“I am your Rat Queen,” declares Riley Pinkerton, vocalist with Castle Rat. Standing on stage decked out in chainmail and battling a sinister figure in black robes, wielding a wicked-looking scythe, you’d be mad to argue with her.
Off stage, the singer is much more laid back. Cracking jokes with dry, warm wit, she admits that she was inspired – in part, at least – by fellow New Yorkers Kiss. “I realised building a larger-than-life persona on stage makes people want to buy into that fantasy,” she says. “We’re definitely pupils of their philosophy that if something’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.
Castle Rat played only two shows before deciding to go full hog on the high-fantasy concept. When they were booked to play on Halloween, Riley suggested dressing up in costumes: herself as the Rat Queen, the Plague Doctor on bass, the vampiric Count on guitars, and a soldier named Sarge on drums (since replaced by The Druid). During the show, she’d battle the Rat Reaper – her boyfriend at the time – in a papier-mache mask.
“The whole audience flipped out,” she recalls. “It was all DIY. I turned a hockey stick into a scythe using cardboard and aluminium tape. But we had so much fun it just stuck.”
Six years on, Castle Rat have become a full doom-theatre extravaganza, with on-stage battles and professionally made costumes. Riley works with artists such as Cameron Finley and It Is Known to create designs that look like they could have come straight from the realms of Dungeons and Dragons. Naturally, their audiences have followed suit with their own creative costumes.
“Some of our gigs look like Renaissance fairs,” Pinkerton jokes. “We played this tiny bar in Lithuania, and these guys in the front row just headbanged the whole show. They’d also made this little puppet rat which could move its head, and that was headbanging too!”
Although Castle Rat sing about the fantastical – their 2024 debut built the band’s lore, while new album The Bestiary is about a wizard’s assortment of magical beasts – Riley admits that there has also an element of empowering wish fulfilment. One of the things she’s been inspired by is seeing fellow New York doom band Reverend Mother live.
“It was literally my first time seeing a girl playing an SG and doing the Sabbath thing,” she says. “I always had this picture in my head that if I played guitar I’d need to be able to out-shred the boys because I’m a girl. Seeing my friend Jackie [Green, Reverend Mother vocalist] it was like: ‘You can do what you want.’ Imagine that! Now I get the flipside, where a lot of women come to our shows and tell me they love what we do and are inspired.”
The Bestiary is out on September 19. Castle Rat are currently on tour in Europe and arrive in the UK on November 4. For dates and tickets, visit the Castle Rat website.
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