News•August 6, 2014 12:56 PM ET•11,494 views

Dragonforce confronted over allegedly bigoted past

Noisey has published a new interview with Dragonforce in which interviewer Kim Kelly goes for the jugular regarding Demoniac, a defunct band which featured three original Dragonforce members. Specifically, Kelly took Dragonforce guitarist (and primary songwriter) Sam Totman to task for such Demoniac songs as "Niggerslut," "Hatred is Purity," and "Kill All the Faggots (Death Squad Anthem)." Here's an excerpt of the interview, which you can read in full here.

NOISEY: So, I wanted to talk to you about something that happened way before the new album. I was digging around a little bit and found Demoniac, the band you were in before Dragonforce. I really want to know what the fuck you guys were doing. Sam Totman: Hah! We started that, me and my friend, back in New Zealand in the 1990s. It was when I was 18 or something. We were having a laugh basically. We just sort of thought "Oh, let's play some black metal" because we didn't know any good singers so we couldn't do any other kind of music except for black metal, death metal. It was just kind of a big joke really. Our first record was all serious, Satan this, Satan that, and we did quite well with that. The second one kind of turned into NOFX crossed with black metal, and then the third one got into power metal so it was like power metal crossed with black metal, and no one really got it basically. In fairness I don't know if NOFX ever sang about "killing faggots" and raping children and killing black dudes. That was what I saw when I looked up the band. We had some strange characters in that band and everyone kind of wrote their own songs, so any dodgy ones weren't anything to do with me. But you still had [Demoniac bassist/vocalist] Lindsay Dawson sing on a Dragonforce record right? Yeah, and I'm still good mates with him actually. He lives in Australia. He's been a friend of mine for years. He's cool, and he sang on the Inhuman Rampage album. I can't get over the lyrics honestly. Has nobody ever pulled you up about that before? Nah. Really? Not really, no. Nobody really cared about that band anyway. I mean, it took like five minutes on Metal Archives to find all that. You guys have really young fans, and you've got songs about raping "old fags" and killing "queer cunts" and that's...not so good. We had a bit of a twisted sense of humor. We were just having a laugh.

The interview continues down this road for a handful of additional questions. Afterwards, Kelly concluded that "it seemed like a few of the band members had begun to realize that perhaps they should've been more careful with their answers."