TE REO AND TREMOLO: ALIEN WEAPONRY ARE COMING TO TAKE YOUR COMFORTABLE IDEAS ABOUT METAL AND BURY THEM!!!
TE REO AND TREMOLO: ALIEN WEAPONRY ARE COMING TO TAKE YOUR COMFORTABLE IDEAS ABOUT METAL AND BURY THEM
There's a version of this story that gets told a lot in music press — three kids from a small country, unlikely rise, international stages, heartwarming. That version is boring, and it misses the point entirely.
Alien Weaponry — brothers Henry and Lewis de Jong on guitars and vocals, alongside drummer Ethan Trembath — are a heavy metal band from Waipu, Northland, New Zealand. They are also something harder to categorise and more interesting to reckon with: a living argument that the colonised world has stories worth screaming, in languages that empires spent centuries trying to silence.
Their music is built on riffs that sit somewhere in the brutal intersection of thrash and groove metal, but what makes it genuinely unlike anything else in the current heavy landscape is the presence of Te Reo Māori — a vulnerable, ancient, fiercely alive language — woven into the rhythmic DNA of every track. This isn't cultural seasoning. It isn't branding. It runs through the albums, the artwork, the videos, the mythology they draw from. When they sing about taniwha, about Hatupatu, about the stories passed down through their whānau, they are doing something metal has always claimed to do but rarely actually delivers: telling the truth about where they come from.They've shared stages across the world. They've collaborated with Lamb of God's Randy Blythe on a track about a shape-shifting water monster. And now they're headed to Australia as direct support for Anthrax — one of the genre's foundational acts — bringing their weight, their history, and their riffs to rooms full of people who may have no idea what's about to hit them.
We caught up with the band ahead of the tour to talk cultural survival, the Blythe collab, what a 40-year career actually teaches you, and what it means to carry something genuinely sacred into the global metal machine.
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