DETHKLOK's BRENDON SMALL: 'I'm Still Doing This Because I Love The Challenge Of This Thing'

On the latest episode of Interview Under Fire, Brendon Small, co-creator of "Metalocalypse", the hit animated series on Adult Swim featuring the fictitious metal band DETHKLOK, reflected on the show's 20th anniversary and the touring group's continued success, including on DETHKLOK's upcoming spring 2026 "The Amonklok Conquest" North American tour with Swedish metal titans AMON AMARTH. Regarding the evolution of the DETHKLOK live performance, he said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Well, this whole show has always been out of the ordinary. I just thought, I'm having a conversation with me when I was discovering heavy music. It's like me talking to a 14-year-old version of me. And so I just thought that kid didn't really get spoken to on television before. Also, wouldn't it be cool to have that conversation with people and start a conversation with people that really do appreciate that kind of stuff and maybe turn some people on to heavy metal that didn't know? 'Cause sometimes it find you. My older sister wasn't listening to heavy metal; she was listening to like pop music. I had to luckily make friends with a guy who's still my good friend who showed me everything about heavy metal in one afternoon after junior high. And I thought that's such an important thing to a young person to kind of s sculpt out their personality through musical choices. Because if you're a 13-, 14-year-old kid, what do you have? You don't have a driver's license, you don't have any money. You're living under somebody else's rules. You've got nothing. All you have is the music you choose to listen to. So I thought that's my audience of the people that take music seriously and also like comedy and also like characters and all that stuff. And how can I wad it all up and put it all in a suitcase and try to sit on it to close it and put so much stuff in there that each week you'd have to rewatch it to kind of get everything. And so that was the idea. And also it was in production, out of production. We made a movie in 2023. And in 2019, we kind of kicked the door back open by participating in this Adult Swim big festival. So we thought, let's see if we can use this kind of door opening to do some cool stuff. Because I thought that we never got to play as much as we could. And our live show is really a lot of fun. And to me, I feel like we're in a traveling carnival. We're, like, 'Step right up and get on and ride this crazy rollercoaster with us.' It should be more fun and more exciting than other shows that you see. And that's the whole idea. And through those 20 years, we kept sculpting the show and fixing little tiny things just so it's more fun for the audience. And so that's what's exciting about this year. And doing this co-headliner tour with AMON AMARTH is going to be really exciting because, to me, the tour is the best of all of the worlds 'Metalocalypse'. We have the TV show, we have the records, but this live show kind of combines everything and makes it electric and fun and immediate. So that's kind of the idea."

Elaborating how he developed the DETHKLOK stage presentation, Brendon said: "I'm basically like an actor on stage. And my idea is to get out of the way so your imagination can take over. And that's the idea. You can acknowledge me, you can see us on stage. [DETHKLOK drummer] Gene Hoglan is there. I mean, he's a powerhouse."

He continued: "There's this one day I remember meeting with Tommy [Blacha], the co-creator, who was in the early days of the ['Metalocalypse'] show. And I remember we were kind of working on the pitch of the show, and it we were just having coffee outside of Starbucks and we were just going, like, 'Okay. If we can have this amount of episodes, then I can write music in each episode. Not a full song, 'cause I don't think we have time for it, but enough to kind of give you the information, the DNA of a song, and I'll give you a verse, chorus, maybe solo, et cetera. But it'll probably be 30 seconds, each one of these things. If I could take these all, elongate them at the end of the season, put them on a record, if we do well enough where I can get money to make a record, then we'll do that.' And how do you tour it? Well, what did the [animated British band] GORILLAZ do? And at the time — this is so long ago — I would get Netflix to deliver me a GORILLAZ concert, and I watched that, and I was, like, well, they're playing behind the scrim and that's cool and everything. And their animation is gorgeous. These guys are great songwriters. It's all super cool. But I think you miss a little bit of the connection with the audience. Even if they are shadows, I think people need to see the musicians that are generating the stuff, 'cause we live in an era where you could just play to a track and you may not be able to discern that. So I thought it's important to show the presence of the musicians on stage. I do not need to be acknowledged. In fact, my joke now is, and I think this is true, that I am bad for the brand. You shouldn't be looking at me. You should be hearing me. We sound exactly like DETHKLOK. We don't look anything like them. So if we can be these kind of stoic shadows and then your eye is on the prize, which is our gigantic — we've brought a gigantic television set into your concert venue so we can show you these crazy cartoons that are sliced and diced like drum programming almost. The editing is so tight with downbeats coinciding with cuts. And so this is a lighting show that we have behind us. I started thinking about that, and then started adding smoke and more extra external lights. And the show keeps on building throughout the years. But the hardest part was — you can sit there and record stuff all day long, but singing and playing that, that's where it takes some muscles and it takes some… And I've learned a lot over the years about becoming a live performer. Nowadays I really, really, really like the challenge. I mean, adding new music into it that we haven't played live before is a great challenge because I go, 'Holy shit, how am I supposed to play this riff and then bark out these vocals on top?' Well, I didn't do it at the same time, because that's not how you record necessarily, but now I'm gonna have to figure it out. And I've had to do that all the time. So nothing is natural about it. I sit there and I work and work and work and hone it out so that I can get it in front of everybody and make sure everything's as tight as possible.

"Working with Gene Hoglan, he doesn't tell anybody what to do, but he just raises the bar so hard because he's such a perfectionist musician," Brendon added. "So that to come anywhere near his level of musicianship is a great challenge. And that's why I'm still doing this — because I love the challenge of this thing."

As one of the most essential musical multimedia acts ever, DETHKLOK is both an animated phenomenon and a live metal juggernaut, combining intense musicianship with breakneck cinematic theatricality. Bringing the beloved larger-than-life characters of DETHKLOK to life once again will be Small on guitar and vocals, legendary extreme metal drummer Gene Hoglan (DEATH, DARK ANGEL, TESTAMENT),bassist Pete Griffin (Steve Vai, Paul Gilbert, Zakk Wylde) and guitar shredder Nili Brosh (Danny Elfman).

"Metalocalypse" is a cartoon series about a fictional death metal band called DETHKLOK that's bigger (and far more powerful) than THE BEATLES. The show ran for seven seasons, with the final episode being an hour-long rock opera, "The Doomstar Requiem".

After "Metalocalypse"'s rise in popularity, Small assembled DETHKLOK as an actual live band to play the music featured on the show, with Small himself handling vocals and guitar.

DETHKLOK's first three albums charted in the Top 20 of the Billboard 200 and the third release, "Dethalbum III", peaked at No. 10, making it the highest-charting death metal album of all time. In addition, "The Doomstar Requiem: A Klok Opera Soundtrack" made it to No. 7 on Billboard's soundtrack chart in 2013.

After several years of dormancy, DETHKLOK returned in 2023 with a new album, "Dethalbum IV" and an animated movie, "Metalocalypse: Army Of The Doomstar". It was hard fought since Adult Swim abruptly pulled the plug on "Metalocalypse" show more than a decade ago, despite its rabid following amongst the metal crowd, many of whom came to appreciate the show's regular easter eggs and voice appearances from the likes of King Diamond, Hammett and CANNIBAL CORPSE's George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher. Indeed, "Metalocalypse" may be the only quasi-mainstream show to be truly catered to a metal audience, which can explain its enduring popularity and the steady drumbeat of requests for its revival.

DETHKLOK's 2023 "Babyklok" co-headlining trek with BABYMETAL was the first DETHKLOK tour in over a decade.