The industrial revolution is here, thanks to LA’s 3TeeTh. But why the hell is their singer a lizard?
They’re championed by Rammstein and Ministry and are trying to overthrow the Presidency with a lizard. Meet 3Teeth
etal Hammer is following 3Teeth through a maze of deserted, graffitied rooms. We’re in the bowels of London’s Electrowerkz, a grimy steelworksturned-nightclub and the scene of our photoshoot. “This’ll work,” vocalist and lyricist Alexis ‘Lex’ Mincolla beams, as we enter a dark and dingy room, his eyes lighting up at the potential props; a stack of military crates, an iron cage and an abandoned DJ booth.
The LA industrial/cyber warriors are in town to support Ministry on their European tour, but today they also release their third album, Metawar. Tonight, they’re throwing a launch party, but it feels like a celebration of so much more – the chrome-plated cherry on top of a frenetic few years that’s seen the band endorsed by Tool and Rammstein and thrust to the front of the modern industrial crop.
Ten minutes later, we’ve emerged from the gloom and decamped to a pub for a chat. Oozing cool, with his perfectly coiffured moustache, knee-high boots and omnipresent sunglasses, Lex sticks out like a sore thumb among the office workers enjoying a post-work pint. Merging the stomp of early Manson and the bite of vintage Nine Inch Nails, 3Teeth’s hyper-conceptual, ultrasexualised swagger activates primal human instincts to fight and fuck, but Lex insists there’s a deeper meaning behind the band’s abrasive machinery.
“Nothing is what it seems on the surface,” he says, sipping Guinness and describing the thematic arc that buzzsaws through Metawar. “Everything has multiple layers behind it, of agenda and incentive, and the thing on the facade is usually there to misdirect you.”
The vocalist spent his early 20s studying political science and economics in Rome out of a desire to be “hypereducated”. (“It was during the Bush administration and everyone had two strikes against them as an American,” he says. “They assume you’re ignorant.”) On 3Teeth’s 2017 album,
Onstage, Lex is a leather-clad force of nature, but behind the scenes he’s the band’s creative and visual epicentre, designing and directing every element of their razor-sharp aesthetic, from music videos to photoshoots. The video for their most recent single, President X, is his most political statement yet. In front of an American flag bathed in blood-red lights, ‘President’ Lex makes a speech at a podium dressed in a
fascist military uniform. Before long, his skin peels back to reveal a scaly, reptilian creature – a character Lex created to reflect his own personal political disillusionment.
“President X was a way for me to explore this concept that it doesn’t matter who the president is,” he explains. “We wrote our first record during the Obama era when, if you were anti-systemic, it meant something. When Trump became president, everyone jumped on that bandwagon of Trump-slamming and I want to be very careful of not writing songs that felt like they’re attacking Trump, but rather are attacking everyone. On President X,
I go after Obama, Bush and Trump on the first line. I wanted on this record to make sure we didn’t go left or right, but walked right down the middle.”
Do you vote back home?
“No way, I wouldn’t sleep at night if I voted.”
But how can you expect to have a voice if you don’t vote?
“That robot is going To know exactly how To get you off”
Lex MinCoLLa
“I don’t need a voice,” he argues. “I have a voice as a singer. In terms of participating in the delusion of choice… I don’t have an interest in that.”
Elsewhere, Metawar’s visions of our future are equally nightmarish – where mass unemployment due to large-scale automation is rife, and where populism and the introduction of a universal basic wage leads to chaos, with capitalism eating itself. Even sex, Lex says, has an expiration date. “Technology will soon destroy that. We’re not going to need each other because that robot is going to know exactly how to get you off.”
We guess this means the next 3Teeth album is going to be completely bleak and terrifying? “No, that’s the funny thing,” he chuckles. “I want to write a really positive, sort of utopic record!”
ex grew up in Boston surrounded by rock’n’roll influence. His mother was good friends with the then-wife of Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer (“I used to swim in his pool”). Having already fallen in love with 80s glam metal, he was introduced to Sepultura and Morbid Angel by his older brother, who played in local death metal bands. Years later, he moved to LA where he put on an underground tech noir club night called Lil Death, through which he met 3Teeth keyboardist and producer Xavier Swafford.
“It was like church,” remembers Lex. “It was every Sunday night, everyone got dressed up and it had this big ornate neon altar. It served as the primordial, black ooze that gave way to 3Teeth.
We’d play industrial, really cool techno and heavy metal, but then there’d be this weird witch house vibe to it and we thought, ‘What if we just smashed all that together and made a band?’”
Soon after, Lex met Tool guitarist Adam Jones at the wedding of a mutual friend where Lex was the best man and Adam was a groomsman. On their return to LA, their friendship blossomed, as they bonded over videogames. “We’d kill zombies together with our headsets on like nerds,” laughs Lex. “I think it was a year later he said, ‘Dude, why didn’t you tell me you had a band?’”
Adam ended up watching 3Teeth play their next LA gig at the Sunset Strip’s The Viper Room, and was so impressed that he casually asked Lex if the band wanted to join Tool on their 2016 US arena tour. Up until that point, the largest crowd 3Teeth had played in front of was around 2,000 people.
“We were going to see The Martian, that Matt Damon film,” says Lex.
“In the line to get popcorn he was like, ‘Hey, do you want to come out on the road with us? The lady was like, ‘Do you want butter on your popcorn?’ and I was like, ‘Shut the fuck up what is happening right now?!’ Adam was like, ‘Don’t think about that now,’ and I was like, ‘How am I supposed to go watch Matt Damon grow shit potatoes on
Mars for two hours?!’”
Their first show supporting Tool was at the 12,500-capacity San Diego Viejas Arena, and that night Metallica were in the crowd. “About 15 mins before we go on, Adam was like, ‘Hey whatever happens out there, don’t worry about it,” grins Lex. “Our fans are supertough sometimes; they booed Mike Patton when he opened up for us.’ I was like, ‘They’re going to eat me alive.’”
They didn’t. The band went down an absolute storm and, the following year, they received another call, this time to support Rammstein on another US arena jaunt, in front of an audience more attuned to their steel-jawed onslaught.
“The first night Till’s like, ‘Come on, come, sips, my room,” Lex recalls.
“There was a girl dancing naked in the corner and his assistant was pouring drinks for us. And he said, ‘So this moustache. It’s fake?’ I’m like, ‘Nah’ and he just grabs a hold of it. Here I am, shooting vodka with Till Lindemann pulling on my moustache, telling me it’s fake, and that’s how we met. They’re just the nicest, no-ego guys you’ll ever meet. But also, backstage Till is like an action figure; he’s got a huge cigar and six shots of mezcal, he’s like everything you want him to be.”
ast-forward to the following night, and it’s Ministry’s gig at London’s Shepherds Bush Empire. As 3Teeth kick off the evening, they’re greeted with a rapturous reception and a sizeable pit. It’s been a long time since an industrial band showed the kind of potential that could put them shoulder to shoulder with the scene’s greats, but 3Teeth are elbowing their way into some seriously esteemed company. To record Metawar, they enlisted the services of producer Sean Beavan, the man who’s had a hand in some of the best industrial records ever made: NIN’s Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral, and Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar. He helped them realise their vision of being a band that combines the legacy of industrial music with a shiny modern future.
“I just fucking rang him up,” says
Lex, when asked how the collab came about. “We’d go and record in his house and his wife would cook us dinner every night. Taking the abstract ingredients of industrial music and making it work requires a knowledge of the genre, and Sean knows everything about the shit we do. He co-produced Antichrist Superstar with Trent and for us, it’s all about being part of that lore.”
Metawar is out now via century media. see more at https://3teeth.org
“Till from rammstein was pulling on my moustache”
Lex MinCoLLa