Subrig Destroyer

At the center of Athens’ doom-laden drone-metal duo Subrig Destroyer is the team of Chris Holcombe (drums) and Joel Martin (bass and vocals). Together they form a slow and bombastic rhythm section that defies both categorization and geography. Their songs’ drawn-out and overdriven walls of pulverizing bottom-end and distortion resonate with all the murk and mystery of dark matter. The duo’s live shows caught the attention of Atlanta psych-metal masters Zoroaster, who’ll release the duo’s debut Rode Asunder EP this spring via Terminal Doom Records.

Athens doesn’t have a reputation as a metal town, but Subrig Destroyer is as much a product of its environment as it is an outsider. “Athens is a shiny happy town,” says Holcombe. “People around here aren’t down with the heavy stuff, and they always want to go to the shows where all the chicks are, and chicks don’t want to see a couple of dirty, nasty dudes playing metal.”

But less clamor from the locals means less distractions. They craft simple, loud and soul-crushing arrangements that set the group apart from the burgeoning Southern metal scene that rests on the shoulders of everyone from Kylesa to Mastodon. For Holcombe and Martin, standing on the shoulders of giants is a privilege but not a means to an end. “People intellectualize metal as some sort of anthropological study, but you can only do that from the other side,” Holcombe says. “When we write songs, we don’t think about genre or where we’re from. If you spend hours writing a song trying to stay within a specific genre, it never turns out right and if we spend too long writing a song we’ll just scrap it. If it’s easy for us to write, it’s good.”