The Violent Hour Announce Debut Album, Share Lead Single “Already Dead”

The Violent Hour, the duo of Carla Harvey and Charlie Benante, will release its debut album, Pretty Girls Do Ugly Things, on January 22. The announcement arrives with “Already Dead” as the lead single, accompanied by a music video.

The pairing is unusual on paper. Harvey came up in Lords of Acid and, until recently, Butcher Babies; Benante is the Anthrax drummer who has also played with Pantera. “Already Dead” shows where the two meet: a thrash metal tonality pushed by a bouncy, swinging rock groove that owes more to Southern rock than to standard heavy metal, with Harvey’s vocal clean and anthemic rather than gruff.

She frames the song as a lesson in exhaustion. “‘Already Dead’ is about reaching a point where someone has put you through so much that they can’t hurt you anymore,” she said. “There’s nothing left for them to take, and that can become its own kind of power.”

The album’s title carries a similar argument. “‘Pretty Girls Do Ugly Things’ isn’t just about girl power women behaving badly,” Harvey said. “It’s almost the thesis for the whole record: good people can do ugly things, beautiful things can come from ugly places, and sometimes you have to get a little ugly to survive.”

Benante writes and records the music but is not part of the touring lineup; Harvey performs backed by an all-female band. Four of the album’s eleven tracks first appeared on the project’s self-titled five-song EP, which makes the debut part consolidation, part new statement.