And the World Turns Around
The Making of Kylesa’s Static Tensions
By the time Kylesa released Static Tensions in the spring of 2009, their native Georgia had established itself as a hotbed of sludgy, but fundamentally forward-thinking American metal. Mastodon, from Atlanta, were the standard-bearers: a white-hot ball of energy that had managed to channel their inborn wildness into a series of increasingly progressive albums. Baroness, from Kylesa’s hometown of Savannah, had released Red Album, the first entry in their genre-exploding color wheel suite, and they would soon one-up it with Blue Record. Their frontman, John Dyer Baizley, had become metal’s go-to cover artist. Black Tusk and Zoroaster were blowing out PAs all over the country, and Whores were just about to launch. These were heady times in the Land of the Peach.
Kylesa were veterans of that scene, but their pedigree also predated it. Guitarist and vocalist Phillip Cope was a founder of crust/sludge miscreants Damad, who had formed in Savannah way back in 1993. Laura Pleasants, the other half of the two-headed dragon at the front of the Kylesa stage, met Cope at a Damad show when she was still in high school. (He was wearing a Black Sabbath shirt; she was wearing a Black Sabbath shirt; she said, “Hey, nice Black Sabbath shirt!”) Drummer Carl McGinley also played in Unpersons, a doggedly underground Savannah doom outfit that had started gigging in the late ’90s. Kylesa were even early to the punch among their own microgeneration: The band’s self-titled debut beat Mastodon’s Remission to record store shelves by a month.
Static Tensions was Kylesa’s fourth full-length, and it found the band molding the raw clay of their musical backgrounds and diverse tastes into something truly dazzling. Its immediate predecessor, 2006’s Time Will Fuse Its Worth, had introduced the band’s novel dual-drummer configuration, but on Static Tensions, they took that idea much further. Eric Hernandez joined the fold on drums, providing dexterous, almost tribal-sounding flourishes as a counterweight to the metronomic timekeeping of his co-drummer McGinley. (In a canny piece of record producing, the Static Tensions mix hard-panned the two drum kits, so what each player is doing is isolated on each channel.) Javier Villegas, best known for his work with the pioneering NYC punks Born Against, stepped in on bass. By combining their keen ear for melody, their progressive tendencies, hardcore aggression, crust-punk nastiness and psychedelic scope, Kylesa came up with one of the defining releases of the “Southern sludge” era. In 2025, after a near-decade hiatus, the band is on the road again, playing a setlist drawn primarily from the album.
In his 2009 review of Static Tensions for Pitchfork, Decibel contributor Cosmo Lee wrote, “If the world were just, Kylesa would be a household name.” We agree. Let’s call inducting Static Tensions into our hallowed Hall of Fame a good start.
Need more classic Kylesa? To read the entire seven-page story, featuring interviews with all three members who performed on Static Tension, purchase the print issue from our store, or digitally via our app for iPhone/iPad or Android.
