CARRY THE FLAME
When her brother died from an overdose, Amaranthe’s Elize Ryd vowed to continue the journey into metal that she had started with him. This is her story
WORDS: DANNII LEIVERS
Elize Ryd grew up in the Swedish Bible Belt in Värnamo, a small, picturesque town dotted with churches, two hours from Gothenburg, where heavy music was the devil. “To be a metal fan was… well, people had their opinions,” she says today, chatting animatedly down the phone to Metal Hammer as she recalls her journey from Sweden’s conservative centre, to genre-hopping melodic metallers Amaranthe.
Despite the outrage of their neighbours, the Ryd family worshipped fervently at the altar of the riff. Elize’s father was a hard rock lover who played bass, while her mother was a singer/songwriter who listened to punk. Like most kids, Elize lapped up the pop music and Eurodance she heard on the radio, nurturing the tastes that would go on to inform Amaranthe’s dynamic blend of metal, synth pop and euphoric EDM. But it was her older brother and metaller, Johan Carlzon, vocalist in local doom band Abandon, who ‘schooled’ her in metal and alternative rock.
“The first three years of a baby’s life is where you shape that person to what it will become,” she says. “I think I listened to more metal growing up than other kinds of music.”
When Elize was two years old, Metallica’s tourbus skidded off the road, killing bassist Cliff Burton, just a 20-minute drive from her house. Although she was too young to remember the accident, she can recall the impact it had on Johan, who was a massive Metallica fan. From then onwards, he was determined to impress on her the importance of Cliff and the music he had stood for, buying Elize her first metal album - The Black Album on cassette - followed by albums by Queen, Kiss and Maiden. “I’m forever grateful that he introduced me to metal,” Elize says. “I went to his concerts when I was seven or eight years old, sitting on my mother’s shoulders.”