Matterhorn is a female fronted metal band from Adelaide, Australia. The band was formed in 2009 and at the beginning of their career, they did tribute shows. Their fanbase was growing year by year, so they decided to walk on their own path – as a result, they released their debut album, Crimes Of Man on March 16, 2018. We had an opportunity to ask some questions from the guitarist, Brendan Ozolins.

“Amanda and I started the band about 10 years ago with the idea of doing a metal covers show to fund an original band, so we thought why not play our favorite old school metal bands, like Maiden, Priest, OZZY, DIO, Sabbath, Purple, AC/DC…etc – while earning money to fund our own original project. The current, settled line up has been together for a while now. As I really wanted my lifelong friend, Steve Opitz to be in a band with me on bass, and when he said yes it was a huge deal to me, his fretless bass playing skills are incredible. Then on Steve’s recommendation, we approached Jaryd Dorey when we needed a new drummer, and again we were very happy when he agreed to join us as he’s an amazing drummer. Jaryd was already playing in another well-known original local metal band, Skintilla at the time, but he was cool to do covers to start with, so the real Matterhorn was born.

But due to Jaryds busy time involvement with his other band, Skintilla, he wasn’t able to put in the extra work on writing our originals. So we had to put the originals on hold for a few years until Skintilla disbanded. We then juggled the cover show with sessions writing and working on our original music, until we had enough material we felt good enough to lay down in the studio to record the album.”

However their first material has come out only a few months ago, we were curious if they’re already working on a new one? “No, we haven’t really started working on new material yet, however, I’ve got a few new riff ideas recorded ready for when we need them in the future” – replied Brendan. “At the moment we are still concentrating on getting our current debut all original album ‘Crimes Of Man‘ out to the world and spreading the Matterhorn word and trying to build up a larger following with this release, which has been going well so far. We really have been blown away and very appreciative of the great response the album is getting from all over the world, especially for a metal band like us, way down here in Australia. We would also love to get the opportunity to one day come and perform in other countries around the world, so we really do thank everyone for their support.

And how does an “average” working process look like? “Being metal music a lot of songs start with the riff, so having ideas is a great way to get the ball rolling. Some of the material on this album I already had written some time ago and other songs were put together by us just jamming on ideas. When we had the music arrangement finished we would then give it to Amanda for her to write the lyrics and melody to it.

Having spent so much time hanging out and performing together – I think it helps with the writing process. We all love heavy metal, so we are all aligned in the same direction as far as that goes, and I’m sure there’ll be some evolving when we write again very soon.”

A fun fact on how the drummer, Jaryd joined the band: “Years ago we were playing a show with a previous drummer, and this little guy was crowd surfing in lycra and going crazy during our performance – a real stand out. A few weeks later after we had to part ways with the then drummer. Steve said we should ask that little crazy guy from that show, His name is Jaryd who is a drummer and would be a great fit for us, luckily Jaryd said yes and we haven’t looked back since.”

Please support the band by buying their music – just click on the photo below.