When US avant garde metal band Imperial Triumphant decided that their image needed a shake-up in 2015, they considered putting on corpse paint, the ghastly makeup popularised by 90s black metal. But, their singer/guitarist Zachary Ezrin says, they then realised how much effort it would take – and how uncool the post-gig rituals would feel: “You just rocked a show, and now you have to sit backstage and wipe off your makeup.” (Perish the thought of being the average female pop star.)
They instead chose to wear striking gold masks modelled after 1920s art deco architecture, though these brought their own problems when they got lost in transit. “We had to do one show where Steve [Blanco, bass] was wearing a new mask that we put together from parts. We went to some Hungarian costume shop and just started grabbing stuff and piecing it together.”
Or as Alpha, the masked and nameless frontman of Portuguese black metal band Gaerea says, “When you start to sweat, you can’t see shit, or breathe, or sing” if you’re performing in a mask. “Last year we played a very tiny club in Stuttgart: super-packed, no ventilation. I can’t recollect a lot from that show, because I blacked out one or two times from heatstroke.”
Despite the practical struggles, and the increased difficulty they bring to headbanging, many more of the genre’s biggest stars choose to wear masks. Ghost, Sleep Token and Slaughter to Prevail have risen to festival-headlining, arena-filling status while keeping their appearances (mostly) hidden behind elaborate theatrical creations. Since Sleep Token’s pop-infused prog metal started dominating TikTok in 2023, other masked, genre-meshing acts such as President and Cenobia have emerged to similar levels of attention.
Plenty of these masked acts fold pop into their sound – Sleep Token, President and up-and-coming French band Sunborn blend crushing guitars and electronica-backed crooning, while Ghost have a melodic flair reminiscent of Abba – though others are unabashedly extreme, including Portal, Briqueville, Batushka and Kanonenfieber. As with most things in metal, it’s a male-dominated phenomenon – perhaps letting men express themselves through costume in a way that would be mocked away from the stage – but there are also masked women, such as Cenobia, and Maria Franz of metal-adjacent Nordic troupe Heilung.
“We go into a different mode in our psyche,” says Alpha, when I ask why bands from across heavy music’s stylistic spectrum are so attracted to masks. “I know a few people who do marathons and they say, after a certain point, when you’re running, everything stops being difficult and you get into this trance. It’s the same with us.”
While there have never been quite as many masked metal bands at any one time as there are now, the phenomenon is not new. When Slipknot blew up in 1999, their image – a boiler-suited, baseball-bat-wielding gang whose masks featured spikes and obscene protuberances – made their ferocious tracks even more intimidating. Further back, thrash seven-piece Gwar emerged from Virginia’s mid-80s punk scene and became the first masked metal band to truly resonate. Their gimmick, portraying ultra-violent warlords from the planet Scumdogia, parodied the theatricality of nascent bands such as Iron Maiden, who themselves had followed the precedent of costumed shock rockers such as Alice Cooper, Kiss, Arthur Brown and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.
“In Gwar, we were poking fun at how metal acts had these traces of satanism and monsters but were just dabbling in it, using it as a bit of an image,” explains guitarist Mike Derks, better known as Balsac the Jaws of Death. “We were like, ‘What if it were real?’”
With their excessive characters and costumes, which included late founder Dave “Oderus Urungus” Brockie wearing a giant alien penis that he called his “cuttlefish”, Gwar took metal’s grossness to new levels. It was all DIY – “we were digging through Dumpsters, trying to find old couch cushions so we could carve the foam up,” Derks says – and rooted in Brockie’s art-school education and his hatred for his classmates’ snobbery. The masks allow for larger-than-life satire: stand-ins for figures from Queen Elizabeth II to Vladimir Putin have been eviscerated onstage, and last year, the band “killed” Elon Musk and Donald Trump at Chicago’s Riot Fest, infuriating the far right.
“In a sense, it’s just laughable, but it was scary when we were getting death threats over social media,” Derks recalls. “It did get me very upset when people were trying to say: ‘Oh, you can’t do that.’ This is the country where we’re supposed to be able to do that! People were saying we can’t do it after we’d been doing it for 40 years.”
Similar to Gwar, albeit more tastefully, many of today’s masked stars have their own mythologies. Ghost pose as a subversive, devil-worshipping church fronted by a skeletal pope, with a tie-in YouTube series and even a feature film about characters in the clergy. Sleep Token’s songs – or “offerings” – are ostensibly about their devotion to a god called Sleep; since they almost never do interviews, countless articles and Reddit threads have searched for the lyrics’ “true” meanings. The masks and anonymity help bands like these become more than just bands: they cultivate escapist, multimedia universes that fans can lose themselves in. When Sleep Token headlined Download festival to 80,000 people last year, the field was full of enthusiastic cosplayers, and Ghost have monetised frontman Papa Emeritus to the fullest extent, selling everything from replica masks to sex toys shaped like his mitre.
For Imperial Triumphant, the golden, art deco-style masks they wear deepen the metaphor of their music. Based in New York, they play chaotic rhythms straight out of jazz, with the goal of looking and sounding like what they constantly encounter in their city: once-opulent remnants of the roaring 20s wasting away. “Our masks are falling apart constantly,” Ezrin laughs. “The gold on them is literally sometimes rotting off, from sweat and travelling and performances. It represents the decay of this majestic beast.”
More broadly, Ezrin says: “Masks have been in every society and culture for thousands of years. They take you out of the picture and present a character: a god, an ancestor or another being. That is really compelling in a world like heavy metal, which is strongly based around conceptual aesthetics.”
The problem is that, unintentionally, masks galvanise fans to find out who is behind them. Tobias Forge revealed himself as Ghost’s founder and frontman in 2017, after he was named in a lawsuit by former bandmates, but he was first outed six years before, when internet sleuths found him on a songwriting database. Sleep Token remain committed to their mystique, despite obsessive fans leaking one member’s birth certificate in January 2024. The rumour around the frontman of President, who attracted a huge buzz by appearing on Download posters before releasing any music, is that the mask hides the pop star wearing it: fans quickly rifled through copyright documents and alleged that the singer is Charlie Simpson from Busted. The band, who are going on tour this month, haven’t commented on the rumour, and journalists who interview them have to sign NDAs so that they don’t spill secrets.
Gaerea aren’t as militant about their anonymity. Although I’m asked not to disclose Alpha’s real name, he joins our video call with mask off and video on. “As a listener, I don’t really care who’s performing what I can hear, awesome or not,” the singer says matter-of-factly. The masks, therefore, are a way for the band to cut out any cult of personality: “We do care a lot for our privacy, [but] really, I just want people to focus on the music.”
Rather than hard masks, Gaerea wear hoods, which are easy to travel with: they tie them to their belt loops at the airport. But in Gwar’s 80s heyday, “Oderus and Slymenstra Hymen [ex-vocalist, dancer and fire-breather Danielle Stampe] had to do an MTV appearance and fly to a show, and the airline lost both their costumes,” Derks says. “They smeared some black makeup on, and he bought a dildo from the sex shop next door and tied it between his legs. People loved it!”
Derks wears a gigantic, jaws-shaped helmet that hides his face. “Being half-blindfolded all the time is difficult,” he laughs. “I’m also wearing seven-inch platforms, so I’m always in danger of tripping over even the smallest thing onstage.” Plus, Gwar lose money by touring, “because we take all the money and put it back into new shows. We could just keep touring with the same costumes we had in the beginning, but we always have to remake them, because they get destroyed through touring.”
All the bands I speak to say that, despite the difficulties, the masks deepen their artistry. “I love the presentation of Imperial Triumphant,” Ezrin says. “Even in 2026, when there are a million masked bands out there, I’d say we’re still unique: if anyone is wearing any sort of shiny mask, I’m getting tagged in it on Instagram. I’m a huge fan of authenticity, and trying to forge your own image.”
Derks is heartened by all the masked bands coming in the wake of Gwar: “I like that the band itself is becoming the show, instead of just having big light shows and pyrotechnics.” And, he says, these masks allow musicians to access new parts of their personalities. When the platform shoes and giant jaws are off, Derks is a very different, rather more timid person: “I’m not as comfortable being the star when it’s actually me, and not a character.”
• President’s UK and Ireland tour begins 11 April at Limelight, Belfast. Gaerea’s album Loss, and Imperial Triumphant’s album Goldstar are both out now via Century Media. Gwar tour the US until 29 April.
