“We wanna create this universe for people to step into”: How Castle Rat are putting the fantasy back into metal

October 31, 2019 proved to be a turning point for Castle Rat.

“We got booked for a Halloween gig, and very last minute I decided we should all dress up,” recalls sword-wielding singer/guitarist Riley Pinkerton. “I wanted to do easily identifiable categories of costume. Our guitarist kind of looked like a vampire, and as rats brought the plague, I thought it'd be cool to have a plague doctor in the band. I was gonna be the Rat Queen, so I sawed the head off a squeaky toy rat, and stuck it on the front of this fake crown. It was a very loose sketch of what it would become! The audience was so into it that I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have that much fun every time?’”

One evening of spontaneous theatricality spurred Riley to transform her plain-clothes doom band into the fully-fledged Medieval Fantasy Heavy Metal outfit blowing minds in the underground and beyond. With a line-up now completed by guitarist Franco Vittore (aka The Count), bassist Charley Ruddell (The Plague Doctor) and drummer Joshua Strmic (The Druid), Castle Rat’s potential just came to fruition with excellent second record, The Bestiary.

“It’s a concept album,” explains Riley. “There’s a wizard character that is woven throughout who’s collecting the souls of all these different mythical beasts.”

Unicorns and dragons are certainly thin on the ground on (or above) the Brooklyn streets where Castle Rat got started. But for Riley, lyric-writing is still a way to address her real life.

“It’s really hard for me to not express my own experiences, and I prefer doing it in pretty hazy, abstract, metaphorical ways,” she says. “The nice thing is the veil is so thick that other people can get whatever they like from it.”

A more diverse piece of work than last year’s Into The Realm debut, The Bestiary expands on Castle Rat’s primary influences (“Sabbath, always, from the very beginning”) to include everything from folky touches, to Maiden-esque moments and heavy, Electric Wizard-style psychedelia on SUN SONG. And, just as their music has developed, so the live experience has moved on from the days of squeaky toy appendages. Talking about their gigs, Riley launches into a veritable checklist of metal wonderment.

“We cover the lore, so we have speeches, there’s a battle scene, there’s blood, there’s chainmail, there’s swords. Our arch-nemesis the Rat Reaperess will be there. Everything you could want is what we try to provide! We try to make it a really immersive experience. We just wanna create this universe for people to step into and be a part of.

“I feel like escapism is important – right now especially. Having a place to go where you can focus on something that’s not real can be a helpful thing.”

It's a place where a lot of people want to be. Riley is talking to K! in the midst of a mostly sold-out, month-long U.S. tour, before returning to the UK and Europe for more shows, including opening for High On Fire and appearing at Damnation Festival. Like Ghost before them, Castle Rat are a band whose theatrical bent and killer songs look set to capture imaginations worldwide.

“It’s been really wild to watch it grow,” marvels Riley. And with ambitions to take the band’s lore into comic books and a movie, things are only gonna get bigger from here.

The Bestiary is out now via Blues Funeral. Castle Rat tour the UK from November 4, and play Damnation Festival Nov 8 – 9.

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• Celtic Frost: “We hated these unwritten limitations in the metal scene… Music should be adventurous”