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While many a rocker has cribbed from high fantasy, few have truly walked the walk. Sure, they might bedeck their album sleeves with ghouls, goblins, manacled maidens and brawny barbarians, but did a member of Cirith Ungol ever have to retrieve a missing unicorn horn from a snowy field in the depths of winter? Has Yngwie Malmsteen spent time squinting in the back of a tour bus, repairing his own chainmail?
Formed in 2019, Brooklyn’s Castle Rat have had to face both these scenarios and more as they live out their epic fantasies. From heraldic, earworm-heavy anthems to eye-popping live shows, costume design, videos and album art, they’re not so much a metal band as a full immersive experience.
“Castle Rat wasn’t meant to be a costumed concept band,” says singer, guitarist, sword-wielder and creative overlord Riley Pinkerton as the band’s tour van speeds from a sold-out gig in Cologne to another in Aschaffenburg – they’re also doing five gigs in the UK this week. “We played two shows and got booked on a Halloween gig, where I made a last-minute decision to dress up. It was all super-DIY, but we had so much fun and the feeling in the room was electric. I thought, ‘What if we could have this much fun every time?’”
Since then, the band – which features Pinkerton as the “Rat Queen” alongside a plague doctor (Charley Ruddell, bass), haughty vampire (Franco Vittore, guitar) and mysterious druid (Joshua Strmic, drums) – haven’t looked back. The Bestiary, the band’s second album, conjures visions of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Manowar joining forces to battle their way through a Frank Frazetta fantasy world – a heroic opus that places them on the brink of far grander things.
The Bestiary was a first for Pinkerton in that she opened the floor to her bandmates. “It made it a lot stronger,” she says of the collaborative process. “I struggled at first – I’d always felt a certain amount of pride being a woman in music going it alone. There’ve been so many times where I’ve got off stage and some guy will say, ‘Those guys write great riffs!’ and I’m like, ‘Hey – I wrote all that.’”
As the band’s stature has grown, so has the scope of their production design. “My motto is always that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing,” Pinkerton laughs. She was originally on course for a fine art degree before balking at the prospect of so much debt. “The fun thing about Castle Rat is there’s so many different ways to apply artistic expression,” she says. “Whether it’s making masks, costume design, learning how to edit music videos … it’s all stuff I don’t know how to do, but it’s fun to figure it out on the fly.”
As if building the band’s intricate lore (“Everyone’s urging me to write it down because it’s all in here,” Riley says, tapping her head) and stitching garments wasn’t enough, the singer taught herself how to make chainmail – no mean feat, though she admittedly left her all-new scalemail look to a New York-based specialist. “It feels like actual armour,” she beams.
As for audiences? They took to the fake blood, foam swords and papier-mache rat skulls with as much gusto as the band. “We played a show in Detroit and it looked like a Renaissance fair,” recalls Riley fondly. “Everyone was in cloaks, sheepskin, chainmail.”
This isn’t to say, however, that life on the road as sword’n’sorcery vagabonds has been plain sailing. “Everything is constantly breaking and ends up duct-taped together,” Riley says. “Plus I’ll have endless ideas as to how I want things to look, but we’re travelling in a van with only so much space. It’s an interesting challenge to make it feel like a larger-than-life story, then pack it down into nothing.”
There have been other logistical problems that would never have plagued Conan the Cimmerian or Dark Agnes de Chastillon. “We did have an ‘oh shit’ moment when we played SonicBlast festival in Portugal and my luggage – which had my sword in it – got lost,” says Riley. “That was a worst-case scenario, because there’s not an alternative version of the show where I don’t have a sword.”
Like a true warrior queen, Riley is gung-ho about the future. “I want to go all the way – let’s do stadiums,” she says. “The only thing that’s really important to me is keeping the DIY aesthetic, making sure everything is handmade. That’s an element I want to keep true, no matter what we scale to. Oh, and I want to ride out on a unicorn every night. You know how Rob Halford does the motorcycle thing? That, but with a unicorn.”
