Castle Rat Brings to Life a Mythic World of Ancient Heroes and Villains

The Rat Queen is on an eternal mission. She’s at it every night on the road, dressed in a medieval chainmail bikini top, red curls to her shoulders, swinging a sword in mighty battle against the Angel of Death, as her band Castle Rat erupts in heavy metal ecstasy.

The Rat Queen is Riley Pinkerton, mild-mannered doom priestess and Brooklyn artist, whose musical and visual dreams fuel her band’s raging odyssey. She is also Castle Rat’s riff master, forging Sabbath-sized slabs of rhythm on her white Gibson SG while looking like a heavy metal descendant of Red Sonja or Poison Ivy of the Cramps. 

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“I think naturally I’m a very shy, pretty timid person. Non-confrontational,” she admits with a smile, sitting backstage in her street clothes at the House of Blues in Anaheim, California. “I’m working on that. But I think that’s the beautiful thing about fantasy—it can broaden your mind as to what’s possible.”

Around her onstage stands an equally dedicated cast of costumed players: lead guitarist Franco Vittore as the vampiric Count; drummer Joshua Strmic as the Druid, draped in pelts and antlers; and bassist Charley Ruddell as the Plague Doctor, clad in black leather and an ominous beaked mask. Together, the band brings to life a mythic world of ancient heroes and villains, attracting an excited audience of headbangers and fantasy fanatics, many of whom show up in costume.

Days earlier, the band had wrapped up a spring tour supporting the Viking headbangers Amon Amarth and Dethklok. Now Castle Rat is closing the road trip with a one-off date at this House of Blues, sold out at 1,400 tickets. It’s the band’s biggest headline show yet.

Hours before showtime, Pinkerton is soft-spoken, with a full mane of red hair, but nothing like the teased metal goddess look she’ll have in costume. 

“It’s very DIY,” she says of the production. “It’s a labor of love. I think that connects with people where we’re presenting a fantasy, but they can see the human flaws that make it feel very grounded in reality, even though we’re trying to make a fantastical thing happen.”

The group’s Bandcamp page describes their mission like this: “Castle Rat is a Medieval Fantasy Heavy Metal band led by the Rat Queen on a mission to expand and defend ‘The Realm’ from those who seek to destroy it. … Together they face the relentless wrath of their arch nemesis: Death Herself — ‘The Rat Reaperess.’”  

Their 2024 debut album, Into the Realm, was bruising doom metal heavily influenced by Black Sabbath. A year later, its follow-up, The Bestiary, leaned into the grandeur of 1980s metal (Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Motörhead) and is a true concept album. The recording of The Bestiary was also funded through a Kickstarter campaign that reached its goal of $139,000 in the first 38 minutes, indicating a growing following for Pinkerton’s wild imaginings.

“The overarching theme is man versus nature and how a man can often corrupt the thing that we’re a part of—and to not forget the power of nature and how it ought to be respected,” says Pinkerton. Each song is about a different mythical beast, with a moral within each story.

As the story unfolds, the album’s central character, the Wizard, becomes alarmed that mystical creatures are dying out. To save them, he seals their souls into a magical book called The Bestiary. The volume is then entrusted to the Rat Queen and her companions, who battle the Rat Reaperess—death herself, a Grim Reaper in a rat head and showgirl bodysuit, who appears onstage each night armed with a scythe.

Each concert climaxes with Pinkerton’s sword fight against the Rat Reaperess, leading to the singer’s inevitable defeat. She is revived by the Plague Doctor, and the Rat Queen rises again, spitting up blood in a moment of pure ’70s rock spectacle worthy of Gene Simmons or Alice Cooper.

“I have major death anxiety so the whole basis of the live show is addressing that, which I also didn’t realize until about two years in,” Pinkerton says with a laugh. “‘Oh, I’ve created a show where I go on stage and I battle death.’ It’s like exposure therapy in a way—I die onstage every night, but then I have to be alive again so that we can play more shows.” 

After tonight, Castle Rat will be back in New York briefly before returning to the road for a summer European tour, followed by a run of headline dates in larger rooms across the U.S., as demand keeps growing.

Their third-ever gig was at Saint Vitus in Brooklyn on Halloween 2019, which inspired Pinkerton to create costumes for the band. “It was a very loose sketch of what Castle Rat became, and it was just so much fun,” she recalls. “The crowd was all in on it. I thought, why stop doing this? What if we just did it every time?”

She made her own chainmail warrior costume out of small metal rings, which survived about 40 shows before being retired. After that, she turned to professional makers of medieval garb at It Is Known in New York, who crafted replacements to the bandleader’s specifications. Wearing it makes her feel invincible.

“The worst part is that it is so cold when you first put it on,” she admits. Now, while preparing for each night onstage, she has drummer Strmic warm up her chainmail bikini top by wearing it while he puts on his Druid makeup. She laughs and calls it her “industry secret.”

Before each performance, she spends an hour transforming herself, applying the elaborate makeup around her eyes, teasing her hair, using lots of hairspray. Vittore and Strmic take about half as much time, Ruddell even less, putting his leather beak mask on at the very last minute. Music is usually playing. One night, Strmic put on the Doobie Brothers.

“There’s been 20-minute get-readies,” Pinkerton says with a laugh, “and those are not fun. It’s nice to take time and get everything just right.”

Costumes and makeup were only the beginning, as Pinkerton soon imagined an entire universe of lore to explain the characters and action onstage.

The world drew heavily from the paintings of fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta, who depicted scenes of barbarians and beasts in conflict, of pulp fiction heroes, femme fatales, and fierce warrior women. Pinkerton discovered his work in her early 20s. During a visit to the Frazetta Art Museum in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, she bought several vintage posters, including a canvas print of her favorite, “Cat Girl”—a painting of a fierce-looking woman in the jungle surrounded by black and spotted leopards. The prints now hang in her Brooklyn apartment.

“It came at a really good time for me, where it really turned my understanding of beauty standards on its head,” she says. “Growing up as a young woman in the early 2000s, it was a very different aesthetic and body type than the figures that Frazetta paints. And that was really empowering and liberating for me to be like, oh, look at these powerful women. Like, there’s a chick pushing a he-man out of the way and drawing a dagger to go at a T-Rex. She’s like, ‘Babe, I got this.’ That wasn’t a format I’d seen before.”

The image she has created for the Rat Queen has become a source of personal strength, pushing past any previous self-doubt. “I’m not wearing a lot of clothes, but I’m stepping into a character, so I never feel exposed on stage,” she explains. “I’m in my persona and I feel very comfortable in my body, which has not always been the case. I’m really grateful to have found the Rat Queen to really embrace how I am as a natural human being and navigating the world and saying, ‘Yeah, this vessel I have is good enough.’”

The songs are draped in heavy metal sword-and-sorcery imagery, but to Pinkerton they still reflect real people and modern life. So the character within “The Wizard” could be the story of any powerful person with something broken inside. “Broken parts of yourself are still valid,” she says. The mystical song “Crystal Cave” is about therapy.

“The first album wasn’t a concept album. It was me singing about my feelings heavily veiled with fantasy language, swords and daggers and all that,” she says.

In that way, her heavy metal songs are not so different from her previous musical identity as a New York folk singer with acoustic guitar. Even when she was doing that, she listened to Sabbath at home, but hadn’t allowed herself to imagine herself in that genre. 

“I was like, oh, I don’t have the chops and my voice is too quiet and yada yada,” she recalls now. That changed once she watched a close female friend get onstage with an electric guitar and rip. Pinkerton finally allowed her heavy metal muse free.

“Every genre I’m sure has its schmucks, and metal can be gatekeeping and all that stuff. But in general it’s a community of oddballs that feel a sense of belonging,” she says, comparing her personal experiences within these diverse music scenes. “That sense of kinship is really great, whereas the folk scene is just a bunch of boys who should be in therapy and are instead pretending to be Bob Dylan.”

As showtime grows closer, Vittore and Ruddell are waiting backstage. Both are the newest members of the band, after Castle Rat’s original lead guitarist and bassist left shortly before the release of the debut album. Vittore is wearing a weathered Kiss T-shirt dating back to the ’90s reunion of the original theatrical rock quartet.

A Brooklyn session player, Vittore was invited to audition for Castle Rat. 

“Riles was like, ‘Yeah, it sounds really good, but would you be down to wear fangs and makeup?’” the guitarist recalls. “I’m like, ‘Not only am I down, but I would love to.’ I’ve always been a Kiss fan, and I love when bands put on a show.”

Ruddell was the roommate of drummer Strmic and had seen Castle Rat early on in a tiny Brooklyn club in front of about 80 people. When they needed a new bassist, he stepped in, with no expectations that the band would grow beyond its local following. 

“The scope of it and scale of it is humbling and intense. We’re catching up to it,” says Ruddell, who has also been a sometime music writer/critic for Pitchfork, NPR, and elsewhere.

Castle Rat have begun some preliminary planning and writing for their next album, piling up new riffs at jam sessions. They expect to be back in the recording studio this winter. And Pinkerton is once again daydreaming about the next round of lore around the band and its music.

Among the singer’s sources of inspiration this time are the Disney-themed fantasy videogame Kingdom Hearts and a book of cosmic spirituality by Richard Rohr called Universal Christ—two wildly diverse sources where the metal singer found signs of a “universal truth.”

“I really enjoy the juxtaposition of finding a truth in two very different places—in Kingdom Hearts, you’re running around with Donald Duck and fighting people,” she explains. “And it was saying the same thing as this book written by a Christian mystic who was almost Buddhist with his beliefs. And I was like, that’s hilarious.”

Pinkerton is still working out how that inspiration will play out in the next round of songs, but likes the theme of finding light even in the darkest of places. “Positivity is very important to me,” she says.

Her bandmates are confident it will lead somewhere exciting.

“Riley is, like, one of the most creative people I’ve ever met. She has a wonderful imagination,” Ruddell says. “When we’re working on music, we all chime in, push and pull. But when it comes down to aesthetics, lore, merchandise, all that stuff, we just sit back and let Riley do it because she’s the only one who can. It’s a beautiful thing to see.”

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The Rat Queen is on an eternal mission. She’s at it every night on the road, dressed in a medieval chainmail bikini top, red curls to her shoulders, swinging a sword in mighty battle against the Angel of Death, as her band Castle Rat erupts in heavy metal ecstasy. The Rat Queen is Riley Pinkerton, […]Steve Appleford{authorlink}https://www.spinmagazine.com/feed/SPINMusic News, Album Reviews, Concert Photos, Videos and Morehttps://static.spinmagazine.com/files/2023/08/cropped-logo-spin-s-340×340.png