In the band practice room at his parents’ house in Parkland, Florida, Chained Saint guitarist Ethan Kahn sits in front of a wall of rock posters. There’s an image of Megadeth and covers of Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Metallica’s Ride the Lightning. The latter has special significance for Kahn. Among other things, it’s the record that first turned him on to thrash metal.
Right after he heard it, Kahn did a deep dive into the band’s catalog, as well as the music of the other Big Four bands Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax, as well as Testament and Exodus. The effect was profound. Kahn stopped playing open chord classic rock and turned his attention toward speedy, muted power chord riffs, unconventional rhythms and rapid-fire legato solos.
“There was just something about that form of music that I loved,” says Kahn, who formed Chained Saint in 2022 with three high school classmates. “There was an ‘it’ factor that drew me in like nothing I’d ever heard. I felt connected to it. It felt like it was my thing, and I thought, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
Kahn and his friends – vocalist Sean Sterling, bassist Sebastian de Avila and drummer Cameron Cottrell – altered their playing styles to accommodate their obsession with thrash. They formed a Metallica cover band but soon began analyzing the structures of their favorite bands to write their own riffs and songs.
Chained Saint’s first couple of originals didn’t make it out of the rehearsal room, but their third song, the nearly six-minute-long Neanderthal, was a winner. The tune starts with an insistent, mid-paced chug before, halfway through, bursting into a feral sprint of piercing riffs and a slashing lead.
“It was the first song we felt really happy about,” Kahn says. “We recorded a video of us playing it up until the fast part, and then we went to get Chipotle to take a little break. We listened to it in the car with the speakers blasting, and we were all smiling and super-proud.
“That was the first moment that we all, cooperatively and collectively, thought we wrote something unique and awesome to us. I think it was the first sign that we could do this in a big way.”
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Two years later, Chained Saint have released their debut album, Blindside, an homage to the speed, exhilaration and complexity of ’80s thrash and a validation that teens in the 2020s can play with the authenticity of bands whose biggest albums came out decades before their followers were born.
With precision riffs, ripping solos and an aggressive attack, Kahn sounds like he’s been playing since he was a little kid. Yet he didn’t touch a guitar until he found his older brother’s Stratocaster in a closet during the pandemic.
At the time, Kahn was playing piano at School of Rock, but he wasn’t feeling the instrument. He was much more impressed by the flashy licks of a then-18-year-old peer who rocked a Les Paul.
For that reason, when Kahn found the Strat he immediately plugged in and practiced tirelessly to learn rudimentary chords and basic riffs: his goal was to try to play some of the classic rock he grew up on.
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“I was taking all my classes online because of the pandemic, and I had to have my camera on when they taught us,” he says. “So I held my guitar out of the frame of the camera so my teachers wouldn’t see me, and I practiced for hours and hours. I just wanted to play all day.”
Once he’d developed enough as a player to up the ante, Kahn focused on learning high-gain power chords, rapid rhythms, complex signatures and scorching leads. After the pandemic ended, Kahn took a course in guitar at school, where he met Cottrell, who was already a skilled musician.
“The teacher of the class got up on the mic and said, ‘Hey, we got a drummer here,’” Kahn says. “I was just forming the band with the guys, and I was, like, ‘We need a drummer.’ I went to talk to him and noticed he was wearing a ‘Hammer of Justice’ Metallica cut-off, and I was like, ‘This is my guy.’ I knew he’d be the right fit and thankfully I was right.”
Much of Kahn’s guitar work, from his bruising riffs to his searing licks, was inspired by emulating his heroes. He even bought a Jackson Kelly after he found out Marty Friedman played one on Megadeth’s Rust in Peace.
“It sounded so good. When I got it, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can shred like crazy!’” he says. “The way Marty plays in different scales, not just pentatonic stuff, really stood out to me and inspired me.”
Kahn also gives props to Soulfly’s Max Cavalera, formerly of Sepultura, and Dream Theater’s John Petrucci. But his favorite player at the moment, and one who has inspired him to approach the guitar in a different way, is Rush’s Alex Lifeson.
“His tonality is so creative and spot-on,” Kahn says. “He can shred on songs like La Villa Strangiato, but he also showed me you can make the guitar sound so different than a lot of stuff I was listening to at the time. And there’s something about the scale he uses for solos that I love. I just call it the Alex Lifeson scale. I’ve been trying to replicate it forever.”
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Chained Saint spent six months writing songs together every day after school and honing their performance before they started looking for gigs. Since their local metal scene was dominated by metalcore and hardcore, they weren’t sure if they’d be accepted.
However, in late 2022, after a few shows, their youth, energy and heaviness won over the locals and the local bands. In turn, Chained Saint have been inspired by hardcore outfits including Sunami from the Bay Area and Drain from Santa Cruz, California.
“In the beginning, it was a little tough for people to find out about us because they all wanted to hear breakdowns and crazy screaming,” Kahn says.
“But we kept at it and we found our way in there and got accepted. There’s definitely a place for us in this scene and I love it. And now, some of the new stuff we’ve been working on is more hardcore and has breakdowns. That, mixed with the thrash stuff, sounds really cool.”
The first time Chained Saint felt they were starting to move beyond the local scene was in 2023, when a concert promoter invited them to drive to a town an hour south of Parkland to perform a showcase for local club owners in an echoey parking garage.
“We were like, ‘If we play great for these people, we’re going to make it,’” Kahn says. “The [promoter] who put on all these shows was there, and that felt like our first big break.”
Soon after, Kahn’s dad Peter Kahn, a longtime friend of Alice In Chains vocalist and guitarist William DuVall, asked his old pal for advice – providing Chained Saint with their biggest break to date.
Over the years, Kahn’s father had sent DuVall pictures of his son playing with School of Rock and jamming with friends, just to keep him updated. This time, he had a purpose. He wanted to get Duvall’s honest opinion on whether or not Chained Saint were good enough to make a living as a band, and sent Duvall demo versions of Neanderthal and Locked Away.
DuVall liked what he heard and urged Ethan to write more songs and send them over. Chained Saint complied, and when Duvall heard the new batch of demos, which were recorded in a local studio, he invited the band to Atlanta to work on a debut album at West End Sound Recording, the studio co-owned by Mastodon’s Bill Kelliher and engineer Tom Tapley.
To capture Chained Saint in their natural environment and help them become more precise and professional, DuVall and Tapley spent six weeks recording and mixing them on analog tape.
DuVall insisted they play every song from start to finish, and anyone who wasn’t perfectly in tempo or performing with the right energy had to stop and start again. And again, and again.
“Since everything was done on tape, we had to be on-point with everything,” Kahn says. “There was no cutting corners, and we worked really hard. It was intimidating at first, but everybody at the studio was so cool and welcoming that coming in to work became something we all looked forward to.”
As surprised as Chained Saint were to record the album on tape, at first Kahn was even more confused when DuVall discouraged him from using his favorite guitars: a Jackson Rhoads Flying V and a modded-out Kramer Pacer.
Instead, DuVall asked Kahn to play his Framus Masterbuilt Talisman, which DuVall designed for the German company. Kahn also used a Gibson 1960 VOS Les Paul Standard, an ESP LTD KH-602 Kirk Hammett Signature Series and an ESP LTD Bill Kelliher Sparrowhawk Vintage Silver Sunburst.
Not a single EMG pickup was used. It’s totally a metal album, but we didn’t record with a single guitar that most people would think is standard metal
“Not a single EMG pickup was used,” Kahn says. “It’s totally a metal album, but we didn’t record with a single guitar that most people would think is standard metal. It was very different for me to record with these things, but William figured it would give us a real punchy tone – something a little different.”
For amps, Kahn played through a Metropoulos DVL-1, a Friedman Brown Eye and a Marshall JCM800, and his effects were sparse – a basic Ibanez Tube Screamer and an EVH Phase 90.
When Blindside was released, DuVall praised Chained Saint on social media. “It has certainly been a journey since I first met these kids practicing in the garage,” he wrote.
“Raw talent met with a lot of hard work and commitment. Through all the ups and downs, the fundamentals learned and mastered, the obstacles met and overcome, this is the result.
“Recorded and mixed to tape. No computers. No gimmicks. No nonsense. Just four guys thrashing it out, giving everything they got. I couldn’t be more proud of them. Chained Saint are the real deal.”
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In an interview with Full Metal Jackie, Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford also praised the band. And he’s not the only one. Kahn’s astronomy teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School wears a Chained Saint cap during class and plays the band’s music before displays at the school’s Astronomy Night educational presentation.
“If I’m a little late to first period in the morning because I had to do an interview or something, my teachers are pretty lenient with me,” Kahn says. “They definitely recognize I’ve got something big outside of school that could be taking my focus away a little bit.”
With the support of DuVall and the success of Blindside singles such as the chugging blitzfest Animosity and the unrepentant kidney-stab Stronger Than Stone, Chained Saint are developing a fanbase outside of the local scene. Now that Kahn has graduated from high school, the band will be able to set their sights nationally and even globally.
“It feels like we’ve got really good momentum,” Kahn says. “We’ve been sticking it out until the summer, when we can tour and play shows. So that’s one thing I’m really looking forward to. There’s a lot of new things on the horizon for Chained Saint.”
