GWAR

Sometime in the mid-eighties, the punk band Death Piggy merged with the art collective The Slave Pit, where people built costumes, props and monsters. The music came second, because somebody had to play something while all the monsters moved around, and today the result of this highly unusual collaboration is the cult band GWAR.

The story that the band tells everyone about themselves is that they are the intergalactic gang the Scumdogs of the Universe, who have landed on Earth with the worst possible intentions (we can only hope that a heroic metal band will one day come and save us from them!). The 1990 album of the same name is still their centrepiece and the record they play most songs from. Since Hell-O in 1988, they have put out 15 releases, most recently The New Dark Ages in 2022.

The masked musicians’ stage characters have names like ’Blöthar the Berserker’, ’Balsac the Jaws of Death’, ’Jizmak Da Gusha’ and ’Beefcake the Mighty’, so you get an idea of what kind of genre we are dealing with. But behind all the silliness, you should not forget how good the music is: GWAR plays fast, hard thrash-punk and has actually received two Grammy nominations, which says something about how far they were willing to take what started out mostly as a joke.