Castle Rat

In Brooklyn, Castle Rat builds a universe where heavy metal and traditional doom mingle with strongly marked medieval and fantasy imagery. Formed in the early 2020s, the band is organized around recurring stage characters — warrior queens, mages and masked figures — which gives a theatrical dimension to both their concerts and videos. Musically, Castle Rat relies on slow, massive doom riffs, tempo shifts closer to classic heavy metal and some psychedelic inflections, with melodic vocals that emphasize a taste for quest narratives, dark cults and witchcraft. After a series of digitally released tracks from 2020, the band recorded several studio sessions that circulated in the American independent metal and rock scenes, before consolidating that work on the album Into the Realm, released in 2024. Castle Rat’s activities are deployed mainly on the circuit of metal venues and festivals in the United States, where the band refines a show that plays on storytelling, costumes and a sound inspired as much by 1970s doom as by certain contemporary currents of psychedelic metal.