CHAINED SAINT

Picture this: your band’s debut album was produced by Alice in Chains’ William DuVall. The studio you recorded at is run by Bill Kelliher of Mastodon. You’ve been shouted out by Judas Priest’s Metal God, Rob Halford, and your music has soundtracked a trailer for the hit video game WWE 2K24. Oh, and all this happened before your guitarist has even graduated high school.

This is the dizzying reality for Florida thrashers Chained Saint. But despite their high-flying start — which also includes a spot in the Welcome to Rockville 2025 line-up — the teenage quartet remain refreshingly down-to-earth. “We’re all friends,” says Sean Sterling, their 19-year-old vocalist. “And though we come from different-ish backgrounds, we just come together and make music.”

“This is our family,” adds guitarist Ethan Kahn, 17. “Good riffs and good people, that’s what we’re all about.”

The band’s debut album, Blindside — which dropped last August on indie label Patriark Records — offers a scorching introduction to their riff-filled world, which is glowing red with raging, old-school thrash energy. For Chained Saint, these eight tracks are both a natural expression of reverence toward the heavy-metal genre they love so much — and a bold declaration of their ambition to bring thrash to a new audience of Gen Z fans.

“Everything comes back at a certain point,” says Kahn. “There aren’t many new bands that are doing the exact same thing that we’re trying to do. The new bands have a more core-oriented vibe, like with Turnstile, and that’s what younger people are liking, including myself. I think it’s missing the other side of metal. I think we just need to bring it back — now’s the perfect time.”

Chained Saint’s love of metal is on full display the moment they log into our mid-October Zoom call. Sterling and Kahn are seated in their practice space. The room is packed with instruments and gear, and the walls are covered in posters and flags bearing classic metal artwork: Metallica’s Ride the Lightning, Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and more. On top of this, Sterling’s wearing a Danzig vest, while Kahn is showing off the more modern side to his tastes with a Turnstile shirt.

“I play a bunch of genres, and I have respect for each of them. But there’s something about metal: It has a different kind of energy,” says Sterling. “It’s almost like playing with raw fire. If you’re going to hold the core of the earth in your hand, that’s kind of what metal is! It’s fun to play with fire.”

Sterling and Kahn had known each other for a long time before the former joined Chained Saint. “Sean was probably the first guy I’ve ever really jammed with as another musician, and we used to jam all the time together,” says Kahn.

When things “didn’t quite work” with their original vocalist, Kahn knew exactly who to call to complete the lineup, which also includes bassist Sebastian De Avila and drummer Cameron Cottrell, both 19. “We just always had a musical connection.”

Then there’s the William DuVall connection. Chained Saint’s music first got into the Alice in Chains vocalist and guitarist’s ears when Kahn’s dad, who’s been friends with DuVall since the Nineties, sent him a video of his son’s band jamming in the garage. DuVall immediately wanted to hear more.

So, he invited them out to Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher’s studio in Atlanta, and DuVall started putting his young charges through their paces. (They would later meet Kelliher along with Mastodon and Pearl Jam engineer Tom Tapley, who Kahn describes as “fantastic people.”)

In keeping with Chained Saint’s love for vintage metal sounds, not a single computer was used during recording and mixing. Instead, everything was tracked on analog tape. This approach was more organic, but it also created more pressure for the band. “Tape can give out at any moment,” says Sterling. “So, if you record too much, it’ll wear out — and you just lost your session.”

“William really liked the idea of going to tape, but we weren’t 100 percent sure,” admits Kahn. “We’d only recorded to Pro Tools and on the same computer we’d do home demos on. We weren’t really too sure about how the process would go. But I really enjoyed it. I personally enjoyed it more than using a computer. I think it sounds more real as well… Blindside is really the purest distillation of what we loved at the time.”

Given everything they’ve experienced so far — including the surprising praise they received from Halford, who hailed the immediacy and impact of Blindside’s lead single, “Animosity” — they’re in confident spirits and fired up for what comes next.

For Kahn, that immediate future involves finishing his final year of high school, so he and the band can fully dedicate themselves to their music. Beyond Chained Saint’s upcoming appearance at Welcome to Rockville, they’ve hinted that 2025 will be packed with exciting live shows (details of which will be announced in the coming months).

“There’s probably only an hour a day, apart from when I sleep, when I don’t have music playing or I’m not doing something music-related,” says Kahn. “Our goal now is kind of just… conquer the world. There’s no roof. We’re going to work as hard as we can. We’ll be happy with how far we get — but we plan on getting as far as we can.”