by Niklas Göransson

At the turn of the century, three young metalhead brothers transformed their collector’s obsession into an online distro. What began as a passion project gradually grew into a pillar of American underground metal: Hells Headbangers.

 

CHASE HORVAL: My dad listened to a lot of classic rock, and I quite enjoyed his shit: LED ZEPPELIN, AEROSMITH, BLACK SABBATH, maybe STRYPER, early VAN HALEN, and Ozzy. The usual suspects, I guess. In the 80s, my oldest brother got into metal – typical stuff like METALLICA and SLAYER. I was still a bit too young to understand, but I definitely felt intrigued.

The eldest Horval brother – born in 1973, a decade before Chase – lost interest in metal after a few years. When moving out in the early 90s, he left behind several boxes stowed away in a closet.

CHASE: At eleven, I happened to be rummaging through his old boxes when I found a bunch of original cassettes. They looked kind of intriguing, so I picked one up – “Ignorance” by SACRED REICH. I remember putting it on; we had a pretty sweet stereo setup at home, and I was just blown the fuck away. Then I started reading the lyrics and found that song, “No Believers”.

“No Believers” from US thrash band SACRED REICH’s 1987 album “Ignorance” criticises religious dogma and questions the existence of a higher power. This was the first time Chase encountered explicitly antichristian sentiments. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, which – like much of the American Midwest – had a strong Christian presence during the 1980s.

CHASE: I was raised with that nonsense in our household, never quite understanding why we kept getting dragged to church on Sundays. I have several brothers, as you probably know by now, and all of us fucking hated going to mass; none of it made any sense at a young age. So, discovering SACRED REICH and reading those lyrics, I thought, ‘This shit rules!’ And of course, the music was the most brutal thing I’d ever heard.

Chase has seven siblings in total. After processing the new discovery, he played it to his brothers closest in age, Justin and Eric, who were ten and thirteen years old, respectively.

CHASE: It really resonated with them, too. So, between the three of us, those tapes set us down the path of extreme metal, actively searching for more such music. By the way, we have another metalhead brother: Craig. He’s three years younger than me and goes by the name Reaper.

Craig ‘Reaper’ Horval hosts the HellCast show and operates a label called Reaper Metal Productions.

CHASE: Craig was always more into the thrash side of it, whereas I quickly got into death metal, black metal, a bit of grindcore and shit like that. I remember selling him some IRON MAIDEN and probably even SLAYER records – sort of unloading my weaker music choices onto him so I could buy DEICIDE’s “Legion”, MORTICIAN, EMPEROR, and the typical 90s stuff.

 

The Horval brothers initially lived in Cleveland, one of the largest cities in Ohio state. After a few years, their parents moved the family to a rural suburb called Medina.

CHASE: It was a very reclusive lifestyle – just a bunch of brothers hanging out, listening to music, reading ‘zines, getting into fucking fights and other stupid shit you’d expect out of kids. We didn’t know anyone who liked metal until Eric, Justin, and I started venturing up to Cleveland for gigs. Basically, we’d hit up all the extreme metal shows coming to town.

What was the first one?

CHASE: That would’ve been DEATH on their “The Sound of Perseverance” tour. Justin was only fourteen. Being the youngest dudes at every single event, my brothers and I stood out, so people started coming up to talk to us. We bumped into some interesting characters and sort of built connections that way. For instance, I soon met Jim Sadist from NUNSLAUGHTER.

US death metal band NUNSLAUGHTER formed in 1987 and recorded their first demo, “Ritual of Darkness”, later the same year. By the time they crossed paths with the Horval brothers, NUNSLAUGHTER had garnered a dedicated following through a relentless stream of demos, EPs, and split releases.

Jim Sadist joined the band on drums in 1995, performing on their fifth demo, “Face of Evil”.

CHASE: Very odd guy, in a good way. Jim and Duaniac – who was also in NUNSLAUGHTER, plus DECREPIT and FROM THE DEPTHS – opened up a whole new gateway into underground metal for us. I also got really close with Dave from VOID MEDITATION CULT. And then you had Don of the Dead, the NUNSLAUGHTER vocalist; we met him through Jim very early on.

These individuals must have been at least a decade older than you.

CHASE: Yeah, but there were no high-school peer groups or anything similar that I could relate to. So, those guys became my friends. I was just a teenager, and they showed me all this sick old-school stuff like PROFANATICA, TREBLINKA, NIHILIST… even SODOM and KREATOR because at that point, I’d only heard their later works. But then I realised, ‘Oh, the early shit is actually sweet.’ One could say they course-corrected me.

The brothers’ new acquaintances also helped them develop a taste for vinyl – a format that had seen a significant decline in popularity. With the rise of CDs, which offered greater convenience and durability, LPs were becoming less common.

CHASE: Vinyl was very hard to come by in the 90s, at least out here. I always heard stories about Europe being the place to get LPs. We had this record store called Shattered, where the owner would take requests. We’d say, ‘Hey, can you pick up some Osmose stuff, like MARDUK picture discs or whatever.’ Then he’d go over to Germany twice a year and collect everyone’s wants, bring them back in a suitcase, and charge us top dollar.

I recall that growing up, many metalhead brothers shared record collections – pooling together their limited resources.

CHASE: Yeah, but not so much with us. All three had that collector mindset where we wanted our own physical copies. After a few years of doing this, it became apparent how ridiculous it was that my brothers and I all kept buying the same shit. We realised that ordering a minimum of five records would qualify us for wholesale prices.

Wholesale prices are typically offered to bulk buyers, allowing them to purchase items at a lower per-unit cost compared to regular consumers. As such, ordering five copies was cheaper than buying three at standard retail rates.

CHASE: My very first wholesale purchase was the two ANGELCORPSE seven-inches – “Nuclear Hell” and “Wolflust”. I bought five each from their guitarist, Gene Palubicki. So, I got what we wanted for ourselves and then had two copies to spare. After a while, it occurred to me, ‘Maybe we should stick ‘em on a website to see if anyone gives a shit?’ Because the internet was just starting to pop off.

During the 1990s, most extreme metal retailers were still offline. Typically, one would obtain a physical list of available titles and then submit the order by phone or letter.

CHASE: Then, of course, you’d only receive part of what you wanted because the rest was sold out, making it a disappointing and annoying process. Just terrible, in my opinion. Perhaps this method made things more personal, but I hated it. My thinking was that interested parties could place an order with us online, and we wouldn’t have to talk to them – just ship their shit by post.

Did you own a computer?

CHASE: No, home PCs weren’t common back then. Eric, Justin, and I worked at Pizza Hut, and our boss hooked me up, like, ‘Come by the house and use my computer.’ When I wasn’t there, I’d go to the public library, and they allowed me to stay for hours on end. That’s how I figured out HTML, Java, and so on. You didn’t have all these free options, like now, where you can slap together a webshop over the weekend.

 

In October 2000, when Hells Headbangers first surfaced on a free Geocities domain, e-commerce was still in its infancy. The dot-com bubble had recently burst, leading to a cautious approach toward online business. Building an internet store required significant technical knowledge as user-friendly platforms and tools were limited.

CHASE: I really embraced the whole e-commerce thing. After learning some JavaScript, I coded a half-assed checkout with integrated payment. Our customers could get their shopping cart total with shipping costs and so forth, and then be redirected to PayPal. The entire process was streamlined so no one had to email anybody. I believe the fact that we weren’t doing this whole back-and-forth shit propelled things for us early on.

How did you spread the word?

CHASE: We printed a shitty catalogue to pass out at shows. At that point, we’d gotten to know some local metalheads. When I told people that my brothers and I were starting an online distro, everyone went, ‘Fuck yeah – awesome.’ Coincidentally, there was very little interest in terms of purchasing from the Cleveland area. We had a couple of customers, but not many.

Despite local disinterest, news of Hells Headbangers spread by word of mouth, and their customer base across the United States expanded steadily.

In July 2001, the webshop moved from Geocities to a dedicated domain, hellsheadbangers.com. An archived version shows a rather respectable early inventory comprising sixty-five different vinyl titles, forty-eight digipaks, and 362 regular CDs.

The selection includes lots of US death metal such as MORBID ANGEL, IMMOLATION, CANNIBAL CORPSE, SUFFOCATION and so on, the biggest black metal bands – CRADLE OF FILTH, DARK FUNERAL, DIMMU BORGIR, SATYRICON, and MAYHEM – as well as old-school metal like METALLICA, ANTHRAX, HELLHAMMER and MERCYFUL FATE.

To supplement their wholesale ordering, Hells Headbangers had started trading by then.

CHASE: Jim Sadist self-released a lot of his own shit, often in collaboration with other random labels. My brothers and I started throwing down some money and would get a few hundred NUNSLAUGHTER EPs or whatever. Out of a print run of one thousand, the batch was chopped up in quarters – like, ‘You get 250, we get 250’, and so on. Our copies were then traded out, which is how we learned that process.

Trading is a vital practice among independent labels, as it allows them to distribute their own releases and acquire new titles without significant financial investment.

CHASE: In the beginning, Eric, Justin, and I worked purely out of passion, with no money whatsoever. We thought of Hells Headbangers as a hobby, not an actual business. In fact, all three of us took personal cash from our regular jobs and pumped it into the distro. It was also a way of fuelling an addiction. That’s how I remember it, looking back in terms of how things developed.

What did your family say when the stockpile grew?

CHASE: Our parents had no fucking idea what we were doing. It got crazy quite fast; first, the Hells Headbangers inventory took over their garage. Then, the hallways and our bedrooms were stacked with records. Eventually, they asked, ‘What’s going on here? Is this your personal collection?’ and we explained, ‘Oh no, we’re selling stuff online.’ They had no concept of what that meant.

 

The first official Hells Headbangers title was an October 2002 split with BLOODSICK and SPAWN OF SATAN – two local bands, the latter being Jim Sadist’s side project. The original plan had been for him to release it on his own label, Metal Enterprise.

CHASE: Jim said, ‘Hey, I was supposed to put out a split, but now I don’t wanna deal with it. You guys have this distro thing going on – you seem to know what you’re doing, or at least enthusiastic about driving to the post office and sending shit out.’

The brothers agreed to take over the CD release in exchange for Jim Sadist showing them how to get it printed.

CHASE: Jim helped us figure out that whole process. He brought me and my brothers to this local place and introduced us to the owner – some random older dude, probably in his fifties – who did the layout on a shitty-ass computer. We came up with a Hells Headbangers logo to slap on it and then thought, ‘Okay, I guess we’re a record label now.’

The LP edition also became an official Hells Headbangers release – yet the cover only has the Metal Enterprise logo.

CHASE: Ultimately, we inherited the entire thousand-LP pressing. Then, probably a year or so later – after noticing Jim offloading his projects on us – Don of the Dead was like, ‘Oh man, you guys should do some NUNSLAUGHTER stuff.’ That’s when he handed us the CENTINEX split.

At the time, Belgian Painkiller Records had committed to releasing a split EP with NUNSLAUGHTER and Swedish death metal veterans CENTINEX.

CHASE: Painkiller’s ten-inch picture disc was supposed to be the only version. But this guy had already taken a year or two, so Don went, ‘Fuck this shit, I’ll just do a regular seven- inch.’ He had the layout ready to go and everything. Don asked us, ‘Do you guys wanna release it?’ and we said, ‘Sure. We like CENTINEX, we like NUNSLAUGHTER, so that’d be cool.’

“Hail Germania” – the first vinyl title bearing the Hells Headbangers logo – was released in April 2003. CENTINEX covered SODOM, whereas NUNSLAUGHTER interpreted RUNNING WILD.

CHASE: The funny thing is, around the time our version came out – or maybe even a month before – Painkiller managed to get their picture disc printed. So, had Don only been a little more patient, the Hells seven-inch would never have come to light.

 

By the summer of 2003, the mail-order had grown substantially. Hells Headbangers stocked almost five hundred vinyl titles, CDs in their thousands, as well as vast selections of patches, ‘zines, and shirts.

CHASE: Besides word of mouth, email spamming was an effective way to promote the mail-order. You’d collect as many email addresses as possible and add them to one huge bulk send-out. But the more e-commerce grew, the more regulations were put in place until, suddenly, you couldn’t just mass-spam people indiscriminately.

In 2003, the United States passed the CAN-SPAM Act, requiring email senders to provide a way for recipients to opt out of future newsletters, include their physical postal address, and avoid deceptive subject lines.

CHASE: This shit throttled our efforts in a way – because now we had to start paying for a commercial email service. But here’s the thing: the company gradually built itself based on these little roadblocks we’d hit over time, which is how Hells got a head start on all this stuff.

Towards the end of 2003, Hells Headbangers’ label operation was firmly up and running. The first handful of releases were projects adopted either from Jim Sadist or Don of the Dead.

In November, Hells Headbangers Records released a NUNSLAUGHTER seven-inch called “Cerebus”, as well as “Living… / …Dead” – a split album with MORTICIAN and FLESHGRIND. The following month came another split: “Alkoholik Metal Blasphemers” by KORIHOR from the Philippines and Japan’s ABIGAIL.

 

In 2004, Hells Headbangers secured a licensing deal for SLAUGHTER’s “Fuck of Death” collection. Besides a compilation released by Nuclear Blast a few years earlier, the Canadian death metal veterans had not been heard from since 1988.

CHASE: “Fuck of Death” was another project where Don said, ‘On second thought, I’d rather not go through the process of distributing a CD – and in no way an LP. Fuck that.’ Now, Don loves vinyl, but he didn’t wanna deal with the burden of mailing out twelve-inch records. So, he handed it over to us. We liked SLAUGHTER but were more interested in, say, MORTICIAN, as you mentioned, or DECEASED.

Formed in 1984, DECEASED is a death/thrash metal band from Arlington, Virginia. They were one of the first bands to sign with Relapse Records.

CHASE: King Fowley (DECEASED) hit me up after receiving an email blast about SPAWN OF SATAN. He was friends with Jim Sadist, which gave us instant credibility. As kids, DECEASED were a huge deal to me, Eric, and Justin – they still are to this day.

So, it felt kind of surreal to hear from him. He was like, ‘Do you guys wanna do “Fearless Undead Machines” on vinyl?’

DECEASED’s “Fearless Undead Machines”, originally released in 1997, is a concept album focusing on zombies, horror fiction, and the supernatural.

CHASE: He’s like, ‘Help me out, guys – those Relapse posers don’t do vinyl.’ It was the same with MORTICIAN’s “Hacked Up for Barbecue” that we licensed the year after – Relapse had no intention of putting those records out on vinyl. I guess the interest wasn’t there in terms of the time and effort required. But the Relapse owner, Matt Jacobson, was cool. He said, ‘Sure, just send me a contract.’

Relapse Records is an American independent label founded in 1990. By 2004, they’d established themselves as a major player across multiple subgenres, having brought acts like DEATH, NEUROSIS, AMORPHIS, MASTODON, DYING FETUS, and PIG DESTROYER to wider audiences.

Despite their prominence, Relapse focused on CDs and didn’t initially invest heavily in LP releases. This reluctance opened opportunities for smaller, more vinyl-focused labels to licence titles that might otherwise not have seen the format.

CHASE: None of us had any idea how to do a contract. Luckily, we knew this odd, older dude who’d come to local shows. He was about sixty and a millionaire who owned apartments and shit – yet somehow interested in extreme metal. I remember him asking, ‘How’s the label going, boys?’ and I said, ‘Man, we need contracts for a licensing deal.’ And he actually drafted some of our early contracts as a favour to us.

 

How did your business dealings with Relapse go?

CHASE: Matt worked with us straight up; we’ve always had a great relationship with Relapse. Their mail-order was cool and offered a huge selection. To be honest, we probably stocked more LPs, but they carried seven-inch EPs, tapes, CDs, and lots of fucked up, crazy t-shirts. Of course, the catalogue was pretty sweet, too.

Around the turn of the millennium, Relapse Records was known for its comprehensive mail-order catalogues. These print editions were extensive and featured interviews, columns, and detailed descriptions of the latest releases, as well as classic and obscure items.

CHASE: They were inspirational for our own catalogues. We only did a handful before focusing entirely on digital marketing. Technically, I guess Hells Headbangers came in to fill a void. A lot of established labels had come online but focused primarily on their own titles. BlackMetal.com were also influential; that was the other one doing an e-commerce type of distro.