“It was heavy, you know? I was humbled by it,” says Ryan Sims, the group's current drummer, as he recalls the first time he sat behind Marcy’s kit at rehearsal in 2022. Marcy succumbed to cancer in 2021; it took a year before his bandmates, singer-guitarist Brandon Richier and bassist David Atkinson, were able to pull Palehorse/Palerider back together. And this week, the band is releasing its first new music in five years, and the first with Sims on drums: a single with the resonant title “Don’t Leave Me Behind.”
“When I was first learning how to play the old Palehorse stuff, I was trying to honor Nate’s spirit but also put my own spin on it,” Sims says. “When you’re listening to another drummer’s parts and playing his drums, it’s like being inside his head a little bit. I’m hearing what he was hearing. It’s a conversation or a language being spoken with someone who isn’t even there. I felt like I was almost talking with him.”
Sims, who also drums in Denver groups Dreadnought and Grief Ritual, had previously played in Green Druid, one of Colorado’s most internationally recognized metal outfits, which signed to the legendary British label Earache Records on the strength of a demo in 2017. That same year, just as both bands were getting off the ground, Green Druid and Palehorse/Palerider started playing shows together regularly at local venues such as 3 Kings Tavern (now HQ) and the hi-dive.
Despite the two groups’ instant bond and mutual admiration, however, Palehorse/Palerider’s music comes from a different place than Green Druid’s weed-fueled doom metal. Instead, Richier and company craft a more melodic and ethereal sound that draws equally from the heaviness of doom and the more warped, spacious drone of shoegaze.
Palehorse/Palerider released its stunning debut album, Burial Songs, in 2017. Even though the record’s title was morbid and the band that made it took its name from an avatar of death in the Book of Revelation, the future looked full of life.
Then Marcy started showing signs of illness that the rest of the band couldn’t help but notice. It took him months to open up to Richier and Atkinson: He had been diagnosed with cancer. “Nate just kept it very close to the vest,” Richier says of Marcy's diagnosis. “He didn’t tell any of us that he was terminal until maybe about a month before he passed. Nate was just the type of person who didn't want anybody to worry or be concerned. But honestly, I think we knew that something was very wrong when he showed up to practice and started giving us gifts — you know, personal possessions and things like that.”
One of those possessions was his drum kit, which he insisted should remain with the band if anything should happen to him. Without putting it into exact terms, Marcy also made it clear that the band must continue without him, and that a certain drummer was his first choice to succeed him.
As Atkinson remembers: “A year before Nate passed, he did call out Ryan's name to us. We sat down at a pizza joint, Brandon and I with Nate. He was never really like, ‘Hey, I'm dying. We need to figure this out.’ It was more like, ‘I can’t do this much longer, and I don’t want you guys to stop. Here's the best way, I think, that we can kind of move forward. Even if I won’t be here, I want a say in this.’ When he brought up Ryan’s name, Nate just said, 'That guy is quite lovely at what he does.’”
Indeed, Marcy had been a fan of Sims’s drumming before their bands met and started sharing stages in 2017. Palehorse/Palerider and Green Druid recorded their upcoming debuts just days apart at the same studio, Module Overload in Aurora. The studio’s owner and engineer, Jamie Hillyer, played Green Druid’s demo-in-progress to Palehorse/Palerider while mixing one day, and Marcy instantly fell in love.
“Obviously,” Richier says, “we had no inkling back then that Ryan would someday wind up being our drummer. But Nate was listening, for sure.”
Under the lengthening shadow of Marcy’s illness, the trio forged ahead. It released the Fire Gone Out/Haxan EP in 2019, which included a crushing cover of the Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” It was followed in 2020 by Legends of the Desert: Volume 1, a split LP with Austin outfit Lord Buffalo. Even more ambitious and atmospheric than Burial Songs, the record was another big step forward in songcraft and visibility for Palehorse/Palerider.
“All this stuff was happening, but we were having fewer and fewer band practices as Nate got sicker,” Atkinson says. “Plus, COVID was happening at the time, so it made it that much harder. Honestly, we would sometimes book a practice just so we could see him. We saw how he was losing weight every week, and it was just heartbreaking. It was Stage IV cancer.”
Marcy’s death at the age of 43 wasn’t just a devastating blow for Palehorse/Palerider; it was a wound felt by Denver’s music scene at large. Since the late ’90s, the tireless multi-instrumentalist had been in numerous bands of almost every genre, among them power-pop combo the Risk, soulful indie group SpokeShaver, Five Iron Frenzy side project Yellow Second, and various ensembles with his wife, local singer-songwriter (and former Westword contributor) Rachael Pollard.
The last song Palehorse/Palerider completed before Marcy’s death is still untitled — not out of grief, but because it was supposed to have been named by a guest singer: Mark Lanegan, frontman of the legendary Seattle grunge band Screaming Trees, a onetime member of Queens of the Stone Age and half of the Gutter Twins with the Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli, as well as an acclaimed solo artist in his own right.
“In 2020, when Nate was still here, we got approached by Magnetic Eye Records,” says Richier, referring to the New York label that has released music by such heavyweights as the Sword, Red Fang and Zakk Wylde. “The label’s whole concept was that they wanted to do a compilation of original songs by eight or nine bands that kind of hark back to Mark’s earlier music, his heavier music, and then having Mark sing on them and record his vocals in Ireland, where he was living.”
Richier continues: “Magnetic Eye was sending songs to Mark to choose from, so we sent them a nine-minute-long demo we had been working on, not with any anticipation that he would be interested in us. And, of course, it was actually one of the first things he latched on to. The label got back to us and said, ‘Mark wants to do this song. He doesn’t want you to re-record it. He wants to do it exactly as it is.’”
The band used a drum machine instead of live drums; Marcy was too sick to record. But the collaborations soon became hampered by another illness: Lanegan contracted COVID in 2021, just as he was about to record his vocals on the track.
“Mark never recovered,” Richier says. “About a year later, we got word from the label that Mark had given the songs back to all the bands. We never heard what he’d been planning to sing on it, and he never gave us his title for the song. And then a month after that, we got word that he’d passed.”
Lanegan died on February 22, 2022, just two days shy of the first anniversary of Marcy’s death.
“After that,” Richier says, “we didn't know what we were going to do. We just knew that if we were going to go on without Nate, we were going to have to start this band from the ground up again.
Brandon Richer is the guitarist and singer of Palehorse/Palerider.
LK Cisco
For Richier, that early band was the Volts. Although he also served time in two of Denver’s most renowned garage-rock groups, the Down-N-Outs and the Omens, the Volts was the outfit that really showed Richier’s deep punk aggression; from 1999 to 2002, the quartet became notorious as one of the city’s most savage live bands.
Around the same time that Richier was destroying stages in the Volts, Atkinson was playing in a far different but no less menacing band, the Hellmen. The group stood out like a mangled thumb in the late ’90s. Brooding, primal and almost Nick Cave-esque, Atkinson and crew brought a cerebral and theatrical edge to the local scene.
“When I started doing what eventually turned into Palehorse/Palerider, it was just a recording project with my friend Brett Anderson,” Richier recalls. “It was 2013, and everything I had done before was more or less one-two-three-four rock and roll. I felt like I was always getting looped into the same types of bands. But it wasn’t really inspiring to me. Not that I don't still listen to punk, but as a musician, I wanted to do something different. I thought it would be cool to try something that I’d never done before.”
With Anderson on vocals, the duo tinkered with bedroom recordings that were reminiscent of Depeche Mode and other dark synth-pop acts from their childhoods. Anderson’s voice was ideal for that style, but Richier soon found it too sharp of a departure from his louder roots.
“I wanted to get some other folks involved, to make it more of an actual band,” Richier says. “That’s when we got Dave and Nate involved. We did that for about a year and a half, with Brett as the lead singer.”
The group was called Hiraeth, and it only lasted long enough to play a handful of local shows. “I think musically, Brett just wanted to do something different," Richier remembers. "We started out more post-punky, and he wanted to go in more of a pop direction. The rest of us wanted to go in a heavier direction, which kind of led to the bottom falling out.”
Anderson left Hiraeth in 2016, and the remaining trio decided to scrap everything and regroup as Palehorse/Palerider. Rather than find a substitute for Anderson, Richier made the reluctant choice to take over lead vocals himself.
“I'm a guitar player. I am not a singer,” Richier says. “Brett was very much a singer. He has an amazing voice. But that’s just not my forte. I’m a singer by default. We never replaced Brett, because we realized it was so much easier to juggle schedules and songwriting with three people instead of four. Moving into a heavier direction helped, too. It's made my lyrics and vocals not as much of an emphasis. It’s not what people typically latch on to when they hear our music, which is just fine with me.”
Much of that approach was inspired by one of Richier’s favorite bands, My Bloody Valentine, whose leader, Kevin Shields, is a master of filtering, layering and burying vocals until they become part of the instrumentation itself.
“I remember the first time I listened to Loveless,” Richier says, citing My Bloody Valentine’s acclaimed 1991 album, which is still the gold standard of the shoegaze genre. “I was on a Boy Scout camping trip, and one of the guys in my troop had just gotten Loveless. He was always listening to cool shit, and he was like, ‘You should check this band My Bloody Valentine out.’
“So I put the tape in and listened to it for a couple seconds, and I was like, ‘Dude, this tape is fucking broken.’ And my friend said, 'Oh, it’s supposed to sound like that.’ That just seemed so fucking crazy to me. It wasn’t an epiphany, but it always kind of stuck in my brain.”
Richier, Atkinson and Marcy also gravitated toward the influence of more recent bands like Red Sparowes and Jesu, both of which utilize dizzying dynamics, dreamy melody and brutal heaviness in equal measure.
“We just wanted to make an effort to do something a little different and oddball, and the heavy music community here in Denver, like Green Druid, just kind of embraced us,” Richier says. “And, of course, that started influencing how we were writing. But really, we’ve been able to play with all kinds of local bands. We’ve played with heavy bands like Khemmis and In the Company of Serpents, but we’ve also played with Wovenhand and Slim Cessna’s Auto Club. You know, it fits.”
Ryan Sims (left to right), David Atkinson and Brandon Richier are releasing the first new Palehorse/Palerider music in five years.
LK Cisco
Says Richier, “We didn't want to put too much pressure on ourselves or on Ryan, but it's been a lot of stumbling and falling and picking ourselves back up. I'm just not a very confident songwriter, and I'm sure that's part of the extremely introverted personality that I am. Plus, the first batch of songs we wrote with Ryan are a little lighter, in a way. A little brighter. My vocals are more up front, too.”
Adds Atkinson with a laugh, “Yes, we still want to be My Bloody Valentine, of course. But maybe we don't always have to sound so blatantly loud and large.”
The new single, “Don’t Leave Me Behind,” reflects the band’s newfound restraint. Alternating between delicate loops and cavernous riffs, the song doesn’t depart from Palehorse/Palerider’s previous style so much as refine it. “Don't Leave Me Behind” will be followed on January 24 by another single titled “Lobotomy Domine,” a nod to both the Ramones and Pink Floyd, as well as an EP called Waves 1 on February 7.
After a follow-up EP, Waves II, comes out later this year, both releases will be combined onto a vinyl LP before the end of 2025. And although the band’s Mark Lanegan collaboration tragically never came to fruition, Magnetic Eye Records has asked Palehorse/Palerider to record a cover of “The Downward Spiral” for an upcoming Nine Inch Nails tribute compilation. For a band that’s been silent, recording-wise, for the past five years, it’s a flurry of pent-up productivity that finally has a chance to be unleashed. Along with a flurry of pent-up emotion.
“It’s been a little bit of therapy, a little bit of processing and expressing things that I think we sometimes have difficulty expressing,” says Richier of the band’s resurrection. “I think Nate would be all for what we're doing now, even though it is a little bit different. But I’m trying not to put myself in the situation where I’m like, ‘Oh, what would Nate think of this?’
“I loved Nate to death,” he adds, “and his influence will definitely always be heard. Nate, Dave and I did have lengthy conversations about this before he passed, and I guess at the end of the day, I think we’d be doing him a disservice if we didn’t let go and try to make something even more beautiful.”
Palehorse/Palerider will play with Ghosts of Glaciers and Clarion Void at 8 p.m. on Friday, January 24, at the hi-dive, 7 South Broadway. Tickets are $12 in advance and $15 at the door. For more info about the show, visit hi-dive.com. For more info about Palehorse/Palerider, visit palehorsepalerider1.bandcamp.com.
