metal

King 810

1 upcoming festival

Flint, Michigan band whose bleak, spoken-word-heavy metal draws directly on their hometown's violence — confrontational to the point of discomfort.

King 810 formed in Flint, Michigan in 2008, fronted by vocalist David Gunn. Their music sits between groove metal and something closer to noise-rock or spoken word, with Gunn's flat, conversational delivery often stepping outside conventional singing or screaming altogether. Slow, heavy riffs are broken up by passages of near-silence, and the lyrics tend toward first-person accounts of poverty, violence and life in a collapsed industrial city.

The band's identity has been tied closely to Flint since the beginning, both in subject matter and in the legal trouble members faced in the years around their first releases. Their records have grown more varied over time, incorporating saxophone, strings and cleaner, crooned vocals alongside the heavier material.

metal