Five Denver Bands That'll Rip Your Face Off This Halloween

Heavy metal has been synonymous with Halloween ever since a little-known band from England called Black Sabbath released the genre’s first down-tuned offering with its occult-laden debut album. The group, led by madman vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, even named itself after the 1963 horror film Black Sabbath, starring a vampiric Boris Karloff.

After Sabbath set the stage, all hell broke loose. Bands only upped the ante in the ensuing decades with imagery and songs full of ghouls and goblins, pentagrams and pitchforks, spurring satanic panics and political pushback along the way.

The Denver metal scene today is no different, so as we enter the season of the witch this October, we present to you five local bands that are still putting razor blades in candy apples and scaring squares.

Axeslasher
No list of gore-obsessed local bands would be complete without the self-proclaimed cryptid group Axeslasher. Complete with its own lore and origin story, Axeslasher presents itself as an undead, splatter-thrash metal five-piece from the genre’s heyday in the ’80s that was brutally murdered by a mob of crazed locals, only to be unwillingly resurrected in 2012 (for the record, that’s when the band actually formed).

Guitarists Lord Guillotine and Dr. Grind, bassist Mr. Scissors, drummer Dr. Barbaric and vocalist Professor Pizza announced their unholy return with “Mark of the Pizzagram/Invasion of the Babesnatchers” and have been slaughtering unsuspecting audiences ever since. Axeslasher’s latest single, 2022’s “Bone Appetite,” is evidence that the band’s bloodlust has yet to be satiated.

The only way to safely navigate an Axeslasher set and escape with all your limbs is to wear the group’s official symbol: the pizzagram. You’ve been warned.

Angelic Desolation
While the members of Axeslasher are monsters, the Denver razorgrind forebears in Angelic Desolation have torn a page out of mad scientist Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s notebook. But they prefer to create ungodly abominations in the form of brutal death metal.

The band’s new album, Orchestrionic Abortion, is filled with nightmarish tales of flesh-eating deities such as “Brutus McMucus” and “Pterrordactyl Mann” (get it?). There’s even a song about a taco truck from hell: “Paco’s Satanic Taco Truck (Los Tacos de Diablo de la Troca de Paco).”

It’s safe to say that guitarist Matt Markle, vocalist Jay Medina, drummer Max Thunder and bassist Leonard White are a little sick in the head, but that only gives Angelic Desolation more street cred on a list like this.

With two full-lengths and four EPs under its belt since being unleashed in 2006, the ungodly quartet’s only goal is “to take the world by storm.... Or slit throats in the name of Satan, whichever opportunity comes first,” according to the band’s official mission statement.

Lacerated
Denver’s Lacerated is the youngest band of this grotesque group, but that doesn’t mean the death-dealers are any less skull-crushing. Age, after all, is just a number; when it comes to wreaking havoc, Michael Myers, Damien Thorn and Rosemary’s baby all started pretty young. Such is the case with Lacerated.

Armed with the five-song EP The Vile Domain, which dropped almost a year ago now on Halloween, the group of Andy Rodriguez (bass), Iván Alcalá (drums), Greg Bueno (guitar), Rodney Lathrop (guitar) and Jeff Rivera (vocals) have spared no time in bursting eardrums and announcing that Lacerated is more than ready for the killing business.

Rivera, who writes all of the band’s lyrics, introduces listeners to evils beyond comprehension on such songs as “Clone” and “Rellik” — the latter being a six-minute descent into madness.

Glacial Tomb
Do you suffer from cryophobia, the fear of freezing to death? Or maybe you just don’t want to deal with the situation of Kurt Russell and friends in The Thing. If that’s the case, then Glacial Tomb (not to be confused with New Orleans subzero group Glacial Coffin) may not be your death-metal band this spooky season. But if you prefer your blackened death metal with a little frost around the edges, then this Denver trio has just the sound for you.

An arctic mix of old-school death metal, black metal and sludge, Glacial Tomb is the side project of Khemmis members Ben Hutcherson (guitars and vocals) and David Small (bass), who eventually teamed up with drummer Michael Salazar (also of local post-metal instrumental four-piece Cult of the Lost Cause) to disseminate nihilism, misanthropy and death.

Glacial Tomb revealed seven cold-blooded songs with its 2018 self-titled debut before releasing the single “Worldsflesh” in 2020. Earlier this year, the band announced that its upcoming sophomore album was finished.

Of Feather and Bone
For the past decade, Denver’s Of Feather and Bone has spewed festering anti-Christianity death metal in the name of its Aztec ancestors. Lead singer and bassist Alvino Salcedo, who is of Mexican descent, says his lyrics and disdain for organized religion is “rooted in knowing that my ancestry was wiped out by Christianity.”

“So my hatred for Christianity doesn’t come unwarranted,” he previously shared with Westword. “It comes due to the fact that my ancestors, my great-grandmothers, my great-great grandmothers, were all killed by the Christians, the Catholics, who came here and told them that they were savages and traded all their great knowledge for a book.”

The fallout of such a cleansing seeps into everything that Of Feather and Bone, which includes Preston Weippert (drums) and Dave Grant (guitars and vocals), does. The trio’s latest record, Sulfuric Disintegration, is full of blasphemous bangers such as album bookends “Regurgitated Communion” and “Baptized in Boiling Phlegm.” Praise be.

Dismembered mentions: Maris the Great, Cronos Compulsion, Primitive Man, Blood Incantation, Wayfarer, Stormkeep and Lykotonon.