Grail solidified the show with this fantastic mix of absurdist heavy metal humor and gore, lots of it.
“It was me trying to create the ultimate job where I get to be funny, play guitar and write music that talks to metal kids,” Small said.
Small’s music created the band and their signature sound. As he put it, for him to write the band’s ethos, he “needed to go sit behind the guitar” and figure out what they sounded like. He said he “had to like the music” and began creating a cross between the Beatles and Cannibal Corpse. He wanted something putrid yet beautiful.
“I love metal,” Small says. “It gets so ugly and fascinating, a putrid nightmarish and beautiful and masonic, ugly and pretty. So first the music came.”
He began thinking about the bands Queen, Iron Maiden and Helloween. He wanted two guitar players, one kind of like Queen’s Brian May and the other like the legendary Swedish guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen, a drummer like Dave Grohl and a bassist suffering from insecurity issues because, well, he’s the bassist in a popular metal band like Metallica.
With long black hair past and the build of a WWE wrestler, Nathan was the quarterback as the lead singer. He resembles the late Peter Steele from Type O Negative in animation. His voice is also deep like Steele’s and thunders through the microphone.
Small delved into their characterizations in Season 3 of Metalocalypse, which Small compared to KISS’s Dynasty, a 1979 album with songs contributed by each member that reflected their personalities.
As Small began creating the music, each Dethklok personality took over and helped to create their sound. It’s one that led to four seasons of Metalocalypse from 2006 to 2013, a klok opera, a movie and four albums. Released in 2006, Dethalbum became the highest-charting death metal album in the history of the Billboard 200, as Blabbermouth reported in April 2008, until Dethalbum II took its place in 2009.
Dethalbum III was released in 2012 and landed in the top 10 of Billboard 200, according to an Oct. 25, 2012, Loudwire report. As one fan wrote in his Nov. 2, 2012, review on Amazon, “I can tell you right now that Dethklok is heading in a less melodic direction and toward pure, ugly brutality.”
That “pure, ugly brutality” can be found on Dethklok’s latest release Dethalbum IV. Small divided it into two parts, a more aggressive tone in the beginning and a mystical one toward the end. He compared the process to Led Zeppelin IV, a 1973 album that found the band in an informal but harsh recording environment that allowed the songs to unfold organically, according to a Nov. 3, 2020, report by Loudsound.com.
“The new record has a lot of aggression and diaphragm work to hold longer notes,” Small said of singing Nathan’s parts on the album. “I didn’t want to be a singer. I love the guitar.”
In early 2020, Small received the greenlight from Adult Swim to move forward with the Metalocalypse movie and, in turn, the album. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, creating a harsh environment for him to finish his animated masterpiece.
As he started writing the script for the movie, Small began sculpting the music, some of which would appear on the movie’s soundtrack. He recorded the film score with the Budapest Orchestra and drummer Gene Hoglan.
“The idea for this movie was to become expansive cinematically,” Small says. “This crazy show has no purpose unless you get to the finish line. I wanted to push the envelope and challenge every single person [working on the film] who are also masters of their craft but don’t often get pushed to the limit. This is an ambitious project. Our budgets aren’t gigantic, especially for animation.”
Written and directed by Small, Metalocalypse: Army of the Doomstar finds Dethklok singer Nathan Explosion traumatized from his experience saving guitarist Toki Wartooth from the Man with the Silver Face and Magnus Hammersmith, the original rhythm guitarist for Dethklok and voiced by Marc Maron. The relationship that Nathan hoped to start never had a beginning. He fumes at the band, the fans and himself. He longs for a normal life and must come to terms with the life he’s built and accept his destiny, fulfill the prophecy and confront the ultimate songwriting challenge: write the “Song of Salvation,” as pointed out in a spoiler-free summary in the Aug. 16 press release.
The film stars Small, co-creator Tommy Blacha, Victor Brandt, Grammy award-winning musician Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner, King Diamond, Jon Hamm, Mark Hamill, Amy Lee of Evanescence, Malcolm McDowell, Juliet Mills, Laraine Newman, Raya Yarbrough, Liva Zita, Kirk Hammett from Metallica and Scott Ian from Anthrax.
“This is a family,” Small says. “They all have a role. … and they are brothers but also a bunch of roommates and spending their lives together… And they see that, and they have to reconcile it and learn how to work together. It’s the power of Metallica. They’re living and still work out good, and it takes so much bravery.”
