Clad in a sleeveless leather-based prime that adheres like Saran Wrap, a black belt with silver metallic eyelets, and shorts that look two sizes too small, veteran rocker Carla Harvey wriggles, shimmies, headbangs, and bounces across the tiny stage of the Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood. It’s her second-ever gig along with her new group Violent Hour, and backing her are 4 younger, equally dressed musicians.
“You are a rock star, girl!” shouts somebody within the viewers.
“You’re a rock star,” Harvey shoots again in a breathy whisper, sprouting a large grin. As Violent Hour launch into the set nearer, the Motorhead-meets-Weapons-N’-Roses barrage of “Sick Ones,” followers bob their heads to the beat. The track is the quickest, heaviest observe on the band’s eclectic self-titled debut EP, which options music kinds that soundtracked Harvey’s adolescence, together with ’80s metallic, exhausting rock, and different. Greater than something, Violent Hour marks a rediscovery of joyful vitality after Harvey’s ugly break up along with her former metallic band, Butcher Infants, which she co-formed and carried out in for 14 years.
If Harvey’s departure from Butcher Infants marked the loss of life of a dream, Violent Hour has triggered a resurrection that resounds with symbolism from her chosen careers. Having labored with the useless and dying nearly so long as she has been in bands, the singer has found a powerful connection between loss of life and music. “For me, the two inspire one another,” she says. “Knowing death is on the horizon makes me want to create art and music. Having those kinds of things to leave behind is the only way you can live on after you’re gone. Thinking of some kid 50 years from now playing something I’ve recorded is kinda magical.”
Harvey is as educated about loss of life sciences as she is about metallic. Over the previous decade, she has been an embalmer, funeral director, hospice employee, and end-of-life therapist. She just lately earned her grasp’s of science diploma in thanatology (the examine of loss of life), and by day she’s a grief therapist for Parting Stone, an organization that makes rocks out of cremated stays so family and friends members can hold reminders of their family members or depart them in locations that had been necessary to the deceased.
Violent Hour members L to R: Allie Kay, Kiana De León, Carla Harvey, Jewel Steele and Sasha De León
(Travis Shinn)
Her first publicity to loss of life was at age 5 when she attended her grandfather’s funeral. On the wake, relations tried to melt the blow for the impressionable younger woman. “Granddad’s in heaven,” stated one relative. “He’s just sleeping,” stated one other. Harvey was unconvinced. “When I looked at him in the casket, I was like, ‘Wait a second. He’s gone. He’s dead. He’s not here and there is no heaven,’” she remembers on a Saturday afternoon over a Zoom name from Galpin Auto Sports activities Velocity Store in Van Nuys, the place Violent Hour will quickly pose for his or her first promotional picture shoot. “I knew that everything people told me about death wasn’t true. I became an atheist on the spot.”
Early publicity to mortality didn’t upset Harvey, it fascinated her. When she noticed useless animals on the bottom, she puzzled what killed them. On the native library, she skirted the youngsters’ part and went straight to the grownup nonfiction cabinets to examine terminal ailments in medical textbooks. When she wasn’t finding out loss of life, she was fascinated about it. “Anyone who knew me from back home would probably say, ‘Yeah, she was a bit odd,’ says Harvey with a laugh. “If people hurt me, I would pretend they were dead. I would think of how it happened — whether they had a heart attack in the front lawn or died in a car accident — and it was a coping mechanism for me. I practically convinced myself that they were really gone and not in my life anymore. Then, I could move on.”
Rising up in Michigan was exhausting, particularly after Harvey’s father left the household to begin anew. Harvey and her brother had been uprooted from their household dwelling in Detroit and moved to suburban Southfield to dwell with their grandmother. The abrupt shift left Harvey resentful and disenfranchised. Worse, her classmates teased her for being biracial. “Kids would say, ‘What exactly are you?’ and I was so ashamed,” she says.
Studying about loss of life provided Harvey some escape from her grim actuality. So did listening to the radio. When she was 11, the native rock station performed Weapons N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle,” and Harvey had an epiphany. “It was such a powerful moment and the feeling I got reverberated through my whole body. I didn’t want that to ever go away, so I started to seek it out.”
At 19, she piled every part she owned right into a automobile and drove from Michigan to Los Angeles. She held courtroom on the Sundown Strip, spent many lengthy nights on the Rainbow Bar & Grill, and performed in varied unknown bands. Earlier than she had any actual success in music, she traded the jam room for the classroom, enrolling in a mortuary science program at Cypress School. “For a while, I lived a fast life and was not on a good path,” she explains. “A lot of people around me who were doing the same thing were either lost or dying. That’s the main reason I enrolled in mortuary school.”
In school, Harvey utilized herself and graduated valedictorian. She labored as an embalmer and hospice therapist and was the director of a funeral dwelling. Thought she stop to document and tour with Butcher Infants, Harvey remained linked to the loss of life business, and through downtime from the band she labored as a grief therapist and end-of-life counselor.
It might sound uncommon for a full of life girl to be equally captivated with loss of life research and music. That’s what Harvey’s husband, Charlie Benante (Anthrax, Pantera), thought when he met her in 2014 on Ozzfest. “I guess I felt like the mortuary school thing was morbid,” he says from the Chicago dwelling they’ve shared since 2020. “But once I realized it’s all about helping people through grief, it made total sense because she has so much empathy and such an appreciation for life.”
Carla Harvey
(Travis Shinn)
It was Benante, although, who got here to Harvey’s rescue in 2024 when she was squeezed out of Butcher Infants for being unable to endlessly tour. At first, she was livid. Then, she turned depressed. “Grief doesn’t just affect people who have lost a loved one,” says Benante. “Carla was grieving because something that she started had been taken away from her, and I could tell she was pretty lost about it. I wanted to help get her out of her funk. She was questioning whether she could even do music again, so I thought of a way to make sure she could.”
Throughout the pandemic, Benante had labored with Harvey on covers of songs by Tom Petty and Huge Assault, so he knew she had the chops to sing in a wide range of kinds. He wrote a brand new batch of songs in rock genres they each preferred, recorded the guitars, bass, and drums, after which helped Harvey lay down the vocals. The couple recorded 5 songs for the “Violent Hour” EP in the course of the first half of 2025. A second EP will comply with subsequent 12 months, as will extra exhibits.
Although he was the first power within the conception and improvement of Violent Hour, Benante didn’t wish to play with the band dwell. As a substitute, he and Harvey held auditions and employed 4 younger feminine musicians — guitarist and background vocalist Allie Kay, lead guitarist Kiana De León, bassist Jewel Steele and drummer Sasha De León. Benante compares the band to ’70s feminine exhausting rock group the Runaways, hatched and molded by rock Svengali Kim Fowley, which marked the debuts of Joan Jett and Lita Ford.
With the Violent Hour lineup cemented, Benante can absolutely dedicate himself to Anthrax and Pantera, and Harvey can dedicate herself equally to music and loss of life sciences in a manner that was inconceivable with Butcher Infants. Not that she hasn’t sacrificed or gone a little bit stir loopy alongside the best way.
“Man, as soon as I got off work every day, I hit it hard,” she says. “I wrote music all night while we did the EP, and I still do. But I get a kick out of working all the time. It’s what I love. I’m very aware that life is short and that, if you want to do something, there is an urgency there. If you put it off, you might be too late. You have to do it now.”
