published on July 10, 2024 in Informative Details

Photos of heavy metal bands in DC

Photographer Louie Palu started talking about the photos he had been making of the underground metal scene in D.C. after we discovered we had a mutual interest in several heavy bands.

I have always been a fan of Palu’s off-the-cuff, slightly chaotic, black-and-white photos and when he told me he had been photographing the D.C. scene and had amassed a hefty archive of work about it, I was immediately interested in publishing the work.

Fast-forward a couple of months and here we are. What follows are both Palu’s personal testimony to a unique time in D.C. music history along with his own thoughts about how and why he started the project he has dubbed “Metal in My Mind,” in the first place.

Washington, D.C., just experienced a unique musical moment, and it helped my mind overcome the trauma of war. After years of covering Afghanistan, in 2010 I went from the chaos of war to sitting in the silence of my bedroom back home in Washington. It wasn’t long after getting back home before I discovered I had a serious problem at large public gatherings.

The first time I had a debilitating anxiety attack, I was at a restaurant with a photo editor, as the lunchtime crowd got larger and louder my hearing reduced to a hum and I could not breath. It happened repeatedly, and all I could figure out is that it was related to my hearing and certain sound frequencies. My ears and brain had been rewired by covering front-line combat and I did not know how to fix it.

I could never imagine that the therapy for my mental health would unfold in the back of a brewery in Ivy City listening to live music. Essentially on a near weekly basis, I was standing in the dark listening to live heavy metal.

Before I started seeing shows at Atlas Brewery’s DIY concrete-and-steel, industrial, bunker-like venue, my journey began with now closed venues like the Pinch, which was a basement under a bar. There was also the Black Cat’s first-floor backroom which, like others, shut down in favor of its larger, more commercial space.

These closures resulted in Atlas becoming the unconventional reigning location for heavy and extreme music. The bands I was seeing were mostly unknown or had a small cult following many established venues and bookers were not interested in. The shows for these bands operated in the tradition of D.C.’s legendary DIY scene that spawned acts like Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Henry Rollins.

I ended up meeting three people behind Atlas’s success. One of them, Chris “DC Metal” Birch, dubbed Atlas as the “CBGB’s” of D.C. metal, likening it to the groundbreaking, legendary New York City bar.

Birch was the first person who made an impact on me. He operates an online blog called “DC Heavy Metal,” which lists every metal show large and small in the DMV. Then there was Will Cook, a Marine veteran. He was the brains behind getting the metal shows at the brewery. Finally, Hasan Ali, who had hosted house shows in the D.C. region, was booking bands and promoting the shows. Though there were many other people who contributed to the scene, these three were the heart of the scene.

The thing about these tiny shows, which had crowds of 30 to 200 people in Atlas’s cavernous concrete and steel interior, is that I could stand alone in the dark and just let the music hit me like sonic medicine.

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There are many kinds of metal such as thrash, which is essentially hardcore punk rock crossed over with early metal bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. And there is also death, doom, stoner, grind, sludge, metalcore, folk metal, black metal and more.

Metal shows can be like attending a theater of absurdity, with music about war, disease, horror, murder, the occult and the end of the world. These shows allowed me to process reality and my trauma in a safe and reflective way.

Some bands dress up like cast members of a horror movie or decorate the stage with items like bones. It’s all just like a Shakespearean tragedy or a history book about war only with electric guitars and amplifiers. The next day most band members, like the rest of us, go back to their day jobs.

I began photographing this remarkable subculture as a way to create a visual archive of what this all looked like. And then the pandemic hit and the shows stopped. Ironically, the pandemic is what so many metal bands had been singing about in songs suffused with darkness, loneliness, disease and death.

Toward the end of 2021 some of the first shows were brought back by D.C.’s most prolific DIY promoter, the aforementioned Hasan Ali. Then, underground shows started popping up at a location called HELL in the basement of a house just over the D.C. line in Maryland by the singer of a local metal band. Interestingly enough, the D.C. metal scene was always very inclusive, HELL even added a drag queen show between sets at one concert.

Though not small, Maryland Deathfest, a massive metal music festival held in Baltimore returned to an outdoor parking lot. Deathfest is where many of the small bands I have seen get a big stage.

Deathfest started out as a DIY festival in Baltimore’s Sonar club, which eventually closed. Then, like a dark harmony in a metal song, Atlas announced they would no longer be hosting metal shows and Deathfest is taking 2023 off. And Ali, exhausted by the complexity of operating metal shows (over many years) and during the pandemic, announced that he would be hosting his last show ever on Dec. 17. Now it looks like an era has ended and these photos may just be the last testament to an extraordinary moment in time.

You can see more of Palu’s work on his website, here.

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