BRON AGAIN
Drugs and alcohol pushed Atlanta doomsters Royal Thunder to the edge… and beyond. But they’ve returned from extinction to make the year’s most redemptive album
WORDS: DAVE EVERLEY
If anything should have been a warning to Mlny Parsonz that her life was out of control, it was the Fentanyl overdose that nearly killed her.
Royal Thunder’s singer and bassist had been partying hard that night, much like she had over the last few years. Booze and cocaine were her consumables of choice, except she didn’t know the coke she’d just taken had been cut with something else. Suddenly she realised something was wrong. Really wrong. An ambulance was called.
“I got in the ambulance and they said, ‘This is definitely looking like a Fentanyl overdose, you need to come with us’,” remembers Mlny.
Fentanyl is bad news. A powerful synthetic opioid several times stronger than heroin, it was a factor in the deaths of Slipknot bassist Paul Gray and Power Trip frontman Riley Gale, as well as Prince, Tom Petty and literally hundreds of thousands of others. The sensible thing for Mlny to do would have been to let the ambulance take her to the hospital. Except, no.
“I was like, ‘I got this’,” she says. “I went back in my apartment and stood on my balcony in my underwear and slapped myself to stay awake. I was in psycho mode.”
She made it through the night, and the next one, and the one after. But it wasn’t the wake-up call she desperately needed. She carried on boozing and drugging, pausing to record her band’s new album, the damaged, defiant, redemptive Rebuilding The Mountain, then picking up where she’d left off when it was done.
The night Mlny Parsonz nearly died isn’t a distant memory. It happened in November 2022. She finally quit alcohol and drugs in February this year. When we speak via Zoom, it’s the end of April (her birthday, to be precise). Everything she’s gone through in recent years - everything she’s put her bandmates, and particularly guitarist and ex-husband Josh Weaver, through – is still raw and painful.