ICE NINE KILLS

Ice Nine Kills began in 2000 in Boston, Massachusetts, started by high school friends Spencer Charnas and Jeremy Schwartz. The band's earliest incarnation played ska punk under the name Ice Nine before shifting its identity across the 2000s, arriving eventually at the horror-themed metalcore that has since become their signature. Charnas, now the sole remaining founding member, has guided that transformation with a singular creative consistency: the conviction that extreme metal and cinematic storytelling belong together.

The pivot toward metalcore, solidified around 2010, allowed Ice Nine Kills to tap something they had always understood intuitively. Horror and heavy music share more than aesthetics. Both deal in intensity, in the confrontation of fear, in the theatrical exaggeration of feeling. Charnas brings a vocalist's precision to that overlap, and over the years the band's performances have become known for their theatrical ambition as much as their musical force.

The breakthrough moment came with The Silver Scream (2018), a concept album in which every track is a love letter to a specific horror film. "A Grave Mistake" became a gold single and set the template: punishing riffs, melodic hooks, and lyrics that weave horror iconography into something genuinely affecting. The album captured horror fans and metalcore fans alike, and its follow-up, The Silver Scream 2: Welcome to Horrorwood (2021), expanded the concept further. Both records come with tie-in graphic novels, and the band has extended their world into additional print, including a full-length book titled The Silver Scream: A True Crime Novel. They treat albums as entry points into larger creative universes, and fans have followed them into every corner of it.

Their profile on the road has matched those ambitions. Ice Nine Kills toured with Slipknot and were personally selected by Metallica to join the M72 World Tour, placing them alongside rock's most significant live acts at an extraordinary scale.

Recent music sustains that momentum. "The Laugh Track," released in October 2025 through Fearless Records, channels Tim Burton's 1989 Batman through a music video featuring actors Matthew Lillard and Phil Morris, directed by Jensen Noen. The track channels the gothic grandeur of Burton's Gotham into metalcore with a precision that only Ice Nine Kills could manage. "Play Dead," a collaboration with the horror survival game Dead by Daylight, and "Twisting the Knife" featuring actress Mckenna Grace, continue the band's practice of finding partners who share their reverence for horror culture. Each collaboration is specific, rooted in a genuine creative overlap rather than novelty.

Ice Nine Kills have built something genuinely their own: an aesthetic universe where metalcore, horror film, and theatrical performance converge. Spencer Charnas and the band he has assembled have turned a high school passion project into one of the most distinctive acts in contemporary heavy music. The world they have created keeps expanding, and there is every reason to believe they are nowhere near finished building it.