METAL LORDS IS THE METAL MOVIE WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR
Created by Game Of Thrones showrunner D.B. Weiss and with music from Tom Morello, Netflix’s coming-of-age movie Metal Lords is a love letter to the scene
HOLLYWOOD HASN’T ALWAYS got rock and metal right. For every Bill & Ted or Sound Of Metal, there’s been a Rock Of Ages or
American Satan. But recently released Netflix coming-ofage movie Metal Lords definitely sits in the former camp – it’s one of the few times the scene has been accurately and lovingly represented on the screen.
“The idea was of doing a coming-of-age movie within that specific subculture, with kids who loved this music,” D.B. Weiss, the film’s writer, director and producer, tells Metal Hammer. “I couldn’t think of too many movies that really focused on that, so I felt that if we hit the bullseye, it would appeal to people who really love and live the music.”
It helps that the people behind
Metal Lords have some heavyweight pedigree. D.B. is the former coshowrunner on Game Of Thrones, and he enlisted Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello as executive music producer.
The Metal Lords of the title are two teenage metal fans and outsiders, Kevin (played by It and Knives Out star Jaeden Martell) and Hunter (newcomer Adrian Greensmith), who form the excellently named Skullfucker to compete in their high school Battle Of The Bands contest. For D.B., who was a huge metal fan himself growing up, it was important to offer an authentic and recognisable set of characters that real-life metal fans could see themselves in. “Hunter needed to feel like a real kid who really loved this stuff,” he explains. “Obviously there is no rule book – there’s no playbook to this stuff. I was like, ‘Do we put an Eddie Van Halen guitar on his wall?’ I know there would be some people that would go, ‘Fuck no! That’s not real metal!’ But then there would be other people who would go, ‘Of course, you have to do that!’
“There is no right answer there.
But it felt like he was a kid with an encyclopaedic knowledge of this world, and was obsessive.”
This attention to detail is baked into the film. Metal Lords doesn’t just namedrop obvious icons such as Iron Maiden, Metallica and Black Sabbath, but dives deeper to reference Opeth, Meshuggah, Celtic Frost and more.
“The To Mega Therion album cover was important to have in there,” says D.B., referencing Celtic Frost’s landmark 1985 album. “There were days where we were done and wrapped, and I’d suddenly go, ‘Did we get an insert of that album cover?’ And they said no, so I was like, ‘Please everyone, five more minutes, we need to get that album cover in there.’ There were some things that I knew just needed to be in the movie.”
While D.B. himself knows the subject well, the presence of Tom Morello helps get every nuance of the world created in Metal Lords spot on,
“I FELT IT WOULD APPEAL TO PEOPLE WHO REALLY LOVE AND LIVE THE MUSIC”
lending some serious rock credibility to the movie in the process.
“Dan [D.B.] told me about the idea for this movie and asked would I like to be involved,” Tom tells Hammer. “That is low-hanging fruit. Metal was my first love – it was the posters on my wall, it was what I aspired to be as a person. I asked him ‘What’s my job?’ and he said, ‘Let’s talk about the music, but I definitely need you to write a song, and the song will be called Machinery Of Torment.’ I said, ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life to write a song called Machinery Of Torment!’ So I did!”
Given that particular song plays a pivotal part in the movie’s Battle Of The Bands scene, it was crucial that it sounded both realistic and raging.
“Over the course of 22 records, I’ve made metal that is mixed with rap and rock and alternative,” says Tom. “What do I do when I make metal that is cut with nothing but more metal? What is that going to sound like? So as my fingers were writing these riffs, I had that in mind: ‘This is only going to be a metal song!’”
Much like Skullfucker themselves trying to convert a school full of non-metal fans into headbangers in the movie, so D.B. believes that Metal Lords is enough of a love letter to the metal scene that it can win over anyone not already immersed in it.
“Fingers crossed,” he nods. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do it: getting people interested in music they really hadn’t thought too much about. In the right setting, in the right circumstances, this music has the power to convert people on the spot, and that’s a very special thing that I love about it.”
METAL LORDS IS STREAMING ON NETFLIX NOW