Clad in a sleeveless leather-based high that adheres like Saran Wrap, a black belt with silver steel 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 together with her new group Violent Hour, and backing her are 4 younger, equally dressed musicians.
“You’re a rock star, woman!” 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 tune is the quickest, heaviest monitor on the band’s eclectic self-titled debut EP, which options music kinds that soundtracked Harvey’s adolescence, together with ’80s steel, exhausting rock, and various. Greater than something, Violent Hour marks a rediscovery of joyful vitality after Harvey’s ugly break up together with her former steel 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 lifeless and dying virtually so long as she has been in bands, the singer has found a robust connection between loss of life and music. “For me, the 2 encourage each other,” she says. “Realizing loss of life is on the horizon makes me need to create artwork and music. Having these sorts of issues to go away behind is the one means you may reside on after you’re gone. Considering of some child 50 years from now taking part in one thing I’ve recorded is kinda magical.”
Harvey is as educated about loss of life sciences as she is about steel. 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 research 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 essential 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 simply sleeping,” stated one other. Harvey was unconvinced. “After I checked out him within the casket, I used to be like, ‘Wait a second. He’s gone. He’s lifeless. He’s not right here and there’s no heaven,’” she remembers on a Saturday afternoon over a Zoom name from Galpin Auto Sports activities Pace Store in Van Nuys, the place Violent Hour will quickly pose for his or her first promotional picture shoot. “I knew that all the pieces individuals advised me about loss of life wasn’t true. I grew to become an atheist on the spot.”
Early publicity to mortality didn’t upset Harvey, it fascinated her. When she noticed lifeless animals on the bottom, she questioned what killed them. On the native library, she skirted the children’ part and went straight to the grownup nonfiction cabinets to examine terminal illnesses in medical textbooks. When she wasn’t learning loss of life, she was fascinated by it. “Anybody who knew me from again residence would in all probability say, ‘Yeah, she was a bit odd,’ says Harvey with fun. “If individuals harm me, I’d faux they had been lifeless. I’d consider the way it occurred — whether or not they had a coronary heart assault within the entrance garden or died in a automotive accident — and it was a coping mechanism for me. I virtually satisfied myself that they had been actually gone and never in my life anymore. Then, I might transfer on.”
Rising up in Michigan was exhausting, particularly after Harvey’s father left the household to start out anew. Harvey and her brother had been uprooted from their household residence in Detroit and moved to suburban Southfield to reside with their grandmother. The abrupt shift left Harvey resentful and disenfranchised. Worse, her classmates teased her for being biracial. “Youngsters would say, ‘What precisely are you?’ and I used to be 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 robust second and the sensation I obtained reverberated by means of my complete physique. I didn’t need that to ever go away, so I began to hunt it out.”
At 19, she piled all the pieces she owned right into a automotive and drove from Michigan to Los Angeles. She held court docket 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 some time, I lived a quick life and was not on a very good path,” she explains. “Lots of people round me who had been doing the identical factor had been both misplaced or dying. That’s the primary motive I enrolled in mortuary college.”
In school, Harvey utilized herself and graduated valedictorian. She labored as an embalmer and hospice therapist and was the director of a funeral residence. Thought she give up to file and tour with Butcher Infants, Harvey remained related to the loss of life trade, and through downtime from the band she labored as a grief therapist and end-of-life counselor.
It might sound uncommon for a vigorous lady to be equally obsessed 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 assume I felt just like the mortuary college factor was morbid,” he says from the Chicago residence they’ve shared since 2020. “However as soon as I spotted it’s all about serving to individuals by means of grief, it made whole sense as a result of she has a lot empathy and such an appreciation for all times.”
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 grew to become depressed. “Grief doesn’t simply have an effect on individuals who have misplaced a beloved one,” says Benante. “Carla was grieving as a result of one thing that she began had been taken away from her, and I might inform she was fairly misplaced about it. I wished to assist get her out of her funk. She was questioning whether or not she might even do music once more, so I considered a means to ensure she might.”
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 quite a lot 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 through the first half of 2025. A second EP will comply with subsequent yr, as will extra reveals.
Although he was the first drive within the conception and growth of Violent Hour, Benante didn’t need to play with the band reside. As an alternative, 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 means that was unimaginable with Butcher Infants. Not that she hasn’t sacrificed or gone a bit stir loopy alongside the best way.
“Man, as quickly as I obtained off work every single day, I hit it exhausting,” she says. “I wrote music all evening whereas we did the EP, and I nonetheless do. However I get a kick out of working on a regular basis. It’s what I like. I’m very conscious that life is brief and that, if you wish to do one thing, there’s an urgency there. Should you put it off, you may be too late. You must do it now.”
