metal

King 810

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Flint, Michigan band whose bleak, spoken-word-heavy metal draws directly on their hometown's violence — confrontational to the point of discomfort.

King 810 formed in Flint, Michigan, fronted by vocalist David Gunn, alongside bassist Eugene Gill; the current lineup also includes Johnpaul Vega and Bryce Ballinger. Early on, the band signed briefly to Equal Vision Records, but left in 2009 without releasing an album, later adopting the "810" name from Flint's area code.

Gunn began writing lyrics for the band after being arrested, and after surviving a 2012 robbery in which he was shot and stabbed, he wrote much of the independent EP Midwest Monsters around that event. The EP earned the band a deal with Roadrunner Records, which released the Proem EP and the debut album Memoirs of a Murderer, both in 2014.

Their music sits between groove metal and something closer to noise-rock or spoken word, with Gunn's flat, conversational delivery often stepping outside conventional singing or screaming altogether. Slow, heavy riffs are broken up by passages of near-silence, and the lyrics tend toward first-person accounts of poverty, violence and life in a collapsed industrial city.

The band's identity has been tied closely to Flint since the beginning, both in subject matter and in the legal trouble members faced in the years around their first releases, including assault charges against Gunn and Gill stemming from an altercation at Detroit's airport. A music video for the song "Killem All", built around real footage of violence, was repeatedly removed from and restored to YouTube.

Their records have grown more varied over time, incorporating saxophone, strings and cleaner, crooned vocals alongside the heavier material, with the band's lineup also settling into its current form of Gunn, Gill, Vega and Ballinger.

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