VENOM PRISON
Larissa Stupar spent her teenage years protesting against Nazis, and now she’s taking her message to the stage. She tells us why Venom Prison will always fight injustice
The death metal crushers are set to slay on Hammer’s tour. larissa reassures us their rising popularity won’t dull their message.
Even as an eight-year-old girl, Larissa Stupar was fighting the good fight.
“One of the boys at the school was really mean to my best friend, so I punched him in his eye,” she laughs.
“Don’t make my friends cry!”
Talking to Larissa today, she’s by no means aggressive – although you wouldn’t fuck with her. As we sit in the bowels of Metal Hammer Towers, following the band’s photoshoot, she’s all smiles, munching away on vegetarian Colin The Caterpillar sweets, recounting her journey from rural Russia to one of the UK’s hottest death metal bands.
“we said to theM, ‘fuck you, these
are our streets as well’”
LARISSA MARCHED AGAINST A RISING NAZI MOVEMENTIN GERMANY
The Venom Prison vocalist grew up in a small village in Rostov Oblast, near the Ukraine border and 1,000km from moscow. And while the movies might make you think Russia is a snowy wasteland governed by strict rules, Larissa remembers a different place – a friendly community where everyone grew their own food, and school was just a few minutes’ walk away. It was an idyllic setting, but one with little opportunity for jobs. So, when she was 10, her family relocated to Germany, her mother’s homeland. It was a difficult transition, as they moved around for months before finally settling in hamm, near Dortmund. This meant changing school three times in quick succession.
“I didn’t talk to anyone at school because I didn’t know anyone, and then I was just the foreign kid,” says Larissa. “People would point at me like the new girl and speak in German, saying mean things about me, but I could understand. That was hard.”
Feeling like an outsider, it was over a year before Larissa opened up and started making friends. “I didn’t feel at home in Russia very much – we were the Germans – and in Germany we were the Russians,” she explains. “I didn’t feel like anywhere was home; I felt like I wasn’t like everyone else. I was interested in different things to people around me, and that’s when I started listening to metal and punk.”
Growing up with her parents’ Toto records in the background, it was Larissa’s older sister who introduced her to the alternative side of music, blasting Nirvana tapes and showing her a VhS of The Prodigy. From there, it was just a matter of time before nu metal started calling.
“They’d only show the videos at night, so I’d stay up really late watching Slipknot and Korn,” she remembers. “I was into all of the Roadrunner bands – that was the label that had the heaviest mainstream metal. ever since I discovered Slipknot, I wanted to be in a band. Corey Taylor was a big inspiration for me.”
But Larissa didn’t always want to scream bloody murder, originally deciding to be a guitarist until her friend took up the instrument first, leaving her with no choice but to take on the challenge of vocals, practising screaming at the local park on top of a skate ramp. By the time she was 16, and with the advent of mySpace (remember that?), she became much more involved in the local scene and discovered a love for hardcore, going to tons of shows in town, but also travelling to neighbouring Belgium and the Netherlands.
Unlike mainstream metal, hardcore has its roots in politics, with predominantly left-leaning crowds gathering at shows and forming a strong community – something Larissa didn’t realise she was looking for. She began regularly attending shows in a nearby uni building.
“The students that put on shows were Antifa [anti-fascist] kids; it was very inclusive and very positive,” she explains. “even before I started going to hardcore shows, I was going to protests and demonstrations in my hometown because Germany still has a Nazi problem.”
She had started going to protests when she was 13 years old, without telling her mum where she was going. This impetus to become more
“Metal doesN’t do eNough
to call out abusers”
MUSICIANS ARE OFTEN HELD UP AS UNTOUCHABLE GODS, SAYS LARISSA
proactive came from being targeted herself by far-leaning “right-wing people”.
“There’s a word in German they keep calling metalheads and greebos – ‘zecke’ – and they would just attack alternative people. We were part of those people, so we wanted to say, ‘Fuck you, these are our streets as well.’”
marching with the Antifa at neo-Nazi demonstrations is a dangerous situation to put yourself in, but luckily Larissa managed to avoid trouble… for the most part.
“If you’re at a protest and you find a group of Nazis somewhere separate from the rest, Antifa people will attack them, and it will be the same the other way round – probably even worse. every time that happened, we would just fight,” she recalls.
At the age of 18, Larissa took part in the huge G8 protests in Germany, staying in a camp for two weeks with likeminded people who would “target different places to stop and barricade things” – although it never went to plan.
“The police had these massive water cannons and they would attack people with them, targeting their faces,” she remembers. “There were so many people injured; there was tear gas in the water, and some people had their ears completely fucked so they couldn’t hear any more. I got lucky.”
Following one particularly hairy demonstration in Dresden – what Larissa describes as “the biggest Nazi march in europe” – with a serious police presence, Larissa made the decision to step back.
“I think you can make a bigger change if you tell other people that there are problems; influence and educate them, instead of attacking them,” she reasons.
Being in a band is one way to influence people, whether it’s through lyrics or what you say and do during performances. When she was 17, Larissa joined the d-beat/crust band mass Strangulation, sharing vocal duties with a guy who would “always be so drunk and take his clothes off onstage”. What followed were two more hardcore bands – including the militant, left-wing Wolf Down.
“When I was in Wolf Down, I was really open onstage. I would hold speeches, and that’s something I got pretty tired of,” she explains. “I don’t want to tell people how to live their lives, but I want to say what I think and what I believe in, and if they find it interesting they can take something away from it, without me actually pointing out what they have to do.”
Following her departure from Wolf Down, Larissa wasn’t sure she wanted to be involved in music again. her boyfriend Ash (who she met previously through bands) moved from Wales to live with Larissa in Germany, and the pair eventually started recording early Venom Prison demos in their living room, which she describes as having a more machine head style. Soon after, they moved to Ash’s hometown of Newport, and started recruiting members for the band we know now.
The band’s 2016 debut album, Animus, tackles the topics of mental health, religion, fascism and rape revenge. Two years on, in a postWeinstein world and in the wake of the #meToo movement, those guilty of sexual assault are being called out for their disgusting actions. But is metal doing enough to name and shame abusers?
“I don’t think metal does enough to call people out,” says Larissa. “musicians have that power and status where nobody can touch them, especially fans, because they’re almost godlike. A lot of people don’t want to believe
that the person who means so much to them can actually do things like that, and deny it even when it’s obvious and people admit to it. metal could do more, but it should come from the men, not the women.”
Last year, Larissa posted a statement on social media about her own experiences with abuse from a former boyfriend and bandmember, which blew up across the hardcore community.
“I didn’t say anything before, because
I was scared people wouldn’t believe me,” says Larissa today, fiddling with her water bottle. “I felt really anxious about people saying I’m saying these things for the wrong reasons.
I must have written the post 20 times and deleted it; I didn’t know how to say it without giving too much detail, because it’s something that’s so private but you’re opening it to the whole world.
“I experienced things and that’s why I thought I needed to say something – so I did. It felt so odd for weeks, because I would receive so many messages; it kind of went viral and I didn’t know what was happening. It felt like it was happening all over again, but I’m glad I said something.”
What advice would you give to those thinking of speaking out but are perhaps too afraid?
“It’s important that you say something. It’s obviously up to you if you want to, because it’s nerve-wracking, and you experience things all over again. People will blame you, but there are people who believe you, there are people who might have experienced the same, and it will help you in the end. You can say it happened, you can prevent things from happening, and you can heal through it.”
With #meToo being such a talking point across the world, and more accusations of rape and sexual misconduct appearing on a daily basis, the follow-up to
Animus is likely to continue in the same angry vein.
“I want to say it’s less violent, but it’s not,” laughs Larissa.
“It’s more intelligent but also more violent at the same time, and that’s something that’s never going to stop. So much shit happened last year that blew my mind, and I’m trying to put it on paper and put my thoughts out there. It’s fucked up.”
But not all of last year’s events were negative. Venom Prison played at Download, graced Bloodstock’s main stage, toured a bunch, and won Best New Band at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods – not bad for a small death metal band from Newport.
“I think metal is ready for young bands,” says Larissa. “For a long time, people were glorifying all these old bands, and young bands weren’t given a chance, bands with women weren’t given a chance. But I think the new generation is ready for that. People are just as angry and they can feel the music even more than they did before.”
Animus IS OUT NOW VIA PROSTHETIC. VENOM PRISON SUPPORT TRIVIUM ON
metAl HAmmer’S TOUR IN APRIL – TURN TO P.107 FOR DETAILS