Lots of underground black-metal bands shun media attention: they refuse to grant interviews, maintain no online presence, conceal their members’ names, and hide their faces in photos (or simply make no photos available). I’ve long assumed that these bands just don’t want press—that they’d rather not deal with an influx of gawkers and rubberneckers eager to slum it among musicians with titillating reputations for occultism, misanthropy, or worse.
Thoughtfulness characterizes everything about the face that False present to the public. Even when they discuss the ugliness and suffering behind their frenzied, cathartic music, their rhetoric is measured: “Though our love and respect for each other is very real and pertinent to our output, the source of what we write definitely very much comes from dark and ‘negative’ places,” they told Kelly. “Together we’re able to take those negative energies and make the experience an enormously positive one for all of us. . . . We certainly don’t play this form of music because we find the world and our surroundings satisfactory.”
