It’s a weird moment to be a US citizen in Europe, even if you’re a doom-metal band steeped in the counterculture of the Los Angeles rock scene.
As the avant-garde headbangers Faetooth have discovered since arriving in Germany for a continent-wide tour, the stereotype of the ugly American – big, boorish and speaking English at the top of their voices – is back with a vengeance.
“I was at the market yesterday. I was, like, ‘God, I hope I don’t look like a stupid American’,” says Ari May, the band’s guitarist and vocalist. “I don’t know how to read German. I’m sorry.
“You have to think about how you are viewed as an American, from the perspective of what signals you’re giving.”
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American nationalism “is not a thing we align with at all”, Jenna Garcia, Faetooth’s bassist and vocalist, adds. “It’s easy to remove yourself from it personally. But I wouldn’t blame someone not American for thinking a certain way about us.”
The band describe their sound as fairy doom metal, meaning it is both loud and ominous but also threaded through with a sense of the fantastical – as if Metallica and Enya were fused at the hip.
Alongside their love of heavy music, they are influenced by horror movies and TV shows, particularly stories of people who find themselves in the wild, far from civilisation and are forced to reckon with nature’s terrifying indifference to human wellbeing. These films are dark and horrific. But they are also about survival and overcoming daunting odds – lessons we can apply to our own lives, no matter the circumstances.
“We were watching a lot of Yellowjackets while writing the album and recording,” says Rah Kanan, Faetooth’s drummer. The characters in the 1990s schoolgirl horror are fans of ritualistic films. “Doing what you can – not just to survive but to exist.”
The band are in Berlin for the start of a run of gigs that reaches Ireland this week, with dates in Dublin, Galway and Cork. Geopolitics aside, the tour is perfectly timed: at a moment when every other news bulletin seems to herald the end of the world, their apocalyptic mix of dense, sludgy metal and My Bloody Valentine-style 1990s shoegaze is the perfect comfort blanket for weary listeners.
Here is loud, cathartic music that numbs your woes and, much like the wardrobe in CS Lewis’s Narnia novels, serves as a portal into a more fantastical world.
“There’s nothing like being sad and playing something that’s a reflection of your emotions,” May says. “Of course, sometimes you want to turn on angry music. That’s probably the first thing people think of when they hear you like metal: ‘Oh, you listen to a lot of angry music.’
“But it’s really not that. It’s reflective and emotive. And there are so many layers within slow music. It’s not just, ‘they’re playing the same riff a bunch of times’. It’s intentional and purposeful – to create a scene and a feeling.”
That hair-raising quality is front and centre on Labyrinthine, their 2025 album, which pulsates with visceral iconography – individuals “bedridden beneath the sheets” and “saints discarding their robes”.
These images are hugely evocative but also have a nightmarish quality. Faetooth explain that they recorded the LP in the midst of a sweltering summer in LA, in a studio without air conditioning and while their drummer battled a stomach bug. It wasn’t quite hell on earth, but it sometimes felt not too far removed.
“It was really high summer here,” May says. “You could feel we were in the moment with recording that – as laborious and sweaty as it was, you can really hear it. It’s a good reflection of what we were feeling, going inside, pulling up some things that were pretty dark and pretty true to us.”
They describe Los Angeles as a city where the natural and the artificial live in constant tension. It’s home to the Hollywood dream factory but also a place menaced each year by devastating wildfires, which can feel like God’s way of telling humanity that, no matter how we lie to ourselves about climate change, things are not going to be okay.
“There’s everything in it,” Kanan says. “Terrainwise, there is mountain and ocean, but also barrenness. As in nothingness. Areas where there’s concrete, where it feels there’s no life and blaring sun. But you can see coyotes and mountain lions sometimes – the meeting of everything in this sprawling city.”
All three members are non-binary and speak with horror at the rightward shift in American politics. As the US embarks on a fascistic reset, transphobes have become emboldened, spewing vitriol all over social media. Faetooth are dismayed by the direction of their country, they say.
“The overall feeling is just very dismal right now,” May says. “It’s scary. People want to be themselves. Being told, ‘That’s not real’, ‘That’s not you’, ‘You can’t be’ – that is so horrific and really embarrassing for our country. It doesn’t reflect the actual community that lives here. The queer community is so strong, so thankfully, within the queer community, you lean on each other and your allies and do what you can to survive over here.”
As they prepared to tour Europe, they watched with horror as Donald Trump deployed thousands of agents from ICE, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, to Minneapolis in a crackdown that has led to at least one death and multiple hospitalisations.
“A lot of people are upset. It’s past disbelief at this point,” May says. “When you think it couldn’t get worse, when you’re already at rock bottom, somehow it just keeps getting worse. You’re just not even surprised any more.”
“Extremism has become normalised,” Garcia says. “Just being fed a lie every single day. And I don’t think people accept or take the lies for truth. It’s just part of what has been normalised as a standard in our country. Especially as artists, it’s like this weird teetering of making your art but also trying not to cover [your politics] up. It’s important to be speaking about it.”
They talk of ICE agents swooping with impunity across Los Angeles, but explain that this is not a recent phenomenon. The drive has been spreading fear and dread in immigrant communities for some time.
“Some of the local places that I grew up going to – like, way before this even happened – the local businesses that I would support, one day their whole staff just disappeared,” May says. “One day their whole staff was taken by ICE. It’s really in the media now. You’re not just seeing it, you are in it. It’s scary.”
Going abroad has allowed them to look at the United States in a different light. The picture is not pretty. “On our first Europe tour, the ICE protests were going on in LA. We got to see it from European news. And people were, like, ‘Are you guys okay at home?’. As far as we know, we directly are okay – but our friends and family might not be. It’s crazy to see it from a different perspective.”
One comfort is the knowledge that, when they step on stage, they are among their own – and that their fans have come not to judge them but to celebrate the sense of community that exists between artist and performer.
“There is a completely different setting when we’re in a venue full of fans,” May says. “Thankfully, they know what your beliefs are.”
Faetooth play the Workman’s, Dublin, on Friday, January 30th; Róisín Dubh, Galway, on Saturday, January 31st; and the Pav, Cork, on Sunday, February 1st
