Imperial Triumphant singer/guitarist Zachary Ezrin has started a new series of Instagram videos where he transposes beloved pop-punk, country and classical songs into a minor key and makes them sound like black metal songs.
The musician has spent the past week uploading his transformative covers, which kicked off with a minor-scale take on the classical piece Ode To Joy, written by Friedrich Schiller and famously used by Ludwig Van Beethoven.
The rendition racked up more than 8,000 likes and was followed the day after by a rendition of the US national anthem The Star-Spangled Banner. Versions of Van Morrisson’s Brown-Eyed Girl, Chris Stapleton’s Tennessee Whiskey, John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads, Creed’s Higher and, most recently, Blink-182’s Dammit all followed.
Watch footage of some of Ezrin’s covers below.
Ezrin co-founded Imperial – a New York-based avant-garde band who combine elements of black metal, death metal and jazz – in 2005. However, their career didn’t truly kick off until the mid-to-late 2010s, after bassist Steve Blanco and drummer Kenny Grohowski joined and the three-piece started to wear haunting, Art Deco-inspired masks. They use their image and the contrast of jazz and metal music as a metaphor for how they see New York, which they’ve previously said “sounds like decadence rotting”.
Ezrin explained to Hammer in 2020: “The more I travel, the more I realise there really is no other place like New York City. The energy and atmosphere and the architecture. The architecture in New York City never ceases to amaze me. The masks, the merchandise, the aesthetics, the lyrics, are all inspired by skyscrapers – especially ones created in the 30s and 40s.”
Asked why the lineup wear masks, he said, “It's nothing to do with anonymity. In this day and age, it’s almost impossible to be anonymous. It just stems from wanting to create a visual presentation for the band – something that matches the music. We want to look like the music sounds.”
The band signed to major label Century Media in 2019 and released their label debut, Alphaville, the following year. The album was met with critical acclaim, and Hammer named it the 10th-best album of 2020. Follow-ups Spirit Of Ecstasy (2022) and Goldstar (2025) have been similarly lauded.
They’ve also collaborated with a host of familiar heavy metal faces, including Mr Bungle’s Trey Spruance, who co-produced Alphaville, and Meshuggah drummer Tomas Haake, who played on tracks on Alphaville and Goldstar.
Imperial Triumphant will tour across North America from May to June, supporting progressive metal luminaries Between The Buried And Me. They’ll then headline in Europe from November to December. The band have said that this run of shows will be their last promoting Goldstar. See details and get tickets via their website.
