SpiritWorld vocalist Stu Folsom came to a crossroads as he entered his teens. While growing up between Nevada and Idaho, he was steeped in cowboy culture. His family tended livestock at home, and his cousins competed within the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. He was in junior rodeo for a spell, too — until a fateful trip to Austin the summer before ninth grade put Folsom (born Stu Brundy) and his brother (current SpiritWorld bassist Nick Brundy) into the orbit of a group of “anarchist punk rockers.”
Suddenly, the prospect of moshing with your friends seemed more up his alley — and a hell of a lot safer — than strapping yourself onto a bucking Brahma bull.
“I was pretty skinny — still am— but as I started to mature, you get to that realization where bulls start getting pretty big, like, that’s a thousand-pound animal!” he exclaims. “If you’re a little scrawny dude, you’ve got to make a decision: Are you fully psychotic and going to be a bull rider, or are you going to go skateboard, smoke weed and hang out with the hooligans?”
Turns out the hooligans won. It’s been nearly thirty years since Folsom hung up his rodeo spurs, and in that time, he’s dug his heels deep into Las Vegas’ hardcore community. At the turn of the century, he became the longtime vocalist of his namesake band Folsom, who conjured scene pride in beatdowns like “The City of Sin.” Further investing in his community, he’d book shows for bands like Terror and Integrity at a literal junkyard venue dubbed the Hammer House.
“We had a forklift. We took a bunch of old cars and lined them so we kind of had walls,” Folsom recalls of one standout mid-Aughts concert moment at the outdoor space. “There were kids head-walking from the cars across the other kids. When my band [Folsom] played there were people [swinging around] tires and palettes. It was straight out of Mad Max.”
These days, Folsom is conjuring a different kind of dystopia through his work with SpiritWorld, a band that combines the intensity of metal with his Western roots. On 2022’s DEATHWESTERN, the group’s sophomore album (and debut for Century Media Records), SpiritWorld deliver detuned, thrash-imbued nastiness beneath lead growler Folsom’s gore-glopped tales of degenerate desperadoes battling supernatural demons on the desert plains.
Live, the band bound into big-time breakdowns while wearing cowboy hats, pearl-snap shirts and elegantly sequined Nudie suits. It’s an awesomely perplexing culture-jam, and one that’s made fans and tourmates of Obituary and Agnostic Front and earned them a spot on this year’s “Klash of the Titans” run with Sepultura, Death Angel and Kreator. Folsom appreciates the cognitive dissonance going on as you’re hearing old-school death metal coming at you from a group of guys that look like they should be grandstanding at the Grand Ole Opry.
“We’re a weird band,” Folsom admits. “We stick out like a sore thumb. We sound like a mix between Slayer and Sick of It All, but visually it’s a whole different identity.”
He continues: “We walk out onstage lookin’ like a honky-tonk band, and all these metalheads and hardcore kids look at us like we’re the stupidest fucking thing they’ve ever seen, but about 20 minutes in, even the biggest hater is banging their head.”
To be fair, there is some sonic crossover on DEATHWESTERN. Take how the lilting, fingerpicked acoustic intro of “The Heretic Butcher” offers up tumbleweed-propelling, film-score ambiance — at least before SpiritWorld bludgeon listeners with chest-compressing drums and south-of-heaven riffage. Folsom’s yee-hawin’ aesthetics were even more pronounced when he began the project.
On their first release, Demo 2017, his shouted vocal delivery paid homage to hardcore, while SpiritWorld’s twangy, reverb-heavy guitar tone evoked the Hollywood Honky Tonk of early Dwight Yoakam. Fittingly, the demo also featured a snatch of dialogue Yoakam delivered in the mid-Nineties drama Sling Blade. (The musician-cum-actor’s brayed delivery of “We ain’t got no band” was a sort of in-joke for Folsom’s then studio-only outfit.)
“I want to combine my love of roots music, punk rock, hardcore and metal, and explore my own path through there,” Folsom sums up of SpiritWorld’s overall mission. Though, over time, the scales have shifted towards the heavier side of things.
On 2020’s debut full-length Pagan Rhythms, the guitar tone gets nastier, the tempos more breakneck. Lyrically, Folsom began connecting SpiritWorld tunes with the horrific tales of merciless outlaws and necrophile priests he’d been crafting for his short story collection, Godlessness. (The book was dedicated to the memory of late Power Trip leader Riley Gale, who also helped edit the stories.) DEATHWESTERN likewise follows these morally corrupt characters, now faced with protecting humanity from monsters spurting out of a gate to hell.
“I took a U-turn with these concept albums [Pagan Rhythms and DEATHWESTERN]. I didn’t intend on shifting musical styles,” he says, adding matter-of-factly, “you follow your muse.”
Folsom came across scenes of violence at hardcore shows over the years, usually through “warring factions” embroiled in petty, fists-swingin’ scene beef. Godlessness, however, works through an imagined, yet unflinchingly vicious depravity.
“That’s some pretty life-ending, horrific shit, where somebody is ripping a woman’s mandible off,” Folsom notes of a particularly brutal confrontation in Godlessness. “I don’t like to glorify that stuff because I’m very uncomfortable [with violence]. Although I do touch on ultraviolence and themes of faithlessness, and write incredibly heavy music, I’m a pretty positive guy. I believe in turning the other cheek and leading with love. But I don’t shy away from the fact that this stuff still bleeds into what I find interesting. I still like films that have very sudden explosions of horror.”
As the musical and thematic directions have shifted, so has SpiritWorld’s external makeup. Along with his brother Nick on bass, the current live lineup features Matt Schrum and Randy Moore on guitars, Preston Harper on drums and, occasionally, Wristmeetrazor’s Justin Fornof handling samples and backup vocals. SpiritWorld is still Folsom’s singular vision — he writes and demos all songs — but its full potential is realized with the help of his friends.
“Just like you would if you made a film, the directors aren’t the ones doing all the practical or digital effects,” he explains. “You have an idea and then you bring the expert to that piece. I approach records the same way.” This philosophy likewise extends to the guest howls Integrity vocalist Dwid Hellion brings to DEATHWESTERN’s “Moonlit Torture,” a demonic duet 20 years in the making, considering Folsom first met Hellion when he booked the Cleveland hardcore icons to play Hammer House. “That period of my life still informs things I do today,” Folsom says proudly.
The day he’s reached by Revolver, Folsom is riffing out ideas for the third SpiritWorld LP. He adds that the finale of the trilogy he began with Pagan Rhythms will likewise connect to another short story collection. He’s tightlipped about the plot specifics, but Folsom hints that there will be some bloodshed. (“I’ve definitely killed off some characters I really liked. That’s sad… but I won’t spoil it.”) And while he currently embraces a very specific, trail-dust-and-viscera-coated aesthetic, that’s not to say Folsom’s tastes won’t shift. From here, he’s envisioning what the future holds for SpiritWorld, both in our reality and his fictional domain.
“I want to explore what happens in the same world, but fast forward so it’s maybe 2050. I think it would be really cool to tie it into electronic music. Industrial stuff. I could totally see myself doing a Blade Runner-meets-Ministry thing,” he says, though the former rodeo rider bullishly asserts SpiritWorld is not leaving their gothic Western hellscape just yet. “You gotta ride the hot hand, too. Like, I told Century Media I’d give them three sick records, so let’s get that done and then figure out what’s next.”