Earthen Altar's Arboreal Black Metal Springs from New Beginnings (Interview)
Are you “kvlt” enough to move to another city because of a black metal album? Evelyn Holland is. Inspired by her deep love for Agalloch’s The Mantle, she packed up her life in Minneapolis and relocated to Oregon in 2020, only to be met with global lockdowns. The illusive forestry that inspired other metal artists was all that remained consistent as the fabrics of socialization decayed amidst the pandemic. A year later, she posted a Craigslist ad searching for bandmates to create atmospheric black metal; more specifically, progressive Cascadian black metal with a focus on queer themes. Luckily for Holland, Portland is “the transwoman capital of the world.” Hazel Henry, a fellow transwoman with shared interests in black metal and nature, reached out to Holland through her posting. What they didn’t know at the time was how foundational their new project Earthen Altar would become to their identities and their blooming friendship.
Boiling the duo’s debut self-titled album, which they released in mid-August, to its core components reveals the alchemic reaction between queerness, nature, and fellowship facilitated by black metal. Across three lengthy tracks, Henry and Holland employ languid tempos and fuzzy textures that snake and saunter, mimicking the uneven footing of a woodland trail. They rarely sprint in their tracks, remaining peaceful even when Henry ramps up the pacing with blast beats. Opener “Endless Rain” encapsulates their patience with the message that self-discovery is an enduring process. Earthen Altar’s other two tracks, “The Body of Yemo” and “Hymn of Cybele,” draw from ancient mythology as a larger metaphor for the duo’s aforementioned core values.
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“I’d like to stress that neither of us are super read on these things. They’re just sources of inspiration. You do find metal bands where the lyricists are academics or historians. For us, it’s artistic inspiration,” Henry says. These inspirations separate the pair from other black metal acts, especially in the Cascadian genre sphere, at least on the thematic level. In their own ways, the stories of Yemo and Cybele reflect Holland and Henry’s experiences.
As Holland says, “Cybele and Attis were lovers, both immortal, but Attis fell in love with this mortal woman. Cybele found out and sought revenge. She later regretted what she did, so she turned Attis into a tree to preserve his being. That’s what I tried to write about because in my life, I feel like I’ve struggled in the romance department a bit, so maybe I was unintentionally writing about personal things without consciously thinking about it.”
Yemo’s myth, meanwhile, is less traditional. To summarize Henry’s explanation, Yemo was never actually worshipped or even appeared in any ancient mythologies. They’re not a character from mythology. Instead, they are a construct from the theoretical field of Indo-European studies that examines mythology and linguistics. In Henry’s words, Yemo is “Based on comparing the actual written myths and the language in the myths, the roots of the words of the names of deities and what they mean. It’s not a story that anyone actually believed, but it’s our best guess at an average root mythology.” That matters because Yemo is an aggregation of trans and queer themes in mythology due to their status as a primordial hermaphrodite by some scholars.
Whereas Cybele reflects Holland’s romantic woes, Yemo is more closely held to Henry’s beliefs and transition. The myth is a creation story in which Yemo’s corpse gives rise to the first man, the valleys, the hills, and the trees. Nature has always been a guiding principle for Henry, particularly the flora that lies within Oregon’s state lines. “Being in Oregon and the PMW has been inspiring for me lyrically and musically. And transitioning too, because I hit a creative wall for a few years, and then the pandemic happened. It’s been slow getting back into things with everything happening in the world,” she says.
On the note of transitioning, Henry credits Earthen Altar as an instrumental piece of her journey. “For a number of years, I identified as non-binary or gender-queer, primarily. I wasn’t feeling like a woman or a man. I didn’t feel like being explicit about anything. It was a process of accepting who I was, which led to me being explicit. Not only do I want this (from a distance) to connect with transpeople, but I actually want to socially connect with trans people.”
The socialization aspect of the duo is incredibly important, as not only do they herald the record as a document of their growing friendship, but black metal as their way of socializing. This is a strange avenue to meet people, with the genre’s prevalence of independent, stubborn, and single-member projects and its history of excluding newcomers. Black metal has always been prickly, and as much as one may want to decry that’s because it’s just an edgy boys' club, Earthen Altar show there’s another reason for that thick outer shell—to protect one’s identity while finding others with similar aspirations. Black metal is as much about preserving the most delicate pieces with oneself as it is about finding others who can relate to those pieces. They’re kept within a box, buried below radiator-hissing drums and tinny guitars, waiting for someone to brave that storm.
“Music, even black metal, has become my main way of relating to people. That’s what my whole life is based around,” says Henry. Remember that Holland’s original ad directly referenced black metal. She knew who she was looking for. Henry was initially hesitant to commit too much to the act since she was involved with another group at the time and was still green behind the drum kit, but soon that trepidation dropped. Black metal was the underbelly of their friendship. During our interview, the two quibbled over whether certain bands were shoegaze or not, the merits of prog and nerdiness, and how much of an outdoorsy activity yoga is when you’re only a five-minute walk from luscious forests waiting to be hiked through. They’ve come a long way from cold-pitches on Craigslist.
“This music is the basis of our friendship, to begin with. Our friendship was important for me to figure out who I was and to get back into the world after the pandemic and resocializing and both of us being trans metalheads where there is still some tension, even here, in the queer metal scene. Although, I think a lot of it was imagined in my head. But the process of the album had a lot to do with me becoming who I am today. I think Evelyn can say something similar. What I meant by that statement is that our friendship is really important to who we are and the album was the original spark or catalyst to that,” says Henry.
And this socialization flows outwards. The inclusion of trans themes into Earthen Altar wasn’t much of a conscious thought. Henry and Holland were simply writing authentically. It would be impossible for them to separate their queer lens from their work because it’s the lens through which they see the world. It’s important to them, in the same way that camping, hiking, and black metal are. These ideas are all inseparable. What isn’t is their decision to be so forward-facing. Henry says, “We could’ve written these songs and not explicitly stated that we’re trans people and not made it evident in the project. But we wanted to connect with trans people, so we made it explicit.”
This returns to their search for connection. Holland also made explicit references to trans fans as a way of connecting with them and extending a branch into a world that is only now becoming more welcoming to queer people. In the liner notes for her Keys of Solomon album Transgression, she wrote, “For Fans Of Opeth, Agalloch and Emperor and my fellow Trans/non-binary people, You all Know this journey quite well." Trans black metal fans are no longer as niche as they once were. Groups like Liturgy and Victory Over the Sun are just two examples of notable trans musicians in the space, and Henry says that well runs deep.
“We’re both pretty lucky to be in Portland, which is the trans woman capital of the world. It still feels annoying sometimes in the metal scene, but we both went to Cascadian Midsommar this year and it’s probably the queerest metal festival I’ve ever heard of. It’s pretty natural here, which feels unique ‘cause of that. There’s also a sketch scene, but they don’t overlap. It seems like the sketch scene is more in hiding these days.”
Speaking with Henry and Holland reveals the authenticity and earnestness in their act. Black metal has always been performative and developed its own culture and characters, but it seems like the most natural fit for the pair. Their enthusiastic push to connect with the world around them, both with other people and the environment, are themes inherent to black metal, even if they’re been taken to their most heinous extremes in the past. But, it’s not as if Earthen Altar are putting on an act or manifesting where they want their will to take them. Aside from the desire to write about mythology because of pandemic-induced interest, everything else flowed from them naturally. They’re products of their environment, of the queer scene in Portland, and of their history growing up with Agalloch in an intersectional ecosystem. “That’s how I can put it succinctly; the music and the natural themes come from this deep desire to connect with the landscape we’re in and recognize our place within ecosystems,” says Henry. “We need to understand that we’re not above ecosystems, nor are we separate from them. We are always in them, no matter how much we try to distance ourselves from them.”
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Earthen Altar released August 11th via Fiadh Productions.
