Asheville, North Carolina’s Hellir came to my attention last year, seemingly out of nowhere. I’d known band mastermind Dan Shaneyfelt in passing before due to his involvement in black metal acts like Black Mountain Hunger and Low Earth, but Hellir’s particular blend of vapor/synthwave and depressive black metal sehnsucht caught my ear in just the right way. What made their first album, 2024’s Wheel of Ghosts, so damn good was its way of feeling depressive but realistic. Not the maudlin wails of crap like Silencer or Lifelover but something more akin to being the anti-hero in a Nicholas Refn or Gaspar Noe movie, with a real longing transmuted into behavior that is both self-destructive and self-constructive, a dark hole lit by old advertisements and glitching NES cartridges that is deep but maybe, just maybe, could someday be crawled out of.
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Much like they did last year, Hellir has again come out of nowhere, this time with a brand new single and video, “Firespray,” augmented with an expanded band lineup that sees Shaneyfelt ceding drum duties to Dylan Webb and bass duties to Luis Reyes. The video for the song is pretty silly, and intentionally so: the band is shown performing while wearing Mandalorian helmets, intercut with the life story of “Robert Allan Fettucini” who wears the same mask (as does his wife). However, the song itself bobs back and forth from black metal into straight-up death-doom, and comes in strong and heavy with it, knocking the unprepared viewer off-guard with the contrast to the wholesomely whimsical visuals.
And, yeah, the video is mostly supposed to be funny and tongue-in-cheek, but there’s a bit of emotional substance in there too, a commentary on growing up and finding that the stuff that gave you meaning as a kid sometimes doesn’t quite do it for you as an adult. I’m reminded of Anagnorisis’ fascinating 2016 album Peripeteia, which managed to craft irresistible black metal out of lyrics about a dysfunctional childhood and somehow didn’t come across as either childish or “unmetal”. That the band hails from Asheville, which was subject to some of the worst damages of Hurricane Helene last year, makes this kind of amusing hiraeth more potent. That, or it could just be a funny video about “what if Boba Fett was a dumb kid or a working Joe on Earth instead of the most feared bounty hunter in the galaxy?” To the viewer goes the interpretation.
Hellir perform live occasionally in the Asheville area and your next chance to see them, if you live around there, will be on May 31st at Fleetwoods with Killiad and Crystal Spiders.
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“Firespray” is available through Hellir’s Bandcamp.
