UNTO OTHERS
THE OTHER SIDE
Armed with a new name and major label backing, gothic heavy metallers Unto Others are set to explode. But are they ready for the limelight?
WORDS: JONATHAN SELZER
PICTURES: PETER BESTE
For a man who’s rapidly become the figurehead for the goth and post-punk revival that’s been creeping ever deeper into the metal underground, Unto Others frontman Gabriel Franco is far from the arch, cryptic creature of the night you might expect. Sitting in his Portland study and talking to Hammer over Zoom, he’s good-natured and utterly unpretentious, but you can sense a restlessness, too. After all the uncontainable, grassroots buzz and critical acclaim that greeted their 2019 debut album, Mana – released under their former name, Idle Hands – leading to a tour supporting King Diamond and becoming Roadrunner labelmates with Slipknot, Trivium and Gojira, he’s clearly still trying to figure out the round hole he’s found himself fitting into.
“I’m extremely cynical,” he says, “so my first thought when we were getting all this attention was, ‘Oh god, are we the new hype band? Because if we are, how long will this last?’ So the more popular we’ve gotten, the more pressure there is for me to not fuck it up.”
Gabriel needn’t worry. For a start, the extreme and retro metal scenes he came out of don’t give out their laurels lightly, their few breakout bands charged with carrying committed, anti-opportunistic ideals to the wider world.
Plus, the post-punk and goth DNA injected into the underground stems from two fiercely independent bands, Sweden’s In Solitude and Finland’s Beastmilk (now Grave Pleasures), whose respective late-2013 albums, Sister and Climax, laid the ground for a host of bands to follow in their wake. German black metallers Secrets Of The Moon, hardcore punks Okkultokrati and atmospheric Icelanders Kontinuum were just some of the artists paying attention.