When you’re 15, you never imagine playing with Slayer,” says Chad Smith, the jovial, dreadlocked vocalist and bassist for Hemlock.
The Las Vegas heavy metal band Hemlock has been around for nearly 30 years, touring around the world and opening for bands like Slipknot, Mastodon, Ministry and, yes, Slayer. “It’s pretty insane,” Smith says. “We’re on 28 years next month—28 years! We started when I was 15, and my brother, Brian, was 17. We started in the garage, playing Elks lodges.”
Aside from Chad and Brian, who plays drums, Hemlock’s lineup has fluctuated over the decades. The brothers recently added Tevon Giannini and Brian Jackson to play guitar, gearing up for more live dates. And then the pandemic mess of 2020 hit.
“This has been the longest [stretch] of no shows,” Smith says. “One time, we were down for four months [without playing live], and I felt bad and guilty then. Now we’re going on a year and a half of no shows.
“We wrapped up a huge U.S. tour in 2019 and booked a European tour for 2020, and two weeks later all the travel bans [happened]. But, I also know it’s a small pebble in the pond. The world is suffering in a lot of ways.”
The guys responded the only way they know how—by making more music.
“We normally don’t have this much free time,” Smith says. “We had been writing parts and pieces over the years in between tours. I drive the bus—a big 35-foot bus—and I’m the stage manager and tour manager. It’s a lot of crazy go, go, go. [Then] we’ll get home and have one week where we don’t have to do anything band-oriented and then just jump back on it. When our European tour got messed up, I got ahold of our old guitar player, and we started writing a bunch of these songs.”
Now, Hemlock has released not one, but two new albums for fans around the globe. KARMAgeDDoN and Violence & Victory both dropped February 8, comprising 11 songs apiece.
“Normally we do a bunch of preproduction and then go into a studio in LA and record for two or three weeks. But this time we were like, ‘Well, all the studios are closed and no one can travel, so now what?’” Smith says. “We wound up with 22 songs. Normally you whittle them down, but we started trying to think of which ones to cut and I just started feeling guilty, like, ‘Screw it, let’s record them all.’ It was very untraditional.”
The result is an arsenal of uplifting headbangery—thrashy, energetic metal meant to kick-start the soul. “I write our lyrics to be super positive and optimistic,” Smith says. “The world needs more positivity—so let’s put out 22 happy, heavy Hemlock songs.”
