Death by death metal

Do you love Spinal Tap but just wish they were approximately 10,000 times more metal? Who doesn’t, really? Lucky for you, Brendon Small, the co-creator, writer and star of Home Movies, and Tommy Blacha, a former staff writer on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Da Ali G Show and TV Funhouse, teamed up with Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim to create Metalocalypse, the metal-est show ever made. As in metal the likes of which will melt your distinctively less metal face right off.

This is courtesy of Dethklok, the biggest, darkest, evilest musical group in the world—three Americans (singer Nathan Explosion, bassist William Murderface and drummer Pickles) and two Scandinavians (guitarists Skwisgaar Skwigelf and Toki Wartooth), all voiced by Small and Blacha and none exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer. But as the real world has shown us time and again, being smart and being famous don’t always go together.

Over the course of 20 11-minute episodes, the band engages in all manner of wacky misadventures. In this first season, Dethklok records the most metal album ever inside a Russian nuclear submarine at the bottom of the Mariana Trench (the darkest place on Earth, natch), and contends with embezzling staff and a sinister conspiracy, not to mention variously successful attempts at stand-up comedy, charity work and even a Fan Appreciation Day—all with hilariously homicidal results.

Crappy Flash animation notwithstanding, the band can really shred (Small graduated from the Berklee College of Music); the real highlight of the program is that every episode contains an authentically constructed death metal tune. So, don’t forget also to pick up The Dethalbum, a CD featuring the full-length versions of most of this season’s Metalocalypse masterpieces.