SCARLXRD

Trap metal has arrived. And its leader may be the most unexpected success story of 2018

Metal is an

ever-evolving genre.

You just couldn’t fathom hearing Korn back in the 80s, just as Ghost would warp the mind of 90s metalheads, and now in the year 2018, the rulebook might as well be pulped. Enter Scarlxrd (pronounced Scarlord), the masked maniac behind the new movement known as trap metal. Its vicious, piercing screams and distorted guitars mix with heavy electronic beats and hip-hop flow to make something more akin to Death Grips, but in reality, it’s just the bastard offspring of a nu metal obsessive. Growing up listening to Eminem and Limp Bizkit, it was Slipknot that dragged a young, responsive Scarlxrd into the world of heavy music.

“I was trying to find the heaviest shit,” he laughs today, speaking to us over the phone while on tour, following a full-on Bonkerstown show at London’s Underworld. “Slipknot’s self-titled album was the most insane shit I’d ever heard. The more you listen to it, the more you feel the energy and you understand the message. A lot of music isn’t about being heavy and loud, it’s the idea behind it that gets me going. The idea of not conforming, that ideology inside heavy music is what inspires me the most.”

Before donning his

signature black surgical mask (inspired by anime Tokyo Ghoul), Scarlxrd was frontman for nu metallers Myth City, but he wanted something heavier. If you think you recognise that face peering over the mask, Scar used to be known as Mazzi Maz and found fame through YouTube and his super-cheery vlogs, something far removed from the earnest 24-year-old we’re speaking to today. He jacked in the all-smiles persona because it was inauthentic and he was lying to himself.

“It’s something I was really good at but I just didn’t enjoy it,” he begins. “You know what it’s like doing stuff that you don’t like – it’s depressing, it’s horrible. The thing is, it was paying, that’s what would keep the lights on and if I was to stop it then that’s it, I don’t have any income or way to support myself. It was a difficult decision to make, but that’s how much I didn’t want to do it – I would risk my life in order to do this.”

But if you’re a well-recognised face on YouTube already, wouldn’t you use that to your advantage? Why hide behind a mask and use a fake name? “I want people to listen to my sound. Who I am isn’t really important,” he says modestly. “Having an artist name, having an image and covering my face is forcing you to listen to the music a little bit more. What I do is raw honesty and it’s raw music. It needs that image to go with it so people can understand it. It all goes hand in hand and it’s not important who I am or what my name is – it’s all about the music I’m making.”

And Scarlxrd has been making music, very successfully, for quite some time, without anyone in the mainstream noticing. With almost a million subscribers on YouTube and 750,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, Scarlxrd is a living, breathing example of the underground at work. It’s the sound of the disaffected youth coming out in a mish-mash of alternative music’s most abrasive and maligned sounds. And the real-world is taking notice.

“It’s very cult-like – you have to be into it to be into it. I understand that my music is not for everyone, you have to have an acquired taste for sure,” he says. “I just want to make honest music and this music sounds honest, to me… I pull parts of myself out and just blast it on the record.

“I have no idea what to call it,” he continues. “DXXM is full of crazy shit – it’s not just rap and metal, it’s almost genre-defying. I get the same feeling when I listen to Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory. At the time I had no idea what it was, it was just crazy, good shit.”

“I RISKED MY LIFE TO DO THIS”