A Kiss Before Dying departs on its “full East Coast tour” June 1st, but the members of the metalcore band won’t be wearing dog collars with spikes and strictly black clothing.
That was the 1980s stereotype. They don’t adhere to today’s look, either, says lead singer Alex Harris, 24. “There’s definitely a modern hardcore style, but we don’t make a point to conform to it,” he says. “We do our own thing.”
The modern hardcore style is “a lot of baggy clothes and lots of camo. Like baggy camo pants are really in. Stuff like that.”
Harris wears T-shirts, jeans, and a band T-shirt along with running shoes on stage. “I like to bust out my Ja Ones. Ja Morant,” he says. “When I first started out, I wore a Grizzlies jersey at every show and they started calling us ‘basketball metalcore.’”
As for their music, Harris says, “We’re sort of metalcore, which is essentially hardcore heavily influenced by metal.”
The band, which also includes drummer Ben Oliver, 20; lead guitarist Josh Smith, 26; rhythm guitarist Brodie Climer, 19; and bass player Rhyan Tindall, 24, recently released a two-song promo featuring their songs “Rage of Caliban” and “The Most Heartfelt of All Fallacies.”
“Rage of Caliban” is “about getting an imposter syndrome about being a good person,” Harris says. “Like fear of having evil inside of you and you want to purge it.”
Describing “The Most Heartfelt of All Fallacies,” he says, “That’s the one a little bit more of a traditional heartbreak song. A lot of it is struggles with neurosis and feelings of abandonment.”
Harris grew up around music. “My dad was a local musician. My entire childhood he played in a band, Taco & Da Mofos.”
His dad, Shannon Harris, was the drummer in the band, which Alex describes as “reggae, rap, rock fusion.”
“Taco was the first person to ever try to teach me guitar when I was really young. My dad was always trying to take me to shows, but they never ever really played all-ages venues being the type of band they were.”
A Kiss Before Dying used to go by Lachance, Harris says. “It’s a dual reference. It’s the last name of the main character in Stand By Me. And it’s also a character from a video game called Oblivion.”
Alex’s first band was Ten Crowns, which he describes as “a bad one.”
Alex played guitar in Ten Crowns, but he wanted to do vocals instead. “So I started Lachance. At the time it was just a side project. I didn’t expect to do anything with it. All the music was themed around the video game Oblivion. There’s a faction in that game, the dark brotherhood, a group of assassins. The lyrics were more about the gruesome killing and death. And when it became a more serious project, I stopped using those type of lyrics and started using more emotional lyrics.”
They released their first record, If Bleeding Out’s in Style, as Lachance. “It was a four-song EP. We had abandoned the whole video game theme. It was an emo record, really. Screamo and emo, violence.”
The EP was “distributed by a small DIY record label, Jean Scene, in Pittsburgh. At that time, it was funny: We had a pretty big following in emo and screamo up North, but we didn’t have as much of a following down here.”
During the tour, Harris’ drummer, bass player, and guitarist left.
Alex had to find all-new band members. “I pretty much had to rebuild it from the ground up. We decided to back away from screamo and go more into metalcore.”
And, he says, “With a lineup change and a slight shift in genre, we decided to change the name.”
The name, A Kiss Before Dying, had nothing to do with the 1956 movie of the same name starring Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward. “It’s from the same video game Lachance is from. A quest in Oblivion.”
But, he says, “We actually used a clip from the ’50s movie in one of our tours. We played it at the beginning of the set. The woman screaming as she falls off the building. All the dialogue leading up to that scene. We’d play that right before we started our set.”
Alex met Oliver at Haven House, a “DIY venue,” Harris says.
“I was in a cover band with a couple of friends,” Oliver says. Epistaxis was the name of the band. “It’s another word for ‘nosebleed.’”
Oliver, who is from Marion, Arkansas, grew up “listening to punk and stuff like that.”
Climer was attracted to guitar at a young age. “My dad always played guitar in his room. It was always full of guitar gear. I was like, ‘I want to do that.’ I started playing guitar in fifth grade.”
Climer was a “huge fan of Metallica and Megadeth” when began playing guitar when he was 15 or 16. “I was really attracted by all the riffs, I would say.”
“My first band was Anaphylactic Shock. We played shows for maybe a year or two.”
Tindall, another native Memphian, says, “I pretty much grew up being surrounded by music. My mother was a choir vocalist. My dad was in a plethora of bands when he was my age. Rad Tindall. His most locally popular band was a band called South Second. And he was in another band, Pavillion Nine.”
Smith originally wanted to be a vocalist or a drummer. But after moving to a small town in Arkansas and hearing the bass player in a high school jazz band, he was hooked on bass. “I had my eyes glued to him the whole time.”
And Smith says, “My older brother got me into old punk and hardcore. And got me to learn bass guitar so we could play together. I started middle school band shortly after this on the trombone.”
But, he says, “Guitar is my go-to because I feel like I can be the most expressive and really dig into new tones.”
In 2024, A Kiss Before Dying released its first full length album, The Death of All I Once Held Dear. “Half of the lyrics on that album are abstract expressions of grief and the loss of the innocence of youth. But a lot is more about directing that anger and pointing blame, almost.”
The opening line of “A Kiss Before Dying” is “Where will we seek our cleansing when all our gods are dead and every place of respite is corporate.”
They get together every week and practice.
“We’re all adults with busy schedules,” Harris says. “Every now and then stuff gets in the way.”
But their slogan is, “Rock on forever.”
“It’s just something we’ve been saying to each other for a long time,” Harris says. “It’s kind of a joke.”
Then he adds, “It’s not a joke. We live by it.”