"The band have their double-drummer barrage fine-tuned to a subtle, sharp point." Greg Pratt wrote that in Exclaim! on 23 October 2010, reviewing Spiral Shadow, the fifth album by the Savannah band Kylesa, and he gave the credit for the sharpness to the two men behind the kits. We think the point was ground somewhere else. Between 2006 and 2015 the second drum stool in that band changed hands four times while the chair at the mixing desk did not change hands once, which tells us where to look for whoever sharpened the point. It belonged to the two founding guitarists, above all to the one who sat at the desk.
Founded in 2001 by Phillip Cope and two of his bandmates from the Savannah band Damad, Brian Duke on bass and Christian Depken on drums, joined by the guitarist Laura Pleasants, the band that took its name from a Buddhist term for the mental states that block the way to enlightenment set out to drag into one room what AllMusic lists as hardcore punk, psychedelic stoner rock, technical speed metal and the leaden sludge of Black Sabbath, and make them share the rent. Brian Duke died on 6 June 2001 after an epileptic seizure, before the band had released a record. Cope and Pleasants have been the only constant members from that year to this one.
This page belongs to the chapter this belongs to on the bands of doom, and it takes the other side of the sleeve. In sludge, the musicians most worth following are very often the ones who have laid walls for other people, as producers, painters of sleeves or owners of labels, so that their habit turns up on records that do not carry their names. Follow the band and you hear one wall. Follow the hand and you hear a street.
Phillip Cope and the desk at the Jam Room
Recording his own band at the Jam Room in Columbia, South Carolina, from Time Will Fuse Its Worth, released by Prosthetic Records on 30 October 2006, through Static Tensions in 2009, Spiral Shadow in 2010 and Ultraviolet in 2013 to Exhausting Fire, released by Season of Mist on 2 October 2015, the Savannah guitarist who had given the band's second album to the producer Alex Newport and took the desk himself from the third, Phillip Cope, produced five Kylesa albums in a row and took the chair for other people between them. The best known of those sessions ran from 18 March to 2 May 2007, when the Savannah quartet Baroness made Red Album there with Cope producing. Relapse released it on 4 September 2007 and Revolver named it the best metal album of the year.
A bricklayer's trowel that has been in one hand for twenty years does not wear evenly. The steel goes thin along a single edge, the edge that one wrist brings down into the mortar at an angle nobody taught it, until the blade is ground back almost to a knife on that side and a stranger picking it up feels it turn in his grip towards somebody else's hand, and every wall it ever pointed, whatever family's name went on the deeds, carries the same bevel in its joints. The Jam Room records were laid with that trowel: six albums by two bands across nine years, the tar of two different riff books spread by one producer, and a listener who follows Cope from Red Album to Exhausting Fire is following that bevel, not a band. It is not the drummers' angle. It is his.
When Kylesa stopped, Cope did not put the tool down. The band announced an indefinite hiatus in April 2016, and that October he told Fred Pessaro of CLRvynt that after fifteen years without a break he was not going to argue with one, and that he was at the Jam Room producing other bands while rehearsing a reunited Damad at weekends.
Laura Pleasants, the second voice and the editor
Guitarist and singer from the first line-up to the present one, Laura Pleasants is the half of Kylesa that argued for the song. The two drummers who arrived in 2006 were so new, she told the Oklahoma Gazette, that the ideas they sparked were only realised on the next record. Static Tensions, recorded between July and October 2008 and released by Prosthetic on 17 March 2009, was written, in her account, with the two kits and a traditional song structure in mind, and played live before tape ran. "Scapegoat" opens it at three and a half minutes, and "Running Red", the longest song on the record, stops short of six.
We really just came to the realization that we know what's working and what really hasn't worked, and we just kind of became better editors of our music.
Laura Pleasants, interviewed by Chris Parker, Oklahoma Gazette, 24 September 2009
The editor's hand went further on Ultraviolet, released by Season of Mist on 28 May 2013 in North America, on which Pleasants is credited with bass as well as guitar and voice, and which reached number 173 on the Billboard 200 with "Unspoken" and "Low Tide" among eleven songs, none past five and a half minutes. The same year the band set up a label of its own, Retro Futurist Records, announced in August 2013. Pleasants has spoken for the return as well: when the new line-up was announced in February 2025, she told the American metal monthly Decibel that talk of a return had begun about three years earlier, while she was putting together a reissue of the first album, and that it was then she realised she was ready to do Kylesa again.
The drum stool, and the men who held it
Chosen at open tryouts in Savannah and announced on 18 February 2006, the two drummers who finally gave Kylesa the double kit its founders had wanted from the start were Jeff Porter, who had come down from Detroit, and Carl McGinley, a Savannah player who also drummed in Unpersons. After Porter the seat beside McGinley passed to Tyler Newberry, to Eric Hernandez, back to Newberry for Spiral Shadow and back to Hernandez, like the crew of a battery kept at the same range through a siege of ten years, men relieved and rotated on the second gun while the first gun went on tolling and the shells kept landing on the same stretch of wall.
The second drum stool changed hands four times. The chair at the mixing desk never did.
McGinley was that first gun. He is on every Kylesa album from Time Will Fuse Its Worth to Exhausting Fire, and on the last of them, with the second kit gone, he carries the whole weight alone, from the opener "Crusher" to "Blood Moon", which also carries an oboe played by Andrew J. Ripley. The reunion announcement of 20 August 2024, signed by Cope and Pleasants alone, put the band on the Roadburn bill for April 2025, the first date of a return played on the circuit described in the Doom Metal Festivals. In February 2025 the band told Decibel that McGinley was no longer interested in playing drums and had given Cope and Pleasants his blessing to go on without him.
The stool went to Roy Mayorga, who had played with Stone Sour and, decades earlier, with the New York crust band Nausea, and the bass went to his old Nausea bandmate John John Jesse, who had offered himself to Pleasants in a message on Instagram once word of the reunion was out. That four-piece announced December 2025 shows in Savannah and New York, and in March 2026 a September night in Asheville with Acid Bath and the Melvins. One drummer now where there were two.
John Dyer Baizley, the painter who signs other people's sleeves
The only constant member of Baroness from its founding in Savannah in 2003 to Stone in 2023, John Dyer Baizley has a second trade that reaches further than his band. He paints album covers and shirts for other groups, and a profile of him at the end of 2009 already counted ten other bands wearing his work. The Static Tensions sleeve is his, on a record by the man who had produced Baroness two years before: the two Savannah bands built each other's houses. The brush was travelling before that sleeve and after it. In 2007 it had already painted the cover for the American grindcore band Pig Destroyer on Phantom Limb, released by Relapse, and after the Kylesa sleeve came the first two albums by the Norwegian band Kvelertak, their self-titled debut in 2010 and Meir in 2013: bands with no Georgia in them at all.
Aaron Turner and the label as an instrument
Starting a distribution operation as a high school student in New Mexico in 1993, moving it to Boston in 1995 to attend art school and issuing its first record there, a seven inch by Vent, the band of a touring roadie who had handed him a tape at a show he booked in Santa Fe, the guitarist and singer who would form Isis in Boston in the autumn of 1997, Aaron Turner, built Hydra Head Records into the house for Converge, Botch, Cave In and Pelican, a sediment of heavy records laid down one release at a time under a label rather than a band. Isis made Celestial for Hydra Head in 2000 and played its last show on 23 June 2010. On 11 September 2012 Turner announced that Hydra Head would begin shutting down that December, and the Los Angeles office closed in May 2013.
A quarry that cut the stone for a whole district and then shut its gates leaves the houses standing, and Turner's label now lives in the records it paid for. His playing went on in Sumac, formed in 2014, and on An Undying Love for a Burning World, released on 20 March 2026 by Neurosis with Turner on guitar and vocals.
| Musician | Own band | Work for others | Dated example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phillip Cope | Kylesa, Damad | Producer, Jam Room | Baroness, Red Album, 4 September 2007 |
| Laura Pleasants | Kylesa | Kylesa's label, Retro Futurist Records | Label announced August 2013 |
| Carl McGinley | Kylesa, Unpersons | Drums in two Savannah bands | Joined Kylesa 18 February 2006 |
| John Dyer Baizley | Baroness | Sleeve painter | Kylesa, Static Tensions, 17 March 2009 |
| Aaron Turner | Isis, Sumac | Founder, Hydra Head Records | First record 1995; shutdown announced 11 September 2012 |
Read the table down its third column and the argument of this page is there without us. Listen for the worn edge first. The name on the sleeve can wait.
