Following Ice Nine Kills’ recent Scream anthem, Spencer Charnas and the rest of his theatricore group are now hailing their heavy-metal lineage with the release of a glam-metal song they claim was first recorded by their parents’ band in the Eighties. Enter Grave Diggler and the new single “Hell or High Slaughter (Grave Diggler: Pt. 2).”
The track arrives to promote horror-comedy movie Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, and the backstory from Charnas and Co. is that the fictional Grave Diggler “once stood shoulder to shoulder with their eyeliner-and-excess peers in Poison, Mötley Crüe and W.A.S.P.,” until bad business deals and drugs took them out of commission in the early Nineties.
“If you were a kid in the ‘80s, and you were into fast cars, fast girls, and sniffing glue, then you were into Grave Diggler,” former MTV host Matt Pinfield said in a trailer for the video that INK uploaded earlier in the week. The teaser further flew Sunset Strip riffage and features salutes to Grave Diggler from members of RATT, actor Elijah Wood and INK themselves.
“What people don’t know is that the way that Ice Nine Kills actually met is that all of our fathers were in Grave Diggler,” Charnas added of the context in the trailer
Producers for Ready or Not 2 wanted to bring a “forgotten classic anthem” of Grave Diggler’s into their movie, and reached out to the INK leader once they realized the family connection. Securing the rights for the track proved challenging, apparently, so INK “re-recorded” their dads’ “Hell or High Slaughter” for the film.
“I’ve been estranged from my father for a long time,” Spencer explained. “But this movie, and this song, while bringing a lot of complicated feelings to the surface, also brought us back together.”
Grave Diggler frontman Sonny Charnas countered in his own statement: “You call my son shrieking into a microphone like a meshuggah mental patient ‘singing’? That’s not heavy metal. I’m heavy metal.”
The tune can be heard in an early scene and during the closing credits of Ready or Not 2, which hit theaters today (March 20th). You can also see a super NSFW music video for the track up above — full of raunchy riffs, pole-dancing and, per Dead Meat‘s Chelsea Rebecca, “too many boobs” — while a documentary dubbed Laid to Rest: The Grave Diggler Story is reportedly impending.