Alec Lange is the vocalist for the local hardcore metal bands Snuff Tape and Monastery. He’s tall, tatted and surprisingly soft-spoken. Sitting in the basement green room of Ace’s High Saloon, a country-hardcore bar in Salt Lake City, Lange recalled listening to metal since he was a child.
“According to my folks, my favorite album, when I was like 2 or 3 years old, was Metallica's Black Album,” Lange said. “That's all I would let them play.”
Eventually, around 14, he started to mimic what he heard. As a self-taught vocalist, “everything that I do is my own technique,” he said. is style took years to develop, and through hours and hours of practice, Lange can distort his voice into guttural screams and grunts.
“I'm always yelling along in my car,” Lange said. “I can't carry a tune in a bucket, but I'll sing along in the car just to help my vocals.”
Not all screams are created equal. Throughout the broader genre, every band has a slightly different spin on the vocals. Even between Langes’ two bands, he adjusts his style.
Salt Lake City has had a thriving counterculture scene for decades. Bands such as The Stench, Iceburn and the female-led Subrosa started right here in the Valley.
With Monastery, for example, the vocals are more technique-based leaning into piercing highs. For Snuff Tape, it's more about getting raw emotion into each performance.
While the screams and grunts of metal vocalists seem like they would take a toll on the vocal cords, researchers at The University of Utah tested that idea. Speech-language pathologist Amanda Stark led the project and has a lot of respect for the genre.
“People think of it as like, ‘Oh, this is dark or demon or satanic.’ But there's also a lot of beauty, a lot of artistry that goes into the performances,” she said.
Stark and her team partnered with an experienced death metal vocalist, winding a camera through his nose to the back of the throat to see what happens to a singer’s vocal cords when performing.
They found those sounds can be created without any damage. In fact, most of the muscle contractions occur above the vocal folds.
“You can twist or squeeze, constrict or narrow these air spaces above the vocal folds in the upper part of the throat, that is what's uniquely creating the sound,” Stark said.
And the evidence isn’t just in the lab.
“So we've got metal artists that have been touring for decades and are not treatment seeking, right? They're not coming into my office and saying, ‘Hey, something's wrong with my throat, or I sounded different.’”
That doesn’t mean just anyone can do it though. Perfecting metal screams takes time, dedication and passion, as Lange explained.
“Just like if you're practicing guitar or you're practicing drums, if you stop practicing, you will come back rusty.”
His advice is simple: if it hurts, stop doing it.
Stark agreed.
“I hope that the bigger project of this comes out to educate people about what is right and what can feel kind of not right, and when is it appropriate to say, ‘Oh, maybe I do need to work with a singing voice specialist, or maybe I need to go see a speech-language pathologist because something isn't feeling quite right.’”
Mechanics aside, Lange said it’s the energy behind the sound — especially in live performances — is what it’s all about. But it doesn’t stop with the stage.
“Make sure you make the time to put that energy into the crowd, just like the performers are putting that energy into the performance. That's just as important.”.
