Death to False Metal: Viperwitch Is Bringing Trad Back

High fantasy always captured Danica Minor’s attention.

As a comic book-loving child who grew up with 1980s films such as Legend, Willow and The Dark Crystal, she envisioned creating similar realms and worlds in cinematic spaces. She didn't expect trad metal would ultimately become the perfect bastion for her artistic wellspring when she started the band Viperwitch back in 2014.

“It took a really long time to get people who were interested in it enough to do it,” Minor explains, adding she played in all-women hair-metal group called Stray Pussy in order to get her kicks, but it wasn’t completely scratching that itch.

“I can write sleezy, dirty ’80s riffs. I can write about cocaine and strippers, but I have to add some of my elements, like gore, blood, steel. I wanted to go faster. I wanted to go heavier,” says the guitarist-vocalist. “That’s just organically where my pocket is. That was the vision right off the bat.”
Minor eventually recruited musicians with a similar interest in orcs and the Elder Scrolls games, mainly former Guitar Center coworker Jason Pinero, and the Viperwitch campaign began to take shape. The current lineup also includes guitarist Will Perkins, live drummer Tim Gillman and vocalist Jean Pierre Abboud, formerly of Traveler. Perkins and Gillman also play in Denver power-metal crew Celestial Wizard, while drummer Jacob Coellen still handles studio work for Viperwitch.

“This vision that we have now is the exact vision I had in mind in 2014, when I started this,” Minor explains. “I was like, ‘I’m going to do trad metal. I’m going to write about the things that I know, the things I’m good at.’”

It may have taken a decade, but Viperwitch’s Witch Hunt: Road to Vengeance, released on Halloween last year, is the medieval techno-dystopian concept album (think Mad Max meets Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell era) that Minor had always dreamed of. Such songs as “Legend of the Midnight Rider: The Saxon Killer,” “Road to Vengeance: Descendents of the Gods” and “Hellbound” show off Viperwitch’s shredding chops and fist-pumping heavy metal through a traditional hero’s journey story arch.

“That was a culmination of thirty-plus years of triumphs that were so small compared to the amount of obstacles and loneliness and pain I’ve gone through for so long,” she shares. “I wanted to make sure to get it out there, not as like a space of ego, but like, ‘This has to be out there because this is the truth and other people walk this path.’ They have to know that this will end up okay. You’re going to be fine, and you have to find that inner-strength.”

Minor, who performs as Lynx the Huntress (that is a Skyrim reference, for all you gamer nerds), hopes the positivity and power of Viperwitch is contagious, a beacon that people can be whoever they want to be, whether that’s wearing armor and slinging swords or simply sporting leather and spikes.

“It’s fantasy. It’s cool,” she adds. “For us, it’s a ritual, it’s an invocation. It’s like putting [those] who really are on the inside on the outside now. We want to teach people that you can do that, too.”

Slay with Viperwitch on Saturday, May 17, during Black Sky Brewery’s eleventh annual goat roast. Chamber Mage, Steel Born and Beast Eagle are also on the all-trad-power-metal bill.

Pinero, who performs under the battle name Zeus, echoes Minor’s sentiments in outlining his personal evolution within Viperwitch, particularly the growth in self-confidence such an outlet has provided for him.

“It’s like an escape from everything that’s going on otherwise. The second that the intro track plays, and we’re start getting ready to run up on stage, there’s a switch that goes off in my brain,” he says. “All that stress and anxiety and problems I was thinking about, none of that matters right now. It takes me out of my own head and puts me into a place where I do feel like I can get past pain and trauma and just escape from all of it, but at the same time, not go back to it.”

That escapism aspect is one of the biggest reasons behind the recent surge in fantastical trad-metal, which includes popular women-fronted bands Castle Rat and Savage Master. Minor finally feels like Viperwitch is existing in the right timeline to capture the attention of the metal masses. But what it comes down to, she explains, is just going out there and doing what you love.

“Joy is the most important key in this. Maybe to someone on the outside, that’s why it comes off as so comical and goofy and funny, a bunch of D&D campaigners,” she adds.

“Here’s the thing, it has to come with joy because that’s where true light sits,” Minor concludes. “If we’re opening with a little bit of light-heartedness, then everything else can flood in afterwards. But you have to have fun fucking doing this.”

Viperwitch, with Chamber Mage, Steel Born and Beast Eagle, 6 p.m. Saturday, May 17, Black Sky Brewery, 490 Santa Fe Drive. Tickets are $10 at the door.