When Castle Rat take to the stage, you’re met with a fever dream’s assortment of a D&D party: a plague doctor, a vampiric count and a woodland druid. Up top, singer Riley Pinkerton – in the guise of “The Rat Queen” – leads this merry band into fabled adventure, each show climaxing with her solo sword duel with the rodent-masked, stockings-wearing, scythe-wielding Rat Reaperess.
But despite having become a successful global festival act off the back of their 2024 debut album Into The Realm, their odds-and-ends fantasy appearance born in the clubs of Brooklyn came about by accident.
“When I started the band it was just a name and we all wore black, but then we got booked on a Halloween show so I very last minute crudely put together the characters and the costumes out of cardboard boxes and paper mâché,” Riley reveals. “It was so fun we just thought, ‘What if we do this every time?’ Now I needed a reason as to why I am the Rat Queen and there’s a plague doctor and a vampire, so I retroactively wrote the lore and it tumbled into what it is.”
With bluesy yet battle-ready classic doom metal underpinnings like Sabbath riffs plunged deep into the dreams of Robert E. Howard, everything about Castle Rat’s presentation, from their look to the vintage production of their albums, creates the impression of a lost band from 80s fantasy movie Deathstalker. It’s 1985 all day here, their deliberately analogue aesthetic showcasing the handmade costumes over elaborate digital artwork.
“For me it was important for both records to be photographed covers,” says Riley. “A lot of metal bands will get fantasy art of a warrior chick, but that’s not representative of what you get on stage. Doing a high fantasy metal band but rooting it in a homespun DIY foundation is what makes it believable and something that people want to be a part of.
"They can see that I’ve sewn my own costume, and there’s threads hanging off of it because it’s something I just did in the pandemic when I had a lot of time, and I made my own chainmail that’s falling apart tied together with shoelace from the dollar store. Down to the name, a castle is grand and it’s royal, but we’re the rat!"
This bespoke approach to the weird and wonderful conjuring images of teenage tabletop campaigns carries over to Castle Rat’s output. Their second album The Bestiary came hot on the heels of Into The Realm. Where Realm…struck a real balance in tone between scuzzy and heightened, capturing exactly the feel of discovering a secret doom act from the genre’s primordial years in the back of a dusty record bin, The Bestiary sees them set their sights on grander things, incorporating orchestration and more progressive terrain whilst retaining that core swords-and-sorcery sound.
“I’m still using stuff from my personal life to flesh out the songs,” Riley divulges of the album’s titular theme, a term any fantasy nerd will be familiar with as a catalogue of mythical fuzzy fellas manifesting here in simple punchy titles like Wizard and Unicorn. “Each of the creatures represents either a person in my life or an experience, and that keeps it real.”
As Castle Rat’s central focal point, despite her equally outlandish companions, Riley is also sensitive to the perception that her role in the band is a visual gimmick and not a creative force to be taken seriously.
“In my late teens if I was walking through a train station with a guitar bag on my back, a number of men that would come up to me and ask, ‘You actually know how to play that thing?’, which I think is an experience unique to being a younger woman in music,” she says. “Sure, like I just like carrying a guitar-shaped backpack!
"There’s the insecurity, like people will think, ‘Oh she looks the part and she sings, so the guys in the band must write all the music’. But I take a lot of pride in starting this band and creating this universe. At this point, if someone says I can’t play guitar, then why is everything going so well?”
With Castle Rat pretty much not acknowledging any trends or developments in the zeitgeist past the high fantasy metal of yore, they may seem at odds with the genre-mashing and digitalisation that makes up much contemporary metal. Yet their swift burst in popularity suggests a healthy appetite for a band who can tap into worlds of myth and escapism as vividly as they can.
“At the end of the day I just wanna play the music that I love,” Riley sums up. “I feel like trying really hard to keep up with the times is a great way to fall into a trap of immediately sounding really dated. Where, if you go far enough back it’ll just be classic.
"Sometimes I look at how I did my eyebrows two years ago and cringe, so trying really hard to stay modern just doesn’t speak to me. I just want to live in this world, where I’m surrounded by Frank Frazetta paintings and the soundtrack is Black Sabbath.”
The Bestiary is out now via King Volume / Blues Funeral Recordings
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