Drag Me Under’s “Blood Hymns”: A Decade of Growth and Grit
- Lauren Juillerat
- Mar 3
- 4 min read
By Nicole Fernandez
Photography by Ellyn Pillers
Reno heavy metal band Drag Me Under has never gone silent. Over the past decade, they’ve kept playing shows, stayed connected to the scene and continued to grow together as musicians. But 2025 marks a milestone, the release of “Blood Hymns,” their first full-length album in ten years.
The band is made up of lifelong friends — Maurice Harold, Jeromy Ainsworth, Brandon Dickson and Patrick Sutton — who grew up together in Reno and connected through their passion for music.
The album bottles their live intensity, recorded and mixed by Ainsworth and mastered by Alan Douches of West West Side Music. While it sounds like a comeback, Harold sees it differently.
“It’s not so much that it was time to come back, as it was that we took forever,” Harold said. “We started recording ‘Blood Hymns’ at the end of 2018 … life got in the way, and then lockdowns happened. After that, it was a lot of time dialing everything in. It hit a point where we knew we needed to release it no matter what.”
Harold explained the record isn’t the result of a sudden spark of inspiration. The band needed time to integrate their evolving views on the world and themselves into their songs, creating a record that reflects who they’ve become.
“[The album] is about half and half personal and external,” Harold said. “A lot happened within the lives of everyone in [Drag Me Under]. We also watched the political and social landscape change almost overnight, and that was before the pandemic.”
“While we were dealing with our own personal lives, we had to watch people we knew, sometimes people we knew well, support an absolutely terrible president who did nothing but sow bigotry and distrust, continuing to do so now,” Harold said. “I think that really influenced a lot of the lyrics.”
Beyond that, the lyrics revolve around the importance of not allowing society to dictate or sculpt a person into inhumanity in the face of injustice.
The songs also speak to indescribable feelings of grief, loss and the unraveling of oneself in the face of a person’s deterioration. In a June 2025 interview with IDIOTEQ, Harold discussed how “Black Moth” is tied to the loss of his parents.
“This is probably the most personal song on the record,” Harold said. “When we started writing, I had already lost my mother, and I was thinking of her slow decline while writing the lyrics. By the time “Blood Hymns” was finished, I had lost my father. For me, it’s a look into the future.”
Their title track, “Blood Hymns,” is also a commentary on the DIY scene.
“These places feel almost separate from the outside world,” Harold said in an interview with IDIOTEQ. “Everyone that goes to these basements, or warehouses, or even more, put together DIY spots, are visiting something special.”
At the band's show at The Holland Project in Nov. 2025, the crowd sang along and thrashed, as the band’s songs rang throughout the venue. Ainsworth’s impassioned headbanging, paired with Harold’s piercing voice and Dickson and Sutton’s steady chaos, cemented them into the minds of the showgoers.
Drag Me Under first thrived on sheer adrenaline, instinct and catharsis. Today, the band still harnesses that energy, but they channel it with a precision that comes from a decade of experience.
“We’ve become a bit more intentional with everything,” Harold explained. “We really put a lot of thought into song structure and how the album flows.”
The result is a tightly constructed, gritty album, packed with danceable songs that still manage to carry significant emotional weight.
After listening to the album, Harold wants one thing for listeners: “I hope they feel like they got punched in the face for 28 minutes straight.”
Every band has a song on each record that hits harder for them than any other. For Harold, that track on “Blood Hymns” is “Old Lions.”
“It has lyrics and phrasing I’m proud of, and music that’s on point the whole time. I’m pretty sure we all had input on every piece of that song.”
In an endeavour to capture an uncontrollable grip on past failures, “Old Lions” reflects on the consequences of becoming trapped by past failures.
“This song is about being overwhelmed from looking back for too long,” Harold said. “We’re unable to escape the past, deep down we all know this, but we still do it … If we look back for too long, we’ll crush what we have now and sabotage things we may be working towards in the future.”
For Reno’s heavy metal community, Drag Me Under’s return with “Blood Hymns” is a reminder of the strength of local music scenes, of what can survive years of change, and of how loud, cathartic and necessary music still is. To Harold, the band represents two things.
“We like to party, and we love. But we also have strong opinions about the world around us and what’s going on within us. The former is shown by some of those riffs, grooves, and beats. The latter is shown in our lyrics, and what we talk about on stage.”
Their values surface in the music’s eccentric riffs and penetrating vocals, in Pat’s relentless drumming, and in a stage presence built on energy, honesty and genuine connection with the audience. After a decade, the band’s release proves that their music has matured without losing its iconic, heavy sound.
Drag Me Under can be found on Instagram, where they regularly post their upcoming shows. “Blood Hymns” is available on Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music.
Edited by Malory Shaw
