Shattered Shadows

The tracks on Shattered Shadows came together because I kept hitting the same wall: how do you make string instruments actually compete in metal without burying them or turning them into decoration? The answer was to stop thinking of violin, shamisen, and guzheng as guests in a metal song. They're co-leads. Soul King does this best—the shamisen doesn't play under the riff, it trades volleys with distorted guitar like they're having an argument. Same with Shamisen Terror, where that plucked Japanese tradition gets fed through the kind of aggression usually reserved for six-string shredding.

“I also leaned into the physicality of the performances—real pizzicato snap, real tremolo bow work, tremolo picking on electric guitar.”

What ties these pieces together is modal thinking and space. Metal's already about tension and release; Eastern string instruments naturally exist in pentatonic and modal spaces that sit weird and right against power chords. Violin Egoist stacks guzheng textures underneath searing leads, and the two instruments occupy different frequency registers so neither one drowns out the tremolo-picked guitars underneath. I also leaned into the physicality of the performances—real pizzicato snap, real tremolo bow work, tremolo picking on electric guitar. No samples pretending to be live.

The collection swings between moments that feel almost orchestral (Moonlit Sakura with its Celtic progressions and propulsive drums) and straight-ahead brutality (the two Metal Power Hour entries that just layer virtuosity on top of crushing riffs). Christmas Violin Rock is the outlier that somehow works. You get folk melody recognition, but played at metal velocity, and the Eastern strings give it a color that doesn't exist on any traditional holiday recording. Listen to how the guzheng sits in the mix—it's present, rhythmic, genuinely strange against what your brain expects from a Christmas song.

Shattered Shadows is instrumental metal that actually wants its string voices heard.