The band channels genre legends like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Waylon Jennings while nodding to modern torchbearers like Blackberry Smoke and The Steel Woods. It can do heartbreak just as well as a tongue-in-cheek drinking song. Everything you’d ask for in the genre — choral singers, ripping guitars, and a twang that comes from a real place — is all there in The Filthy Heathens.
Plenty of bands claim a high energy show. The Filthy Heathens actually do — bordering on the theatrical when it fits, dialing it back when it doesn’t. If there aren’t beers on stage and at least one shirtless man up there, you might be at the wrong show.
“We’re just living inside of each song individually,” Hetzer said. “I think that the audience can feel that when you’re just really living in it.”
Hetzer’s raspy vocals suggest hard years on the road, but can still gently deliver when he wants to — like a clean amp that only breaks up when you dig in. Both timbres can be heard on “Devils Like Me,” a single from the new album.
“Etheridge” was produced by Patrick Himes at Reel Love Recording Company in Dayton. The seven-song EP sounds huge, as many of the albums that come out of there do. Hetzer jokes “a lot of Miller Lites died in that studio.”
The album’s title derives from the name of Hetzer’s late friend and favorite songwriting partner, Etheridge Wilson, a Dayton area musician who died earlier this year. He helped break Hetzer out of the songwriting rut, one where you can’t talk about this or use that chord within the limited three-minute pop-song structure. He also encouraged him to focus on his own songs, as opposed to singing somebody else’s.
“He kind of opened my eyes to the idea that you could even be a musician for a living,” Hetzer said. “He was a guy who was like a second father to me. He was always very open, too. He said, ‘you should be writing whatever the hell you want to write,’ and so he was a huge influence on anything musical that’s ever come out of me.”
Before Etheridge’s passing, Hetzer was able to let him know that The Filthy Heathens’ first album was going to be named after him.
“He just smiled at me. He didn’t really say anything,” Hetzer said. “But I knew when he smiled at me like that, he understood.”
The two of them co-wrote many of the songs on the debut EP. The band is looking to cut a full length by the end of the year.
The single “Cyril” is sung from the perspective of a soldier coming home from service. Suffering from PTSD, he eventually takes his own life. The lyrics are based on Hetzer’s friend, Cyril “Rocky” Rockwell, who happened to be in the same Army division as the Filthy Heathens’ guitarist, Cody Doench. Doench personally knows several veterans who have lost their battle with PTSD, too.
“Cyril” is The Filthy Heathens’ at its most devastating. On the other end of the spectrum is “Always at the Bar,” a tongue-in-cheek drinking anthem. Then again, upon another listen, it’s possible all of the songs are heartbreaking under the guise of gritty Southern rock ballads.
Last year, The Filthy Heathens released a collaboration beer with Devil Wind Brewing in Xenia. The light beer, aptly named The Filthy Pilsner, is said to be like Miller Lite with a perm and a good mustache.
There’s that party side.
Since then, the band has left town and hit the road, playing the festival circuit and amassing ten times the listeners just a month after the EP dropped. The boys are becoming road-tested warriors, and Hetzer is finally growing into that raw and raspy voice.
“We’ve had cars repoed, lost our jobs, everything else trying to make this thing work,” Hetzer said. “You don’t go through that to play at the bar up the road.”
Brandon Berry writes about the Dayton and Southwest Ohio music and art scene. Have a story idea for him? Email branberry100@gmail.com.
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The Filthy Heathens’ debut EP “Etheridge” and new single “Cyril” are streaming everywhere.
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