photo by Becky Degiglio / words by Kurt Orzeck

Death-centric music usually falls the purview of heavy metal, but San Diego’s New Skeletal Faces—led by Errol Fritz—sees an opening for similar themes to be addressed in more serviceable rock songs.

On an early Friday evening shortly before his band is due to perform at Til-Two Club, Fritz chatted with Knotfest via video to show and tell us what he’s all about. Wearing dark sunglasses in a room in his apartment, he’s surrounded by strikingly impressive gothic paintings that he uses for his band’s artwork and marketing materials, a cache of dusty VHS tapes on a shelf, a large Alien face-hugger statute, and loads more creepy memorabilia.

Fritz is an avowed visual artist first, having hatched his New Skeletal Faces music project with bassist RKO seven years ago more as a means to showcase his creations in new settings and shapes rather than becoming a musically myopic Rock Star. His gamble on launching a band that is more focused on conceptual artistic ideas than conventional songs has paid off, with New Skeletal Faces headlining many of their shows and having cultivated a cult fanbase that digs their direction.

“I have no formal training in art. I went to community college for a couple of months and dropped out because it wasn’t for me,” he explains. “I've always been more like self-motivated and self-taught. I was 15 or 16 when I started just getting into rock and roll, but I’ve always wanted every band I’ve been in to be more of an experience not just like a boring rock band that plays at a bar.”

New Skeletal Faces—rounded out by drummer Don Void—dropped their Peaceville Records debut, Until the Night early last November. The band vociferously touted the album as evidentiary of their desire to “present themselves as a cosmic abomination that tote the genre lines between all manners of darkness in music (and) cast their own black light onto the long dormant corpse of death rock, shattering the mirror of modern heavy metal into fragments that reflect back a fresh new take on this form of music with an energized and outlandish conviction.”

Certainly, New Skeletal Faces aren’t lacking in the artistic ambition department. But now comes the hard part: executing that vision and seeing it through to, if not completion, at least a destination where they didn’t expect to wind up. Fritz, who is leagues more sincere than pretentious, readily admits that he’s still trying to figure out the methods by which which he can fully realize his vision, which itself is somewhat amorphous. But given the exceptional quality of his visual art and the strength of Until the Night, combined with the knowledge that he’s self-taught, the young visionary should not be discounted, no matter how grandiose or unwieldy his goals may be.

New Skeletal Faces’ live performances incorporate Fritz’s visual art, copious use of fog machines, and excessive lighting effects that almost certainly warrant seizure warnings. Clearly, he’s going for a B-horror movie look evocative of those aforementioned VHS tapes. As a concept band, they have the advantage of growing in popularity on a large scale and not limiting themselves to their hometown. Fritz estimates 500 people turned out at a New Skeletal Faces concert in Mexico City last winter.

“The crowd was moshing, going insane … it was savage, man,” Fritz breathlessly recalls. “I smashed my guitar onstage, and the crowd just went nuts, and they grabbed the pieces of my guitar, and they started ripping it apart—and eating it, bro!”

Needless to say, New Skeletal Faces is a band that needs to be seen to be believed.

-----

Until the Night, the Peaceville debut from New Skeletal Faces is now available - HERE

Be sure to catch New Skeletal Faces live on the 2025 edition of the Decibel Magazine Tour with Mayhem, Mortiis and Imperial Triumphant. See a complete list of dates and cities below. Get tickets - HERE