(Today our Denver-based contributor Gonzo brings us high points of his conversation at the recent Fire In the Mountains festival with members of the Montana band Galvanist, intertwined with his thoughts about their new album The Silence Between Stars, released in May of this year via ATMF.)
There’s a particular kind of magic that only happens when you’re standing out on tribal land in the shadow of the mountains, dust coating your boots, cold drink in hand, talking heavy music with people who live and breathe it. Festivals like Fire in the Mountains aren’t just weekend party stops; they’re cultural touchstones where you discover something deeper about the music, the setting, and the people making the noise.
That’s precisely the headspace I was in when I sat down with Bozeman, Montana’s Galvanist to unpack one of the most cerebral, devastatingly heavy, and quietly fascinating projects brewing in Bozeman’s DIY heavy music underground.
To understand how Galvanist arrived at their dense, suffocating cross of blackened sludge and doom, you have to go back to the freezing industrial reality of where extreme metal actually gets made: storage units off a dusty back road in Bozeman. It all started in earnest when drummer Chris Navarro crossed paths with co-founders Micah Tippit and Tanner Erhart years earlier—after literally catching a broken nose in a mosh pit at a local gig—and crossed paths with them again while playing in local progressive death outfit Cellar Vessel. “Our [practice] unit was, like, two down from them,” Navarro said, “but they were so loud that as soon as they played, we’d just sit and listen to them.”
Galvanist was born almost by accident when Chris returned from an undergraduate hiatus from drumming. Micah and Tanner reached out with a simple blueprint: “Hey, we want to do a doom metal band.” But simple doom didn’t survive first contact with the practice space. “My dumb ass just kept blasting every practice,” Chris laughed. “I’d start to get some skills back, and I was like, I can do that. And so I’d do it, whatever, and I’d overplay. And so then Micah would start, you know, bringing forth a lot of these very intricate riffing styles and time signatures and odd tempo changes and stuff. And it just very naturally went from a doom metal band to a blackened doom sludge.”
That chaotic energy found its sonic anchor when Kevin George joined on bass. While Kevin was already juggling multiple projects and known for a much more surgical, clean mixing style in his work behind the soundboard, Galvanist offered a chance to capture something unvarnished and raw. “I wanted the challenge on this because I’m a big fan of this kind of metal… Neurosis, stuff like that,” Kevin noted. “And the fact that everything was like live… one-take kind of style recording and everything. Trying to get it all as organic as possible. And I wanted to take my swing at it.” Armed with a five-string bass—because, as he put it bluntly, “You can’t play music like this on a four-string”—his low-end presence solidified the band’s punishing foundation.
What truly sets Galvanist apart from the legion of sludge and doom bands out there, though, is the sheer intellectual horsepower driving the concepts behind the records. This isn’t just generic misanthropy or standard occult posturing. When they began mapping out their debut, Connection, Chris was deep in an undergraduate philosophy degree focusing on aesthetics and film theory, digesting the works of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. He found himself fascinated by how the photographic lens perceives and inevitably negates a subject, channeling that tension into void dialectics.
“You have an idea and you have an opposing idea, and each one is known by and opposed to the other,” Chris explained. “So, when you put them in a room together, they’re annihilating, and creating themselves over again and again and again. And I think that the special parts of art that I really enjoy and the parts that open me up to being vulnerable.”
That unflinching vulnerability took on a much more visceral, biological weight soon after that point. Prompted by a severe medical incident and near-death experience, the band began exploring Calvinist determinism, bodily failure, and human agency, filtered through the existential lens of French philosopher Georges Bataille. Micah took the conceptual reins, leaning into Renaissance philosophy, rhetoric, and classical elemental theory. From there, he said, the music naturally organized itself into a four-movement cycle where the energetic arc of each track aligned with the classical elements moving in reverse against the four seasons—spring, winter, autumn, and summer—translating complex cyclical philosophy directly into dynamic sonic weight.
If that sounds like a weighty chore, well—that’s kind of the point. The band’s suffocating blackened sludge sound is deeply rooted in existential dread, longing, and the inevitable collapse of the self. Entropy, however, is not an uncommon theme in songs as mercilessly heavy as the ones Galvanist have put together, and new album The Silence Between Stars is a testament to that.
Musically, the philosophic side of the band pays off mightily in the new album. Take “Atrophy,” a song that existed in the band’s vault for two years before seeing the light of day. It’s an absolute riff monster built on intricate rudiments and suffocating momentum before pulling the rug out entirely. As the track begins to uncoil, it slows down to an agonizing crawl, and then collapses into one of the nastiest, crunchiest, head-bobbing moments of sludge you’ll hear anywhere. It’s the kind of section that demands you hit the rewind button the second it finishes just to feel your ribs rattle again.
Much of that unique tension comes down to the wildly disparate influences colliding in the rehearsal room. Alongside broad touchstones like YOB and Neurosis, Chris deliberately injects strange rhythmic flavors into the band’s bloodstream by lifting gospel, jazz, and funk exercises directly from his drum lessons. “I just steal things from [my instructor’s] lesson plan and throw them out,” Chris admitted with a grin. “And he always tells me not to do that. And then I’ll do it and I’ll bring him a demo, and he’s like, ‘That actually works. That’s really sick.’” Bringing that syncopation into extreme metal gives the blastbeats an anxious, claustrophobic pulse that keeps the riffs from ever settling into standard genre tropes. Think Cult of Luna meets Batushka and you’re on the right track.
All of this was captured urgently and intensely on the stage during Galvanist’s unforgettable set at Fire in the Mountains behind the backdrop of Glacier National Park this July. Fire in the Mountains is a unique festival, and I’ve written about that extensively already. But because of that spark of uniqueness, the festival is the ideal spot to showcase a band like the Bozeman quintet, now featuring additional guitarist Neal Stein, at their most primal, most aggressive, and most uncompromising. The unexpected highlight of the set, though, may have been when the festival’s security personnel, for which Kevin George also volunteers, decided to rile up the pit and instigate the crowd. Opening choice “Hauntologist” drew in more than a few curious onlookers in the brutal midday sun, and by the time the band closed with the grandeur of “Spiorad,” the reactions ranged from enthusiastic roars to utterly stunned silence.
At the end of the day, metal remains the ultimate melting pot—a genre intense and romantic enough that you can weave black metal screams, flamenco acoustic flair, Renaissance elemental cycles, and French post-structuralist void dialectics into the same canvas without losing an ounce of dirt and grit. The five men in Galvanist understand that instinctively. They aren’t just churning out heavy riffs for the sake of volume; they’re using the full spectrum of heavy music to learn about themselves in real time. Keep your ears peeled for these guys as they continue carving their path beyond Montana—they’re doing something rare, vital, and thoroughly crushing, all while moving the needle for heavy music fearlessly forward.
https://atmfsssdtp.bandcamp.com/album/the-silence-between-stars
https://galvanist.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/galvanist.arcana/
https://www.facebook.com/galvanistdoom/