HALO SOIL
THE STORY BEHIND
How a bunch of ex-death metallers got over being gazumped by Disturbed to deliver one of the greatest rock club bangers of the 2000s
WORDS: RICH HOBSON
IN THE EARLY 2000s, it seemed like every band had at least one massive, floor-filling anthem in them, and Soil were no exception. The Chicago five-piece might have been musically and visually out of step with prevailing nu metal trends, but their 2001 single Halo became as inescapable a rock club banger as Drowning Pool’s Bodies or Alien Ant Farm’s cover of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal.
“When we wrote Halo, we never expected it to do as well as it did,” admits bassist and founding member Tim King. “But people went apeshit.”
Soil started as a side-project of Oppressor, a death metal band formed by Tim and guitarist Adam Zadel in the early 90s. They’d seen the underground metal scene changing, and they weren’t keen on where it was heading.
“The Norwegian [black metal] scene became super-popular and guys were covering their faces in corpsepaint and singing about Satan,” Tim recalls. “We weren’t into that Satanic stuff and there was no way we were gonna paint our faces!”
Instead, Tim, Adam and drummer Tom Schofield drafted in guitarist Shaun Glass from fellow Chicago natives Broken Hope and gravelthroated vocalist Ryan McCombs to form Soil. They took their name from the old Entombed track Rotten Soil, and they shared a groove with the Swedish death’n’roll pioneers. They were death metal musicians playing the kind of music they’d grown up listening to.