Hollywood superstar Nicolas Cage has heaped praise on his near-namesake band Nicolas Cage Fighter.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, the star of Face/Off, Mandy and Con Air revealed that he wasn’t just aware of the Australian hardcore band, but was a fan, even quoting their lyrics.
“I am familiar with a hard rock band [sic] out of Australia called Nicolas Cage Fighter, and I think they’re terrific,” said Cage, whose latest movie is The Surfer. “Their songs are empowering. The lyrics are all about taking ownership of your mistakes, never being a victim, figuring out how you can fix your problems. ‘Re-evaluate your life/Focus on yourself/Look me in the eyes again/Tell me that none of this is your fault.’ They’re not afraid to write songs that are about where you have to own up to your mistakes.”
Cage’s love of metal and hardcore should come as no surprise. As well as being a friend of Rob Zombie and Kirk Hammett, his son Weston was formerly a member of Eyes Of Noctum and Arsh Anubis.
“Weston got me into the black metal music that is so popular in Norway,” Cage told Metal Hammer in 2018, around the time of the release of his gonzo, metal-adjacent arthouse horror movie Mandy. “Black metal is something that gets a pretty bad rap, because of the church burnings [in the early 90s] and so on, but the music itself came from classical music! Weston was listening to bands like Dimmu Borgir and I thought the singers were outstanding, and the music was classically influenced – I think that’s the root of metal, which is interesting enough in itself as it springs from Bach, Wagner and Beethoven. You can’t say that about so many forms of music, as so much of it came from gospel and African music. I think there’s something to be said for that.”
Nicolas Cage Fighter’s last album, The Bones That Grew From Pain, was released in 2022. “Unloading a devastating arsenal of groove-laden riffs, the four-piece carefully fuse the best bits of contemporary death metal with the white-knuckle conviction of classic 90s hardcore,” wrote Metal Hammer in our 7/10 review.
The band are due to release a new album in 2025.
