Primer is The A.V. Club‘s ongoing series of beginners’ guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you.
It starts, inevitably, with the name. When you talk about the band Murder By Death to people who aren’t familiar with them, there’s an immediate hand-wringing, a self-conscious “no, wait, don’t dismiss them, they’re not likethat, I’m not like that” apologia, followed by a sense that you’ve already lost before you started speaking, because it is nearly impossible to describe what they actually are, and because they are, in some ways, like that, and you are also a little bit like that, and defending the things we love always seems to bring out the worst in us.
It ended, too, with the name. “We weren’t covered much in the press, we never had a song that had a lot of radio play, nothing ever went viral, we didn’t have a big social media presence, we never played a good festival spot where there was a sea of people in the audience, not once opened an arena or even a big shell auditorium show or tour. We constantly lost opportunities because of the band name and were somehow always treated like nobodies or yesterday’s news by most of the industry. But you, you gosh dang wonderful audience, managed to keep us growing, and we never had a career slump,”frontman Adam Turla wroteearlier this year in a note announcing the band’s final tour. After 25 years and 10 original full-length albums—plus a Christmas album, four cover albums, and a smattering of EPs, including an instrumental soundtrack toJeff VanderMeer‘s novelFinch—Murder By Death was saying goodbye.
Even though it’s been expressedmanytimes before, we do, unfortunately, have to address it again, if only so we can finally put it to rest: The name “Murder By Death” conjures images of a cheesy metal band trying to shock audiences—that’s the “they’re not like that” part of the caveat. The “I’m not like that” part—that’s more, “I’m not about to monologue at you about ironic post-modern commentaries on violence in media or whatever nightmarish direction you think this conversation is going in.” Sometimes you’ll get lucky, find a film buff who recognizes the name for what it is: a reference to Robert Moore’s 1976 mystery comedy film of the same name. And Murder By Death, the band, is, at least a little, like Murder By Death, the movie: referential and reverential, sometimes a little schlocky in a fun way, with a particular knack for crafting a narrative and telling a story. Fans, when we’re trying to convert new listeners, won’t take a hard left turn into “I’m a covert edgelord, surprise!” territory, but we will approach the conversation with a zeal that some might find suspiciously devotional.
But all of this is a distraction. Fans have spent—I have spent—so much time explaining what Murder By Death is not because defining what they are is by far the more difficult task. Jason Heller‘s succinct “gothic Americana” summary is pretty good, as is this Reddit commentthat describes them as “hard-driving, Clint Eastwood-western rock for werewolves,” andthis quotefrom a PureVolume page that no longer seems to exist that calls them “…the sonic equivalent of No Country For Old Men.” You’ll often hear Turla’s vocals compared to Johnny Cash, and it’s true that both men share a rough-edged baritone that adds color and character to their songs about down-on-their-luck Old West outlaw types. The band is probably most commonly lumped into the alternative country genre, given some of their lyrical themes and their occasional incorporation of resonator guitar, and that, too, isn’t totally inaccurate. But it doesn’t account for cellist Sarah Balliet’s haunting string work or the ghostly romance ballads that pop up just as often as the tracks about desperate men on the run. As Turla identified in his goodbye letter, “This band has always been a jumble of contradictions.” They were, are, and will remain a one-of-one.
Before Murder By Death announced their retirement, the best way to understand what makes them special was to go to one of their concerts cold, with no background and no expectations, and let their singular sound and the passion of the crowd win you over. (This happened, for me, when they opened for The Gaslight Anthem at a show at Terminal 5 in New York circa 2009.) You might’ve even been lucky enough to hear them indulge their joyous, goofy side, a key component of what makes their concerts so fun, and play the fan-favorite one-off song “Pizza Party! (At Gloria Estefan’s House).” But since the opportunity to do that is rapidly dwindling as MBD works their way through their final tour (though they do plan on reuniting once a year for their beloved “cave shows” at The Caverns in Tennessee), and because, unfair as it is, they have so often been defined by what they are not, the band is long overdue for a celebration of what they are; an attempt to reconcile the two seemingly disparate halves of their work (the cowboy songs and the haunted romance songs) and explain why now, at the end, after they’ve recorded their final song, is a fitting time to dive into their music for the first time. This is a eulogy; a re-evaluation after their time is up;a procession for the thief. It’s time for all of us to set aside our misconceptions and come around on Murder By Death.
Part 1: Who Will Survive?
“I almost think of it as a series of novels,” Turla said about Murder By Death’s albums in an interview withFLOOD magazine in 2022. That’s especially true of the first four: Like The Exorcist, But More Breakdancing (2002), Who Will Survive, And What Will Be Left Of Them? (2003), In Bocca Al Lupo (2006), and Red Of Tooth And Claw (2008).
Like The Exorcist is all table-setting; it’s not quite as narratively driven as the following three (which are all concept albums), but it sets the mood for what’s to come. Murder By Death recorded it when Turla and Balliet were still in college, which might explain the abundance of pop culture references, from the band’s name to the title of the album and songs like “I’m Afraid Of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and “Holy Lord, Shawshank Redemption Is Such A Good Movie!” But the instrumental opener, “Those Who Stayed,” is an exceptionally strong thesis statement for the band. It starts with Balliet’s sparse cello before she’s joined by Turla’s creeping guitar and drummer Alex Schrodt’s percussion before it devolves into an otherworldly screeching courtesy of Matt Armstrong playing his bass with a glass slide (or, at least, that’s how the band used to pull it off live; how they achieved it in the studio might be a different story). It’s the sound of the apocalypse filtered through the lens of The X-Files;Cowboys & Aliens but if it was good instead of shit. Cracks forming in the desert, some unknown horror bearing down on you from the horizon. Back when they had a full-time keyboard player (Vincent Edwards, who left the band in 2004), Murder By Death used to play it live back-to-back with the album’s other instrumental song, the eight-minute “Those Who Left,” which has a similar vibe to “Those Who Stayed” until the seven-minute mark, when Turla starts screaming as if he’s being boiled alive. They called it the “Medley Of Evil,” and, holy lord, forget The Shawshank Redemption—that is such a good name.
That theme of people staying and leaving, whether by choice or not, is something the band revisits throughout their discography, but it ties immediately into their sophomore album, Who Will Survive, And What Will Be Left Of Them? (That’s another reference, this time to the tagline of the 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre.) Who Will Survive is the band’s first proper concept album, and the one perhaps most beloved by fans. It’s not hard to see why: This is Turla at the peak of his storytelling abilities. It’s about the devil getting shot in a small Mexican border town and the ensuing zombie apocalypse he rains down upon the earth. (Consequently, this is also the easiest album to sell new fans on, because that story sounds awesome no matter who you are or what you’re into.) The imagery is evocative and specific; on the opening track, “The Devil In Mexico,” which features backing vocals from My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way, Turla sings, “Black heart leaking oil in the pan / Dealing insults with his free hand / In this hospital bed bleeding.” On the very next song, “Killbot 2000,” featuring Thursday’s Geoff Rickley, the world has gone to hell with stunning expediency; already, the zombies are attacking children. “Carry their little bodies to the cemetery ever so gently / Please don’t let their necks crook towards the ground,” Turla sings. The album ends just before the final showdown between the devil and his original attacker; the shooter’s fate remains unknown.
In comparison to Who Will Survive, In Bocca Al Lupo is a collection of short stories. “While the last record is one long story, the new record is 12 different stories, all about sin, redemption, and guilt. Think of them like short stories in one anthology, each about a different character who has either committed acts that have harmed other people or are part of a bigger story where something like that has happened,” Turla explained. This is Murder By Death in peak antihero cowboy mode; standout track “Brother” centers on a man covering up for his fugitive brother, and “Shiola” (a word Turla invented to “express a feeling that you can’t really understand,” as he told Songwriters On Process) is about a man whose family is dead, perhaps by his own hand. Whatever happened, it’s not good. “Shiola, will all be forgiven? / Shiola, am I strong enough to start again alone?” he sings. There’s another line, too, that ends up being a prescient preview of the band’s late-career albums: “Is it wrong to love a family of ghosts?” the narrator of the song asks.
Red Of Tooth And Claw is the first album to feature current drummer Dagan Thogerson after Schrodt left the band, and it functions as a prequel to Who Will Survive, And What Will Be Left Of Them? This is the story of a man on the run with nothing to lose. There is unspecified trouble with the law (the opening track, “Comin’ Home,” one of the band’s best songs), arson (“Ash”), and stabbings (“’52 Ford,” “Spring Break 1899”). There’s also what might be the band’s first true romance song, “Fuego!,” a sizzling, simmering smoker about the intoxicating pull of a dangerous lover.
Together, Like The Exorcist, But More Breakdancing, Who Will Survive, And What Will Be Left Of Them?, In Bocca Al Lupo, and Red Of Tooth And Claw define Murder By Death’s early years—they’re albums about men stuck between a rock and a hard place, usually due to their own actions. These are men who aren’t expecting to survive the final shootout. But even though there’s only one more true concept album in the band’s oeuvre (The Other Shore, still several years and several albums down the line), I’d argue that the rest of the band’s catalog does still have an overarching theme: What if these men did survive? And what would happen, what would their lives look like, if they kept on living after they thought they were supposed to die?
Part 2: And…
The transition into the aftermath comes on the band’s fifth album, Good Morning, Magpie(2010). Turla wrote the majority of it while on a two-week solo camping trip in the Smoky Mountains, and he made a conscious choice to move away from the concept albums that had defined the earlier era of the band. “We try not to get stale about ideas. I don’t want to be known for only doing concept albums, so instead I just try to write good songs,” he told Spinner. This is also the first MBD record to feature multi-instrumentalist Scott Bracket.
The first two songs fit thematically with the band’s first four albums: “Kentucky Bourbon” is a quick ditty about the superiority of bourbon from Kentucky, and “As Long As There Is Whiskey In The World” is a joyous singalong ode to alcohol. “I think we’re a drinking band—we drink a lot, our audience drinks a lot, and I don’t want to put out a record that doesn’t have one drinking song,” Turla toldThe Washington Post. Still, as Turla pointed out to Spinner, though some of the themes are familiar, the tone is different than anything they’d done before: “This album has a couple songs that are more positive, so it’s pretty cool because they still sound like Murder by Death songs and the lyrics are still somewhat dark but kind of a little more fun.”
But things take a turn on the album’s fifth track, “Piece By Piece,” which is a haunted warning from an older man to a younger one. Turla told Alternative Press, “I wanted to do a song from the perspective of someone older. This is our tenth year as a band, and I often think about how different our perspective was when we were kids starting a rock band…That’s what this song is—it’s basically an old S.O.B. wishing he was younger, but at the same time having a much better understanding of life than he did when he was younger.” This is the turning point where the hard-living cowboy has to reckon with being the one who survived, even though he never meant to. Even though he might not—almost certainly doesn’t, if he’s being honest with himself, thoughts he tries to block out by finding absolution in the bottom of a whiskey bottle—deserve it. And then, on “Yes,” an even older man, who finally achieved some semblance of peace and wisdom: “Yes, everyone comes and goes / White in the head, before we know / Set things right before you go / Let the people you love know,” Turla sings.
Turla described the next track, “Foxglove,” to Alternative Press as “the closest thing to a love song we’ve had. It’s about a ghostly lady visitor in the night.” It is, in essence, a love song about a ghost. But it’s also about loneliness: “Like I’ve said, I was damn lonely [on my camping trip]. I pined for contact with other people,” he explained. Much of Murder By Death’s early work was about men lamenting their relationships with women, whether they had to leave them behind or were struggling to return to them or just using them and then moving on. After what should have been the end for these characters, it makes sense that they’d want to seek out that kind of companionship again—but, after what they’ve been through, their experiences with romance, or life in general, were never going to be typical.
Part 3: What Will Be Left Of Them?
That leads into the band’s final five albums: Bitter Drink, Bitter Moon (2012), Big Dark Love (2015), The Other Shore (2018), Spell/Bound (2022), andEgg & Dart (2025). These are the ones that contemplate the after—not only the afterlife, but when you find yourself at a point beyond which you could have ever reasonably seen yourself still being alive, whether that’s because of some sudden, unimaginable event, or because you just assumed you’d never actually make it to old age.
Bitter Drink, Bitter Moon is the first album where Murder By Death goes all-in on ghosts and romance. In “My Hill,” the narrator laments the changes to a hill on his family’s farm, as a parking lot and a shopping center encroach on the land, and he and his lover watch from a distance. Eventually, we learn that the narrator is dead and buried beneath the hill, his lover long gone, too. It’s not quite a family of ghosts, but it’s close. And it’s easy to imagine the narrator of the next track, “Lost River,” as a warped-mirror version of the narrator of Red Of Tooth And Claw. If the guy from ROTAC were more calculating, if he could see a future for himself beyond what’s immediately in front of him, you could picture him drowning in a river and his spirit trying to drag his lover down with him so they could be together forever. (Though I’m gone, don’t be afraid / We’ll meet again on the river someday / The croak of the frogs will lead you true / Wear a skirt of greenstone, so I know it’s you / Wear a skirt of greenstone to drag you to the blue,” Turla sings on “Lost River.”) It’s the sort of twisted logic that might make sense to a man who lived a life of desperation and violence. The rest of the album is full of similarly haunting stories that deal with the inevitability of death and the difficulty of letting the ones we love go.
Big Dark Love, as the title implies, deals with the vastness of love as a feeling, and not always knowing what to do with such an overwhelming and powerful emotion. Here, David Fountain replaced Bracket as the band’s multi-instrumentalist. It is the band’s most stylistically experimental record; the songs are more atmospheric and less dense lyrically, with many of them employing nontraditional structures. “I think a lot of people associate us with storytelling and with this record the key word was brevity. I didn’t want to have long-form stories. I wanted them to be more open-ended and more vague,” Turla told Do LA. But the band’s common themes still shine through. On “Strange Eyes,” Turla sings, “I cannot hide / Lord I have tried / You give me no reprieve / No chance to fight.” It’s the sound of a person fighting with themself, trying to deny a love they don’t think they deserve.
If Who Will Survive, And What Will Be Left Of Them? is Murder By Death’s cowboy apocalypse opera, The Other Shore is their space cowboy apocalypse opera. This is the band’s first album with their current bassist, Tyler Morse. Press materials described it as “a space-western about a ravaged Earth, its fleeing populace, and a relationship in jeopardy.” It is, perhaps even more than Who Will Survive, about those who stayed and those who left. The opening track, “Alas,” sets up that dividing line: “I need to stay but alas I must go,” Turla sings. The narrator has decided to evacuate the Earth and escape into space, leaving behind their stubborn partner who doesn’t want to go. On “Stone,” the person left behind reflects, “My will is iron, I know / That I haven’t learned a thing / From the trouble it’s got me in / And my troubles are just starting to begin.” Here, finally, is the antihero romance merger: The archetypical character from the band’s first four albums learns to stop running, stop fighting, and leave their past behind—literally. Sometime after their lover has already fled, they leave Earth, too, and after four years of space travel, the couple reunites in a distant world. The barrier between those who stayed and those who left crumbles into dust.
“It’s an album of our times, the fragile country we live in, and the emotions that come with the weight of the world,” Turla told FLOOD about Murder By Death’s ninth album, Spell/Bound. (This is the band’s first album to feature violinist Emma Tiemann.) Turla is right that modern politics creep into this album more than any of the band’s others, but there’s still a characteristic spooky, gothic reckoning tied up in it, too. On “Incantation,” he sings, “You, you, I name you / A crawling doubt / May you turn to bone meal / I cast thee out.” It’s a purification spell, a rejection of evil spirits. It’s easy to map that onto the current state of the world, but it’s also reminiscent of a religious exorcism, or the kind of fire-and-brimstone preaching that permeated the Old West. The kind of judgment an outlaw might be running from. “Everything Must Rest,” in contrast, is one of the band’s sweetest, most heartbreaking songs, without any caveats; just a person struggling to say goodbye to the person they love.
And then, finally, the goodbye album: Egg & Dart. “The album is basically an elegy,” Turla said in a press release. “The songs are about goodbyes and the different ways we think about that concept.” It’s a goodbye to fans, but it’s also a fitting conclusion to the story the band has been telling their whole career. The narrator of the opening track, “Searcher,” opines, “What I hid from myself, hurt me and hurt you / A spell of protection that split us in two / Now all that’s replaced with one burning truth / I burn for you.” That’s not just a man who has suppressed his past and carved out a new life for himself even though he’s still haunted by the things he’s done; that’s a man who’s learned to live with what he’s done and accept that he still deserves to be loved. That’s a man who has survived, and this is what’s left of him. It’s the story of a whole life, told across ten albums. That’s why it’s still a good time to get into Murder By Death, even though they won’t be making new music any longer: Because the story is finally complete, and it’s gorgeous. We oughta give them their dues for goin’ out like that.
