DRUIDESS

If you live in Montreal, I can say with utmost certainty you have heard of Druidess. This Montreal-based grunge band is famous for their slow churning tone and romantically dark vocals inspired by Type-O Negative. The band is a quartet, with vocalist Ryan, guitarist Massimo, bassist Zach, and drummer Morgan (who unfortunately could not be present for the interview). I sat down with them for an interview on September 18th, 2024 in their recording studio located just off Atwater. The band had been recording their second album, just wrapping up a take on the drums as I walked up.

After introductions were made, I began with simple questions about the background of Druidess. “Me and Massimo met at a jam space a while back”, Ryan tells me, “eventually, we clicked, and went to a couple local shows. That sparked us wanting to make music together”. Massimo tells me he had met Morgan, who they had seen play previously, and Zach through messaging them on Instagram, “he was our first choice, and we got him”. Ryan had chosen the name by looking through Type-O Negative songs, eventually stumbling upon “Be My Druidess”. He says, “It’s gothic, doom-esque” and decided it was perfect for the project which had been born out of a past band.

I ask the band about their marketing on Instagram. As I write this, Druidess has amassed over 18 000 followers with more followers pouring in by the day. Marketed as “90s nostalgia” online, the members say it doesn’t come close to describing their music. “It started with the 90s nostalgia grunge thing” according to Massimo, “then 200s, that’s what we actually grew up with”. In Ryan’s words, their marketing online is “nostalgia-bait”, which sparked Druidess’ first viral video, with about 10 million views. Druidess, however, has gotten a lot of backlash about the way they sell their music online with many seeing it as banal and cliche, but Ryan tells me “When you get people riled up, they respond. For every bad comment we equally get a new follower”. Morgan tells me, “Back in the day it was all luck” in terms of getting music out there, “back then, though, you had to be [phenomenal] or you wouldn’t succeed”. He claims today we are losing the ability to differentiate good music and bad with the rise of auto-tune and other electronic musical aids. 

Druidess goes on to discuss their inspirations. “This music would be nothing without the amalgamation of everything that came before it,” Ryan tells me. Massimo discusses how Type-O Negative will always be his biggest inspiration, “the tone, the gothicness, the etherealness, which is a big part of Druidess [now]. “I have never heard something so heavy, yet beautiful” a statement from Massimo that I believe truly sums up the band; Morgan says he was blown away when bought a CD from them.

On Druidess’ 2023 album, the Product of My Love, they received much hate about a song titled “I Don’t Know”, for its startling similarity to Nirvana’s Come As You Are. Morgan says “When I recorded the drums, I did it on purpose to make it sound like the original song”. Massimo tells me, “I was 16 or 17 when I wrote the song. I was fucking around playing Come As You Are on my guitar and I changed up a few notes. The whole intention was to rip off that song, but Nirvana themselves admitted to ripping off a riff from a band called "Killing Joke who had ripped it off another band”. Druidess tells me they hope another future band will continue this tradition of copying the riff.

In their upcoming album which is set to be released in 2025, Druidess tells me that it will be much more of a team effort, with all members of the band having some sort of contribution to it. “A lot of the material on the first album was me and Massimo’s previous work,” says Ryan, “it was just me and Massimo in the garage”. With 15 songs coming up on their new release, the music is a lot of collaboration, but also solo-written music. Ryan credits his lyric writing to a variety of philosophical influences like Nietzsche, Kafka, and Schopenhauer; “those themes of existentialism, longing, despair, not knowing your place in the world, and feeling like everything is a big nothing”. Yet with Morgan, he is more direct in his lyricism, “like I am writing to someone”. Massimo on the other hand, believes his writing should fit the music and how it works when a melody is played with it, but prefers storytelling.

Druidess has such an air around their music; themes of despair and mystery are riddled in a goth-romantic twist to create a beautiful sound. Keep your ears open in 2025 for the release of their new album, you won’t regret it.

By Kain Steele-Gaffney, 2024