My Gen X father-in-law introduced me to Faetooth as we barreled down the I-5 highway in his pickup.
“Check this out, this is legit,” he said with his usual warm decisiveness, pressing shuffle on the band’s catalog. The first note didn’t begin, it ruptured — less the start of a melody than a tectonic lapse. A slow-moving avalanche of doomgaze followed: down-tuned guitars, howled vocals and feedback that settled like fog. He gripped the steering wheel and pressed his foot on the gas. I nodded my head to the lurching beat. It was the kind of shared, intergenerational communion that only heavy music seems to summon.
Like the bands Faetooth echo — Deftones, Pallbearer, King Woman — their sound doesn’t divide by age. It levels the playing field and meets everyone exactly where they are. Doom. Shoegaze. Sludge. Whatever you want to call it — this is music for anyone tuned into the frequency.
“Our shows draw a huge mix of different people and ages,” says guitarist-vocalist Ari May.
“Yeah, we have the baddies that come out in their fits: their chainmail, no eyebrows, micro bangs,” adds bassist-vocalist Jenna Garcia. “Then we have the old-dude metal guy with a long beard and a hat, and then we literally just have some guy. Like, one random frat guy. So: three guys that look like wizards, six baddies and just some guy.”
Faetooth — who bear all the generational markers of the Gen-Z-millennial cusp, from band tattoos and thin eyebrows to a bone-dry sense of humor — are a Los Angeles trio whose self-proclaimed “fairy-doom” transcends eras with its raw, mythic power.
Comprised of May (they/them), Garcia (she/they) and drummer Rah Kanan (they/them), Faetooth bend the iron weight of doom metal into something more spectral and ornate — steeped in a visual and lyrical language drawn from folklore. It’s the sound of a cathedral collapsing in slow motion, of fairies slipping from the pews like smoke through stained glass.
Since releasing their 2022 debut album, Remnants of the Vessel, they’ve built a devoted cult following, supporting genre titans like YOB and Pallbearer while carving out their own niche. But 2025 marked a major leap forward. They launched their first U.K./ EU tour — including sets at Roadburn, Download and Hellfest — and this fall they’ll join Belgian shoegaze crew Slow Crush for a North American run. Their sophomore album, Labyrinthine, reflects that evolution: a denser, more ambitious record that entwines doom metal’s glacial heaviness with lush lyricism, dynamic arrangements and a deepening emotional scope.
But Faetooth’s vision wasn’t always rooted in crushing darkness and mythic sprawl. Their earliest musical connection was built on brighter, faster sounds — and their descent into doom would come later, slow and deliberate.
The members of Faetooth first connected at punk and surf-rock shows during their senior year of high school. It was 2019, and the doom metal they would eventually play together wasn’t found anywhere in their immediate L.A. scene. May, in particular, made a conscious effort to “darken” their music tastes that year, drifting away from the cresting, repetitive bounce of surf rock to the unsettling dissonance of doom.
Their first encounter with the genre’s full cinematic potential came while rewatching the 2009 cult classic Jennifer’s Body. In one scene, Megan Fox’s titular character emerges — creature-like and serene — from a lake as the Sword’s sludgy “Celestial Crown” plays. For May, that moment crystallized the primordial, mythological power of doom: a perfect soundtrack for their inner world and creative fascinations.
Faetooth began as friendship: going to shows, sharing music and hanging out. The idea of starting a band emerged gradually, as May’s vision took shape and the others began tuning into the same wavelength. Their earliest jams weren’t songs, exactly, but fragments: textures, riffs, a shared language of heaviness. Over time, those pieces coalesced into something more focused — and unmistakably theirs.
That foundation of closeness has only deepened with time. Over the years, their personalities have shaped the band’s internal chemistry. May is the Type A organizer, running on a tight schedule. Garcia is the mediator, stepping in when May and Kanan get into sibling-like tussles on tour. This dynamic maps directly onto their songwriting process. “We’ve all had to learn how to compromise,” says Garcia. “If there’s disagreement, you find a way to work through it.”
The trio’s connection to doom has always been as visual as it is sonic. A photographer and graphic designer outside of Faetooth, May brings a sharp visual scaffolding to their music. On the mood board for Labyrinthine, they splashed on deep blues, while Garcia pasted angelic scripts, magical seals and winding branches. “We’d look at this art and it would make its way into our music,” says Garcia. “It was a symbiotic relationship.” When they play, each member sees a distinct vision in their heads: for Garcia, those branches and seals; for May, a pile of antiques; and for Kanan, silent, abandoned houses.
Through music, they get to reinhabit the magical, symbolic world they lived in as kids — hunting for fairies in the woods or playing mermaids in the pool. Faetooth draw from that childhood stream, but also pull forward the heavy stones of adulthood: weight, consequence and reflection.
Fittingly, Labyrinthine is mythologically dense and tightly wound with poetic precision. Many of its songs stem from May’s reading habits at the time — especially their fascination with Lilith, the demonized woman of Jewish folklore cast into darkness for refusing to submit. Lilith became a symbol for the band: miscast punishment, exile and radical self-possession — feelings that pulse throughout Labyrinthine (and ones deeply familiar to most heavy-music listeners).
You can hear it in the seething tension of “The Well,” which opens with an incredibly eerie gray noise, or “Meet Your Maker,” a trudging lament that recalls Emma Ruth Rundle at her doomiest. Even the dreamlike “October,” which draws from the dark romance of shoegaze, ripples with dread and defiance.
For Faetooth, myth isn’t just an aesthetic — it’s one of their biggest inspirations for making sense of the world. In the band’s view, there’s no karmic repercussion happening in real time, so there’s a kind of catharsis in applying a different framework: a way to imagine justice where none may exist. The stories they draw from suggest that evil will ultimately be recognized and punished, even if not in this lifetime. “We’ll bring a parade/Of all deemed unworthy,” they howl on the revenge fantasy “Death of Day.”
Their audience brings in their own interpretations, much as the band applies theirs to myth. “Someone told me how much one of our songs meant to them, as someone who’d experienced grief and loss,” Garcia says. “So, we’re expanding the idea of how our music is being perceived.” Aware of that emotional reach, the band remain committed to writing from their own personal experiences on Labyrinthine — drawing from their deepest vulnerabilities, of feminine abjection and dejection.
When it came time to record, that emotional heaviness met a punishing physical reality. They tracked Labyrinthine at the tail end of a sweltering L.A. summer in a studio with no AC. Kanan came in with a stomach bug. May was reeling from the heat. That discomfort burned itself into the album, which feels sweltering and drowsy under the weight. The music trudges forward in a slow march toward death, broken apart by screams and spurtive eruptions of guitar.
It’s deceptively hard to play as slow as Faetooth do on Labryinthine. It demands locked-in patience and endurance. But this kind of tempo facilitates a deep expulsion of the band’s inner psyche. Dancing around negative space, each note reverberates for as long as it takes a skipping stone to skim across a lake, sending the listener into a deep, meditative space. “I feel it can really make you sit with yourself,” says May.
Labyrinthine isn’t just Faetooth’s next step — it’s a record that extends a hand across generations, drawing everyone into the same fevered, hypnotic current. The band may write from their own vulnerabilities, steeped in myth and shadow, but the resonance belongs to everyone in the room: some wizards, some baddies, some guy — and maybe even a Gen X dad gripping the wheel a little tighter.