As the distorted guitars chug along with a galloping beat, apocalyptic images take shape and drift into one another like a disturbing dream. A faceless man rises out of sand. A fearsome knight on horseback charges into view, and a Roman legion marches across the frame. The army marches to the horizon, and an endless swarm of bats takes flight. The bats bleed into a shot of a vampire’s coffin, and the fierce visage of a man comes into view, snarling and grimacing as he spits the lyrics, “Purgatory, pain, pain or glory … / I alone decide my fate / Don’t you know you are … trapped in the sands of time?”
This is the video for “Sands of Time,” the latest from long-running, old-school metal band Iron Jaw, whose new album, Cursed, debuts Friday and will be celebrated with a concert at Haltom Theater on Sat, Feb 1. Iron Jaw vocalist Todd Pack produced, directed, and edited the video and co-produced the new record, the band’s first since 2020’s Chain of Command.
In addition to Pack, Iron Jaw is crewed by four local legends, and in terms of DFW metal lore, they’re some of the scene’s elder gods. Guitarist Rick Perry’s first major band, Warlock, got its start playing Judas Priest- and Black Sabbath-inspired proto-metal in the late ’70s, after which Perry gained some fame in the mid-to-late ’80s in a popular Arlington-based thrash band called Gammacide (as well as in Puncture, Warbeast, Cowtown Syndrome, and the Texas Metal Alliance). In Iron Jaw, he splits the shredding with Jeff Brown, who played guitar in ’80s thrashers Plague Allegiance, who cemented their legacy back then by turning their rehearsal space — known as the Tombstone Factory — into the epicenter of local heavy metal debauchery. One of Perry’s Warlock bandmates, Randy Cook, who was also in another pretty big thrash band called Rotting Corpse, is Iron Jaw’s drummer, and Clay McCarty, himself a former member of Warlock, plays bass.
Pack, who also played drums in Dallas-based groove-metal band Creeper and sings in a band called Horror Cult, knew Iron Jaw’s other members from way back when, when he was a teenager making the scene. After he finished high school, he moved to Los Angeles in 1986, where he “tried to be a rock star,” briefly playing drums in a thrash band called Hallows Eve and later forming a band called Jackal (“before the other Jackyl band came out,” he said). When those groups fizzled out, he returned to Texas, where he took on singing lead in Metallica tribute band Alcoholica.
Though it’s been a few decades since the five of them first hit area stages, the years between now and then have only sharpened their sonic steel. Iron Jaw channels the sounds of classic metal — a mix of Reagan-era thrash and the New Wave of British heavy metal influences — into a sonic assault of breakneck percussion and sinister, high-speed riffage, over which Pack (whose delivery is satisfyingly Hetfield-ian) spits tales of war, doom, and the occult like fire from the lake pipes of some hell-spawned, postapocalyptic hotrod.
Art by John Fossum
Of the band’s writing dynamic, Pack said, “Rick writes some really great lyrics. … I won’t change much if he has a complete body of work for a song. … Usually, he does such a great job of writing that I don’t have to change much, just a word here or a phrase there, a line just so it improves the vocal flow, but there were some songs on the last record where he had ideas or had written some things, and he’d be like, ‘You know, I need you to finish it. … Let’s make this tougher.’ ”
Cursed’s seven tracks cover mythologized invaders (“Tonight We Raid, “Pyromancer”), war and fate (“Sands of Time”), religious infiltration into politics (“The Wolf King”), Alistair Crowley (“Order of the Golden Dawn”), and the underpinnings of a serial killer, rendered in the album’s title track — as well as a paean to getting laid called “Bury the Snake.” With riffs and lyrics that are still basically the gas and oil that powered this genre during the Me Decade, one might be tempted to dismiss Iron Jaw and their new record — pressed on red vinyl, no less — as a throwback act. But these guys are all metal lifers, doing what they do best. That they were in the thick of a pretty gnarly scene and lived to tell about it, let alone continue to put out killer albums, is a testament to the power of loud amps and blazing-fast lixxx.
“I mean, there’s still a handful of us [from the mid-’80s DFW thrash scene] that are still around,” Pack said, “all the old-school guys who went through their crazy, wild ’80s phase and then kind of settled down and then maybe even took a step back and then came back around into it. … We just want the world to know that we’re still doing [classic metal], that it’s still popular, and that you can still put out quality music at any age.”
