Fascist/Nazi Band Booked to Play at Chapel of Bones
Chapel of Bones is a metal venue in Raleigh. In August, they’ve listed a show featuring the band True Iron Will. Metalheads will know about the website Encyclopedia Metallum, which provides information about virtually every metal band. Here is a link to the encyclopedia page for this band.
For those unfamiliar with metal, there is a subgenre called Black Metal, which this band plays. Within black metal, there is a large fascist and Nazi subcurrent called NSBM (national socialist black metal), and many bands that don’t explicitly play NSBM are still loosely affiliated with it, sympathize with it, and so on.
Looking at True Iron Will’s encyclopedia page, you can see that their latest album has a song honoring the “blood flag” — aka the Nazi Blutfahne — as well as a song about “Vinland.” Vinland refers to early Norse settlements in North America, but it has turned into a whole thing on the extreme right — basically, it has become a name for an imagined “golden” Aryan past from which society has fallen and to which white nationalists wish to return.
More concerning is that their guitarist runs an even more explicitly Nazi band called Lost Hierarchy. That band is signed to a dedicated Nazi label, Winter Solace Productions, which releases music from bands with names like “Aryan Kommando 88” (where 88 is an infamous dogwhistle for “heil hitler,” since h is the 8th letter of the alphabet 88 = h) and “Einsatzgruppen.” The name of one of their records, “Victory Sun,” is itself a dogwhistle for Nazi iconography, as that term is variously used to refer to the swastika, the black sun (sonnenrad), and various riffs on the swastika like the kolovrat, used by bands trying to fly under the radar a bit more. (In the kind of quasi-religious/spiritual form of Nazism common in black metal, the swastika is taken to be a representation of the sun, which is treated as a sacred source of energy, hence lots of references to the sun in NSBM and NSBM-adjacent black metal). The main man is also on Instagram, where he can be seen wearing merch from dedicated Nazi bands like Bilskirnir and Peste Noire, wearing a shirt calling Mohammed a pedophile, and praising the NSBM band Kaevum, whom he thinks released the best album of 2025. I would link to his profile, but I believe that violates Reddit policy.
I emailed the venue to express concerns about this nearly three weeks ago and have received no response. By my lights, no band like this should be given a place and a platform in our community.