Death lurks in the Louisiana swamps. Floods, hurricanes, disease-spreading bugs, colossal alligators… there are plenty of ways to meet a grizzly end. Such mortal perils made it the perfect spawning ground for a nihilistic, scuzzy new strain of metal in the early 90s.
But while Eyehategod, Crowbar and Soilent Green helped turn New Orleans into the world’s sludge metal capital, arguably the most groundbreaking band to emerge from that scene came from the backwaters of the Bayou State. For all intents and purposes, Acid Bath lived at the end of the world.
“When you’ve got the barrel of a gun pointed at you by God, with hurricanes being thrown at you every year, people don’t worry anymore,” Acid Bath singer Dax Riggs says today. “You get on with living.”
Acid Bath burned bright and brief. Their music blended sludge with doom, death metal and the blues, their lyrics painting vivid narratives of mania, madness and death with psychedelic imagery, and they left chaos and controversy in their wake. They released just two albums during their six-year existence, before tragedy cut their career short in 1997.
For the next 27 years, they remained the great lost Louisiana band, beloved by underground metal connoisseurs – including Slipknot’s Corey Taylor – but little known by the wider world.
And then something strange happened. In October 2024, the line-up for the third edition of millennial metal megafest Sick New World was announced. Among the many bands on the bill were Acid Bath, due to play their first shows since 1997. Even amid a line-up that included Metallica and Linkin Park, it was their presence that generated the most vocal excitement online.
“It’s fucking weird, man,” says guitarist Sammy Duet. “While we were together, nobody really gave a shit. Touring, we’d only really do well in Louisiana and the South. We’d go to New York City… there’d be 10 people there.”
“You’d think it would have taken a rest when we put the band to sleep,” Dax marvels. “It never did. I still get people telling me we recorded their favourite albums. [Adult actress] Stormy Daniels even has our lyrics tattooed on her. It blows my fucking mind.”
It’s a common misconception that Acid Bath took their band name from John Haigh, nicknamed ‘The Acid Bath Murderer’ after killing six people and dissolving their bodies in sulphuric acid in 1940s Britain. The truth is more mundane: they nicked it from a local band who had just split up. “Plus we took a lot of acid,” admits Sammy.
They formed in 1991 from a pair of local groups: Dark Karnival (Sammy and bassist Audie Pitre) and Golgotha (Dax, guitarist Mike Sanchez and drummer Jimmy Kyle). They’d all grown up in various small towns an hour or two’s drive away from New Orleans itself – Houma, Morgan City, Galiano.
“It felt like we were the only people making any kind of extreme music where we were from,” Dax says. “We were outside it all in our creation. We had room to grow the way we were supposed to.”
Acid Bath’s sound was distinct from the rest of the sludge metal crowd, drawing on influences as diverse as Morbid Angel, Depeche Mode, The Doors and Simon And Garfunkel. But the extremes of their music were tied together by dense riffs and existential dread that sprang from a shared love of early Black Sabbath.
Acid Bath knew they had to break into the New Orleans scene. They would drive out to the city on a Friday and stay there all weekend, playing late-night showcases where they might not go onstage until 3am. Soon they were packing out the places they played and befriending members of Crowbar and Eyehategod. Word eventually reached Roadrunner Records in New York, who sent a representative to Louisiana to see Acid Bath play. It was a disaster.
“Word got out and the fans all went berserk,” Dax recalls. “They completely destroyed the bar we were playing and broke a waitress’s leg. It was a trainwreck.”
Roadrunner passed on the band, but Acid Bath found a home with underground label Rotten Records. In late 1993, they headed to Side One studio in Metairie, Louisiana to record their debut album, When The Kite String Pops. Released in August 1994, it plumbed the darkness under the surface of the Louisiana swamps.
Bad-trip songs such as Jezebel and The Bones Of Baby Dolls were filled with images of death, depravity and mental distress.
“There’s a very dark vibe here,” Sammy says. “The first settlers used it as a penal colony. Southern Louisiana is where they’d stick their murderers, their rapists and their mentally ill. It all seeped into the soil.”
When The Kite String Pops would subsequently become a cult classic, but at the time it caused ripples rather than waves. Much of the attention it did get centred on the artwork – a painting by infamous serial killer John Wayne Gacy, chosen by the label. It tied in perfectly with the band’s overall vibe, but not everyone was on board with it.
“I hated it,” Dax admits. “I get that we had serial killer references and it made sense on the surface, but to associate it with a particular killer or incident wasn’t a good thing for us.”
The minor controversy surrounding the cover didn’t do them any harm, and the chaos of their New Orleans gig continued on the road. They were denied entry to Canada at the border after turning up without documentation or visas (“Then they found something they weren’t happy with on our bus,” says Sammy. “Let’s leave it at that.”), and at one show, Dax was blasted with electricity mid-gig, falling head-first into the crowd.
“I didn’t get brain damage… I think,” he jokes.
Then there was the gig in Iowa, where they were supported by a local band wearing weird masks. Their name? Slipknot.
“It was still very early days for them,” says Sammy. “At the time they’d got a different singer – Corey hadn’t joined yet. Clown was actually the promoter of that show. As I recall, they still had a lot of that theatricality and Clown was there beating these beer kegs. They were just this local band, but a few years later I saw them on TV, and it was like, ‘Wait, it’s these fucking guys!’”
Acid Bath’s second album, Paegan Terrorism Tactics, was released in November 1996. It was a more straightahead record than the debut, though the dark lyrical content remained, as did the provocative cover art - this time a painting by controversial euthanasia proponent Jack Kevorkian, aka Dr Death.
An increased melodic focus hinted at bigger commercial ambitions, though not everyone saw it that way - sales of the debut album in the UK had been so poor that Roadrunner, who licensed the album on this side of the Atlantic, refused to release the follow-up. It was a moot point anyway.
On January 23, 1997, just two months after Paegan Terrorism Tactics was released, bassist Audie Pitre was killed in a car accident. He had been out with his parents and younger brother when their car was hit by a drunk driver. Audie and his parents died from their injuries, though his brother survived. The rest of the band found out when they met to go and see Cannibal Corpse play a local show.
“As soon as we got to the venue, our manager took us aside and told us we needed to talk,” says Sammy. “Audie’s girlfriend called us and she just said, ‘He’s gone. He’s dead.’ I hung up and told the rest of the guys, we just couldn’t believe it. It was a bad night. I’d been friends with him since we were teenagers.”
Almost 30 years on, the pain and grief is still obvious. Sammy is forced to stop as tears well up, while Dax sags as he talks about Audie’s loss.
“Audie’s the guy who made it all possible,” says the singer. “He was a very kind person and so creative too – ideas poured out of him all the time. He connected us all. He was like a brother to me and it felt like a hopeless situation without him.”
The members of Acid Bath served as pallbearers at his funeral, and they briefly tried to keep the band going. Audie’s best friend, Joseph Fontenot, was recruited to play bass and the band booked some shows. But the grief at his passing proved too much, and the rest of Acid Bath found it difficult to play the songs without their friend. A disastrous gig with Crowbar at Shreveport Municipal Auditorium on April 25, 1997 was the final straw.
The venue held more than 3,000 people, but fewer than 500 people turned up. Today, they blame the promoter, but whatever the reason, the outcome was the same – Acid Bath were done. “It was a crushing end to it all, really,” says Dax sadly.
After Acid Bath’s split, the surviving bandmembers stayed in touch but went in different directions musically. Sammy joined Crowbar for a four-year stint before devoting his attention to his black metal side-project, Goatwhore.
Dax and guitarist Mike Sanchez initially played together in Agents Of Oblivion, releasing a self-titled album in 2000. Dax subsequently formed the bluesy Deadboy & The Elephantmen, before going solo with 2007’s We Sing Of Only Blood Or Love, only to drop off the map entirely after the release of 2010’s Say Goodnight To The World.
In their absence, Acid Bath’s reputation was growing. File-sharing meant the band’s music reached more people than it ever did when they still existed. Slipknot’s Corey Taylor cited them as an influence – the song Acidic from the Des Moines band’s 2022 album The End, So Far is supposedly a tribute to them, while rumours circulated that Corey had been approached to front an Acid Bath reunion in Dax’s absence.
Ironically, it was another death that partly inspired their reunion. Tomas Viator, who had played drums in Sammy and Audie’s earlier band, Dark Karnival, and joined Acid Bath as keyboard player for the last few months of their existence, passed away in May 2024. Around the same time, Sammy was asked by the people behind Sick New World if he’d consider reuniting Acid Bath for the 2025 edition of the festival.
“It just put everything in perspective,” Sammy admits. “It was like, ‘If we’re gonna do it, we should do it now while everyone is still around.’”
The Acid Bath reunion was announced in October 2024, with the line-up featuring Sammy, Dax and Mike Sanchez, plus Goatwhore’s Zack Simmons replacing original drummer Jimmy Kyle, and Dax’s former Agents Of Oblivion bandmate Alex Bergeron on bass. Although Sick New World was later cancelled, Acid Bath’s second coming couldn’t be stopped.
More reunion dates were announced at US festivals Sonic Temple, Welcome To Rockville, Louder Than Life and Inkcarceration, as well as a pair of hometown headline shows at the Fillmore in New Orleans in April. Two subsequent shows were announced at the 4,000-capacity Hollywood Palladium in LA in August - the biggest gigs of their career.
Both rapidly sold out. In November 2024, Acid Bath held their first practice in almost 30 years.
“It was amazing, man!” Sammy says enthusiastically. “We didn’t have any of the ‘Oh, what do we play?’ shit. We just started playing [Paegan Terrorism Tactics’ opener] Paegan Love Song and burned through it. None of us had said about playing that song, so we just locked in together.”
“I kinda just went berserk and decided to go for it,” Dax says with a grin. “It felt totally natural. It’s not as painful as every moment was [after Audie passed].”
Having sold out every show they’ve announced so far, Acid Bath are already bigger now than they were first time around. But they’re non-committal when it comes to recording a new album.
“I’m not opposed to creating music with Mike and Dax again – I’d love that. But I’d be very hesitant to call it Acid Bath,” says Sammy. “But when you’re jamming together, eventually you get bored of just doing the same songs over and over. That’s when you end up writing new music.”
“It’s all up in the air, but I do think it’d need to be done as something else,” Dax agrees. “My dream of the third Acid Bath record was a very doomy trip. But I love playing with these guys. It’s like a giant psychedelic weapon.”
The second coming of Acid Bath officially begins on April 25, with the first of those two hometown shows (the second follows on April 30). Whether this reunion is a belated victory lap or the start of something bigger remains to be seen, but whatever happens, this band from the wilds of Louisiana are finally and deservedly getting their time in the sun.
Acid Bath play Sonic Temple, Inkcarceration, Welcome To Rockville and Louder Than Life this year.
