It’s early December, and snowing heavily in Saugerties. That’s nothing unusual for upstate New York, but it is something of a novelty for Riley Pinkerton. The Castle Rat frontwoman moved here from Brooklyn last summer, but the band’s intense touring schedule has meant that it’s only now, some five months later, that she’s actually been able to spend time in the new house she shares with her boyfriend.
2025 was a crazy year for Castle Rat and Riley Pinkerton. They’ve gone from being relative unknowns – albeit relative unknowns with a fantastic, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired image – to one of the most talked-about new bands in metal. Videos of Riley, clad in a chainmail bikini and brandishing a huge sword onstage, have gone viral.
Their mix of doom, trad metal and nerd-bait fantasy lyrics has struck a chord with those on the lookout for something larger-than-life and unembarrassed to be ridiculous – Castle Rat’s second album, The Bestiary, came in at No.3 in Metal Hammer’s Albums Of 2025 list.
Right now, though, Riley and her bandmates – lead guitarist Franco Vittore (aka The Count), bassist Charley Ruddell (aka The Plague Doctor) and drummer Josh Strmic (aka The Druid) – are having a well-earned break. No touring, no writing, no recording, no nothing. So there should be plenty of time for the singer to leave her mark on her new abode. Except that those months on the road being immediately followed by an empty void has taken its toll on her.
“I’m struggling with that,” Riley admits. “I had a psychiatry appointment and I have anti-anxiety meds now, because I spun out as soon as I got home. It’s literally just been go, go, go, go, go – and my anxiety was building up on the road, too. I was like, ‘I need to talk to someone about this’, and at least give myself a safety net so that I can function. Because I can’t let this get in the way of my job, which is my dream job. I’m like: ‘Why am I anxious about my dream job?’ It’s because it means a lot to me, so then I put a lot of pressure on myself. So it’s been a wild transition."
“But I’m a homebody. I love being home – to the degree that sometimes I think it’s crazy that I’m a touring musician, because home means the most to me.”
“I go onstage, I battle death, I die, and I come back to life – because I don’t want to die.”
Riley Pinkerton
When she is on tour – or at least when she’s onstage – Riley assumes the role of The Rat Queen. Her story is acted out onstage, as well as within Castle Rat’s songs. The narrative revolves around her battling her arch nemesis, The Rat Reaperess (Maddy Wright), in a fantasy world known as The Realm. Riley is its Rat Queen, wearing chainmail outfits and wielding a gigantic sword, modelling her look on the aesthetics of 1970s fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. It’s campy and self-aware, but it never undermines the glowering, doom-laden dramatics of the music.
When she’s at home, though, like she is now, she’s simply Riley Pinkerton – a normal human with normal worries, no chainmail in sight. Her flowing red hair is the only remnant of her character that remains. Of course, the two are still heavily intertwined. For a start, her onstage moniker stems from the fact that she was affectionately nicknamed The Rat by her family when she was a kid.
“I was probably more like a princess at that point,” she quips.
Secondly, she heavily infuses the band’s songs with her own, real-world emotions.
“I have major death anxiety, where I really don’t want to die,” she explains. “And one of my theories is that if I keep making a thing, I can’t be taken off this Earth because I have a job to do. That’s my deal with God, or whatever – if I’m really busy, you can’t take me yet.”
The Rat Reaperess is a metaphor for that anxiety; her way of confronting and combating it, albeit onstage, to feel a little more at ease when it comes to her own mortality.
“I go onstage, I battle death, I die, and I come back to life – because I don’t want to die,” she says about the epic showdown between the two characters. “It’s funny, because I didn’t set out to make a show about my death anxiety. I was like, ‘I think it’d be cool if I die and spit up blood and yada yada yada – but I have to come back to life because I still need to play another show the next night.’ And then I was like, ‘Oh, this is entirely about that.’”
There is also, she says, “a deeper level about the Rat Reaperess” that she “would love to go into in a comic book or book book”, but that’s for the future. For now, though, she’s focused on the music. She just wants it understood that, despite what that character represents, she doesn’t consider her a malevolent being.
“I never refer to her as evil,” says Riley. “I say she’s our arch nemesis, but it’s not a show about good versus evil. It’s life versus death. The Rat Reaperess is just doing her job, and we paint her as the bad guy, but really we’re completely going against the natural order in evading that. Honestly, in the natural world, we’re the bad guys, and that’s something that I want to explore, and I think is important for me. That tone is important – where death isn’t bad or evil, it’s just something that I don’t understand. The fear of the unknown freaks me out. So she more represents that anxiety than…”
She never finishes her sentence. Hearing something behind her, she turns abruptly to the source of the noise and her thought trails off. It turns out that it’s just one of the joys of country living – a rodent running around the house. “I have a mouse. Fitting!” she chuckles after a few seconds of distraction. “I just heard it in the stove. The stove isn’t on. We’re good.” She looks relieved – almost as if it could actually have been The Rat Reaperess herself.
Riley Pinkerton was born in New York, but mainly grew up in Michigan with her mother. She would, however, travel to New York and stay with her dad, who still lives there “in a tiny one-bedroom”. It was his sofa she crashed on when she first moved there with dreams of making it as a folk singer. There are, for the curious, still videos of that previous musical incarnation online, including one at a Sofar Sounds NYC gig.
“Oh God,” she says. “It’s so bad! I’ve got to get someone to take that down. Damn.”
She stayed at her dad’s place while she worked on finding a job and a place to live, and eventually did both. It sounds like both were quintessential New York experiences for her – she started working at a now-closed doughnut shop on St Marks Place, and found a place a few blocks away.
“There was this old drunk Irish guy who had a storage room in his six-floor walk-up in the East Village that I rented,” she remembers with a sly smile that reveals the folly, naivety and wonder of her youth. “I could stand in there and touch both walls. There was a lofted bed, so I couldn’t put my arms up standing in my room, but then if I went up there, I couldn’t sit up in bed without hitting my head on the ceiling. It was the smallest space ever.
“I worked at the doughnut shop and paid my rent, and that’s about it. We didn’t even have a working stove – it was tiny tiny. But I remember feeling like, ‘Oh, I’m doing it. I’m living in the East Village, dreaming about Debbie Harry and CBGB - I’m doing it!’ But I wasn’t really doing anything. I was just working at a doughnut shop and drinking a lot.”
Not long after, Riley moved to Brooklyn, and she stayed in different parts of the Big Apple’s hippest borough for about a decade before eventually relocating upstate. But that time was a formative period for her. Not only did she meet some “pretty legit dudes” at the doughnut shop pre-Castle Rat that she was “able to build more of a rock’n’roll band around”, someone she met early on in her New York days booked her first show. That same person also gave her the kick she needed to follow her real musical inspirations (mainly Black Sabbath) rather than do the folk thing.
“She started a band that was, like, full Sabbath worship, where she had an SG [Gibson SG, the guitar played by Tony Iommi and Angus Young, among others],” remembers Riley. “I went to see her and it was the first time I saw someone doing the thing. I was like, ‘Oh, you can just do it!’ It broke some wall I had up… To see someone get up there and do that blew my mind open. I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. Just do the stuff that you love. Like, why am I complicating it and trying to find whatever it is I’m looking for?’ And so that was really the impetus for leaning in.”
She’d owned an SG since she was 18, but resisted playing it because of the inherent burden that comes with doing so and being female. But after seeing her friend do it, Riley decided she was just going to follow her heart, and the medieval fantasy doom metal of Castle Rat was born.
“There’s this pressure,” she says, “that if you’re a girl playing guitar, you have to be really fucking good, or people are not going to take you seriously. But I don’t have a desire to be a shredder. People who do, will. They’ll sit down and obsess over scales, and that’ll be the thing that excites them, and they’ll become good at it. I’ve just never felt that way about guitar. I feel that way about songwriting and worldbuilding: that’s where I shred. That’s what really excites me.”
Somewhat ironically, that all started by chance. After playing their first two shows, their third was booked for October 31, 2019. For those first two they’d worn all black in an attempt to be less conspicuous. After all, they were still finding their footing and their confidence. Then, for that Halloween gig, they decided to dress up.
“It was so much fun,” remembers Riley. “And I felt everyone onstage sort of relax into their roles because they weren’t showing up as themselves. Our drummer at the time was not into metal at all – I’d worked with him on folk stuff – and he was like, ‘I feel like a poser up here.’ I was like, ‘Just don’t talk to anyone, and if they ask you about Sabbath, leave the room.’ So he was really into the costumes because it allowed him to play a character.”
The rest is history-in-the-making. After that gig, Riley wrote and devised the lore of The Realm and its characters, and they became a permanent, and intrinsic, part of the band’s identity. In 2024, they released debut album Into The Realm and – as the past six months have shown both the band and the world – things have snowballed ever since. And while they might now have a much-needed few months of nothingness, the future is looking incredibly bright.
First on the books after that rest and recuperation is opening up for Amon Amarth and Dethklok’s Amonklok co-headline US tour, which will see Castle Rat play the biggest stages of their career to date. For some people, that might be intimidating, but not for Riley.
What’s more, she’ll be playing those gigs sober. She stopped drinking five years ago, after partying too hard on her birthday “to a degree that was frightening and involved me vomiting up blood”. It wasn’t intended to be a permanent thing, but – in much the same way Castle Rat’s existence is a confluence of happy accidents and perfect timing – that’s just the way things worked out.
“The deal that I had with myself was that I wouldn’t drink until the pandemic was over and shows were back,” she says. “I couldn’t imagine getting onstage without a shot or two of whiskey and a cigarette as my vocal warm-up – what the fuck?! – because that was the only way I knew how to do it. But our first show back out of the pandemic was the day before my birthday. I was like, ‘Am I really going to end my sobriety one day shy of a year sober? That’s stupid.’ So I was like, ‘OK, maybe it’s worth seeing if I can do this sober. And if I can play this show sober, then I can pretty much do anything sober.’”
She’s more than proved that’s the case. For now, though, you’ll find her in upstate New York, hopefully defeating her post-tour anxiety by chasing mice, turning her house into a home, and making her Castle Rat dreams come true.
The Bestiary is out now via Blues Funeral Recordings. Castle Rat play Welcome To Rockville in May and Bloodstock Festival in August.
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