MajorBoom

Rex Vale grew up in the industrial outskirts of Melbourne, Australia, surrounded by factory noise, late-night radio and a constant diet of alternative metal. As a teenager, he discovered that screaming into a cheap microphone was a better outlet than keeping everything bottled up.

His voice became MajorBoom's defining weapon: low melodic passages that can suddenly erupt into brutal screams and distorted vocal attacks. Rex writes heavily about anger, isolation, manipulation, failure and the pressure of pretending everything is fine.

Away from the stage, Rex is surprisingly reserved. He rarely talks between songs and prefers to let the lyrics explain what he is thinking. Onstage, that disappears completely.

Nyx Raven was raised in Sydney, Australia, and originally trained as a clean vocalist rather than a metal singer. Her early influences ranged from dark alternative rock and electronic music to cinematic and classical vocal arrangements.

She joined MajorBoom after Rex heard a rough recording of her singing over one of the band's unfinished instrumentals. Her haunting voice against MajorBoom's crushing guitars completely changed the track - and ultimately changed the band.

Nyx isn't simply the female voice beside Rex. She can carry entire songs, moving between intimate whispers, powerful clean vocals and aggressive distorted passages. The contrast between Rex and Nyx has become one of MajorBoom's signatures.

Jax Storm grew up in Newcastle, New South Wales, surrounded by heavy industry and a thriving pub-rock scene. He learned guitar on a battered second-hand instrument and spent years playing everything from hard rock to metal before becoming obsessed with creating sounds that barely resembled a conventional guitar.

Jax doesn't believe every song needs a traditional guitar solo. He'd rather build grinding riffs, dissonant harmonics, feedback, strange effects and enormous walls of distortion.

He and Z3RO regularly destroy and rebuild each other's sounds in the studio - Z3RO processing Jax's guitars electronically while Jax turns Z3RO's synthetic noises into riffs.

Kai Draven was born in Auckland, New Zealand, before moving to Australia in his twenties. His musical background started far away from metal, with funk, reggae and bass-heavy electronic music.

That history gives MajorBoom's rhythm section a different character. Rather than simply following the guitars, Kai's bass often becomes another lead instrument - huge distorted bass lines weaving underneath the riffs.

Kai is also one of the band's stabilising personalities. When studio arguments become heated, he's usually the person sitting quietly in the corner until everyone has finished before delivering the sentence that gets the session moving again.

Volt Ash is an African-American drummer from Chicago, Illinois, whose musical education began behind a drum kit long before he discovered metal. Growing up around gospel, hip-hop, funk and rock gave him a rhythmic vocabulary very different from the musicians he would eventually join.

After years playing sessions and touring with heavier acts, Volt relocated to Australia and eventually crossed paths with MajorBoom.

His playing combines crushing acoustic drums with syncopated grooves and electronic percussion. Instead of simply keeping time behind the band, Volt and Z3RO build much of MajorBoom's rhythmic identity together.

Despite being an intimidating presence behind the kit, Volt is one of the most easygoing members of the group.

Nobody in MajorBoom calls him by his real name anymore.

Known simply as Z3RO, he came from the underground electronic scene in Berlin, Germany, producing industrial music, drum & bass and experimental electronic tracks before becoming interested in the destructive possibilities of combining electronic production with live metal.

He initially worked with MajorBoom as a producer. One track became three. Three became an album. Eventually the band stopped pretending he wasn't a member.

Z3RO manipulates samples, synths, programmed drums, vocal fragments, glitches and live instrumentation. During performances he can sample something the band has just played, destroy it digitally and throw the transformed version back into the song seconds later.

He's also responsible for much of the strange ambience between MajorBoom tracks - the static, transmissions, corrupted voices and mechanical noise that make their albums feel interconnected.