Nightmare Fuel: Buckle Up For Flahoola’s Fast-And-Furious Debut

Flahoola is fast.

So much so that even the Denver power trio’s nightmares crave a need for speed.

Bassist-vocalist John Napier shares a particularly frightening recurring fever dream he experienced as a young speed freak.

“I was being hunted by a Formula 1 racecar driver who was chasing me down in his car,” he recalls. “I just remember seeing a white helmet with an Italian flag on it chasing me and at the end he’d kill me.

“Every time I died, I would wake up,” Napier continues, reliving the past horror. “There were nights where I’d fall back into the dream again. It went on for five to seven years. Then I had my first lucid dream and I stopped him and killed him, and I never had the dream again. I had to turn it back on him. It was crazy.”

This ethereal death-loop is now immortalized in the new Flahoola song, “Italia,” the latest single from the group’s upcoming debut album, Electric Scythe, set to be released on Halloween, Friday, October 31. The group is playing a proper release show on All Hallows’ Eve, Saturday, November 1, at the Oriental Theater, so dress your Samhain best for the costume contest. Napier, guitarist Cole Helman and drummer Jaydon Kershner are stepping out as characters from the “Italia” music video.

Local riff-wielders Tongue Hammer, Nova Nights and Shwarma are also on the bill. The festivities include a photo booth and custom cocktail menu, too.

“We’re trying to make it a big Halloween party,” Kershner says, adding that there will be respectful audience interaction and participation. But don’t worry, it went play out like a Gwar concert.

“We don’t have the same budget for fake blood like they do,” he continues.  

“Or real blood for that matter, but one day,” Helman quips in calling it Flahoolaween Volume I. “We’re going to kick ass.”

Flahoola, the name is an antiquated Irish slang term to describe an “extremely vulgar woman,” first began lighting up the local circuit nearly a decade ago, after Napier and Kershner teamed up in a previous incarnation. Helman eventually joined full-time in 2022, and since the three have kept busy busting out a furious alloy of leather-loving trad metal, gritty classic rock and longhaired stoner-doom. But up until this point, never formally put out anything.

Electric Scythe — recorded, mixed and mastered at the iconic Fort Collins fortress, the Blasting Room — is a career-spanning rock-and-roll rollick, eleven tracks of what Flahoola’s been doing live for all these years.

“We wanted to get in and record these songs for a longtime,” Kershner says. “We’d go play a live show and get a good response and people would be like, ‘You guys have so much energy, where can I find your music?’ and we’d have to be like, ‘Nowhere yet.’”

He laughs at that last part, but the music is dead serious. Dropping singles since June, nearly half of the playlist is out, including the Stephen King-inspired rager “TommyKnocker.”

In an effort to capture the rawness of a Flahoola show, most of the songs were tracked live in the same room. When it came to “TommyKnocker,” a newer original, the tempo couldn’t be contained.

“We were trying to do takes of it all together,” Kershner explains. “We were all pushing it, so Chris [Beeble, engineer] was like, ‘It sounds like you guys just want to do that faster.’”

So they did, naturally.

“I think we increased it by, like, thirty BPM,” he continues.

“Age of War” and “Automatic Man” are similarly searing, while “Cosmo Dust” is the doomiest Electric Scythe has to offer.

“It’s a more trippy, transcendental thing,” Kershner says of that one. “The song’s about space drugs so we wanted it to feel, at some point, you were on them.”

“We reworked every song of ours,” Napier shares.

“And it still ended up faster,” Helman adds. “But you get a little taste of the old and the new, where we came from and where we’re heading.”

When the full record is out, check out “Frankenstein’s Hell,” a rock opera told from the monster’s perspective, too. The bandmates hint at plans of hitting the studio sooner rather than later to lay down more unreleased material. But in the meantime, the best way to take in Flahoola is from the stage, where the three always reach peak speed.

“I know the looks they give when I’m speeding up the tempo. I know the eyes,” Kershner says.

He shrugs. “The adrenaline kicks in.”

“It’s not intentional,” Helman concludes, “but it’s rock and roll.”

Flahoola, with Tongue Hammer, Nova Nights and Shwarma, 6 p.m. Saturday, November 1, the Oriental Theater, 4335 West 44th Ave. Tickets are $27.