Strapping Young Lad

Strapping Young Lad is an extreme industrial metal band created by Devin Townsend in 1995, just after the musician shot and recorded with Steve Vai. He wrote by himself the album Heavy As A Really Heavy Thing , the band's first effort at that time composed of one person. First of all, drummer Gene Hoglan (Death , Testament , Fear Factory ) who will help him write the second album City , then Byron Stroud ( Fear Factory , Zimmers Hole ) and Jed Simon ( Zimmers Hole ) who will lend a hand for the recording and the concerts of the formation before becoming full members of the band. This second album will be emulated at its release in 1997 and will soon become one of the most bourrin albums ever recorded, before becoming a cult, some songs having contributed to the Strapping Young Lad phenomenon by placing them directly on the pantheon of the most heavy bands on the international metal scene ( Oh My Fucking God, Detox, AAA). The band played concerts with Crowbar, Entombed and Obituary. Devin Townsend will then pause the band, while taking care of his solo career and his profession as a producer ( Lamb of God, Soilwork, Zimmers Hole) to return in 2002 with City's successor, the eponymous "Strapping Young Lad" and his terrible song "Aftermath", a veritable ode to savagery. They will leave for a challenging tour with among others Nile , Meshuggah or Devin Townsend ... 2005 will be for the band the apotheosis of savagery, the year of release of the album Alien , excessive, violent and completely insane. We will even say of this album that he is the perfect soundtrack of a riot, no wonder when we know that to write Alien, Devin stopped taking the treatment he follows for his manic-depressive disorder, in order to let express himself all the madness that was in him. They will come back a year later with their latest album "The new Black", very different from other productions, before Devin decides to dissolve the band so as to avoid according to his claims not to lock himself in a unique style. The style of Strapping Young Lad is a very heavy metal and attached very low, close to the indus by certain aspects, but having a more heavy dynamic and more complex structures, with frantic use of the almost systematic double pedal, of which only the living metronome Gene Hoglan has the secret. Most songs don't talk about anything and are just an exutoire, or are questionable humor parodys that Devin Townsend likes to put forward ( Far Beyond Metal, Goat, Oh My Fucking God, Love?, ...). Strapping Young Lad is also a voice, quite atypical in the middle of metal, since Devin is able to sing as if to push rather violent suggestive screams, far away from the growls or other classic grunts.
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