This Band Will Scare the Influencers Out of Spooky Season

Romanticizing fall, or “spooky season,” is officially in full effect: Pumpkin-spice lattes and cookies, “witchy” hats bigger than a full moon and Taylor Swift’s surprise engagement to her pigskin prince right before the NFL season officially kicks off this month (fuck the Chiefs, by the way).

It’s enough to make those with more morbid minds vomit. For the truly haunted heads, may we suggest checking out a band so sinister that its music may or may not have the prescient power to possess not only the musicians behind the nauseating notes, but listeners of ghoulish fascination.

No need to play it backwards either, because what Fort Collins murder-sludge unit Old Skin does is disgustingly deliberate and as digestible as back-of-throat bile. Delicious, if not downright twisted. But you be the judge.

“It’s fun to write something that you’re like, ‘Oh my god, someone’s going to fucking die from this tonight,’” guitarist Hayden Cooley says.

Old Skin traces its origins back to 2020. Initially a four-piece, the group grew into the current six-member configuration — Cooley, guitarist Collin Galloway, bassist Joe Helzer, drummer Kyle Milam, noise-bringer Gage Christopherson and vocalist Matt Dooley — while releasing a pair of EPs, Towering Monolith of Flesh (2022) and V/H/DEATH (2023). But this year’s horror-inducing debut, Wails of Ten Thousand via Cursed Monk Records, is the first chapter of Old Skin’s Malleus Maleficarum.
As if cursed to compel, Cooley & Co. wrote the seven tracks over the past two years, without thinking about stringing them together on an album until it became clear the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

Kicking off with “Crosspusher” — a “party-sludge” song about The Exorcist — Wails of Ten Thousand appears groovy and accessible at first, nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to traditional sludge-metal. But the song only opens the door for the descent into madness that follows. “Vessel (Brainworm),” which is literally about becoming possessed, haunted-mansion tome “Hissing House” and Oathbreaker anthem “Shattered Blade” further pull the curtains back on Old Skin’s fractured psyche by mixing in more death-doom and harsh noise.

Even the instrumental interludes — “Arch of Skulls” and “Acid Bath” (that’s a wink to the OG sludge band Old Skin takes its name from, “Old Skin” is a 1996 Acid Bath track) — are unsettling. But the climax, closer “Cauterizing Hammer,” is the final nail in the coffin, nearly seven minutes of dread, a tale about a murderous mallet that kills and encaptures all who dare wield it.

“As the album goes on it progressively gets darker and darker,” Cooley admits, adding that at first, he and his bandmates were unsure they wanted to go down such a bleak path.

“We took a step back and were like, ‘Do we like this? Do we like that it starts with this fun, positive song and by the end of ‘Cauterizing Hammer’ you just want to kill yourself?’ Oh, yeah, it’s perfect. It’s just brutal.”

Laying down the low-and-slow dirge for the album-ender almost broke him, too.

“It made me feel insane trying to record that,” Cooley continues. “The whole time we were tracking it I was like, ‘I don’t know how Primitive Man can write an entire album that’s this slow and not lose their minds by the end of it, because it’s insane.’ It’s pure anguish.”

So witness Old Skin’s ritual live when the FoCo crew opens for Washington State psych-doom lords Kadabra on Friday, September 5, at Surfside 7, courtesy of Front Range Fury.

Cooley admits the group doesn’t gig too often — could you imagine the wave of hysteria if they did? — but Old Skin has had the opportunity to open for sludge legends Weedeater and Eyehategod recently, as well as NOLA blackened death-grinders Goatwhore, and rub shoulders with Mike IX Williams, Dave “Dixie” Collins and Sammy Pierre Duet, also of Acid Bath.

“They’re idols that you watched and listened to for years and talking to them it’s like, ‘You’re just like us,’ but perfected their craft and are awesome about it.”

Old Skin is on its way to doing that as well. Cooley explains there are plans for the sophomore follow-up next year and the six are already brewing up some sickness.

“We’ve been trying to write and put together a thoughtful album. The direction that we want to go is we want to keep getting heavier,” he says.

“A lot of it is just these intentional slow parts, devastating riffs, trying to make something that sounds sad and evil,” Cooley concludes. “We just want to write something diabolical.”

Old Skin, with Kadabra, 8 p.m. Friday, September 5, Surfside 7, 238 Linden Street, Fort Collins. Tickets are $12-$15.