Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
Today, heavy rock group The Violent Hour announced their highly anticipated debut album, “Pretty Girls Do Ugly Things“. Set for release on January 22, 2027, the project is a culmination of frontwoman Carla Harvey’s journey thus far. Across 11 tracks that blend the grit of old-school rock ‘n’ roll, the soul of indie and alternative, and just the right dose of heavy metal, the album traces themes of survival, transformation, and the darker parts of being human. “‘Pretty Girls Do Ugly Things’ isn’t just about girl power women behaving badly,” Harvey says. “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.”
Alongside the announcement, The Violent Hour unleashed the single + video, “Already Dead,” an infectious alt-rock track that captures the darkness of hitting rock bottom and insisting the only direction left is up.
First premiered via Ladygunn, “Already Dead” is about surviving the kind of pain that leaves you numb. When you’ve already been burned, betrayed, broken, and dragged through hell, there comes a point when you realize there isn’t much further you can fall. And that realization can be incredibly freeing. The song takes that darkness and turns it into something positive…a declaration that if you’ve already hit rock bottom, the only direction left is up. It’s about letting go of the things that broke you, finding your strength again, and realizing it’s never too late to start over. You can’t kill what’s already dead.
Carla Harvey explains, “‘Already Dead’ is about reaching a point where someone has put you through so much that they can’t hurt you anymore. There’s nothing left for them to take, and that can become its own kind of power.”
The accompanying music video directed by Vicente Cordero takes place in a morgue (fitting for Harvey, who is a former embalmer). What begins on an autopsy table quickly turns into a celebration of refusing to stay down. Death is just a minor complication…a tiny setback that results in a video that’s part horror movie, part dance party, and all rock ’n’ roll.
“Already Dead”: Watch / Listen
There are easier ways to start a band than having an existential crisis, locking yourself in a room with legendary drummer and multi-instrumentalist Charlie Benante (Anthrax, Pantera), and writing the record you’ve been threatening to make your entire life. But Carla Harvey has never been particularly interested in doing things the easy way.
She’s been a mortician, embalmer, grief specialist, comic book creator, author, actress, internationally touring musician, and professional collector of wonderfully questionable objects. So, naturally, her next move was The Violent Hour.
Born and raised in Detroit, Harvey grew up with one foot in art and the other in music, playing in bands at night while working whatever jobs paid the bills and plotting an escape to Hollywood. It delivered exactly the kind of beautifully weird life she was looking for: acting gigs, bands, dive bars, heartbreak, bad decisions, great stories and eventually a 15-year run co-fronting Butcher Babies on stages around the world.
But Carla has always had another life running parallel to rock & roll. Fascinated by death since childhood, she went back to school for Mortuary Science, graduated valedictorian, became a licensed funeral director and embalmer, worked in funeral service and hospice, and ultimately earned a Master of Science in Thanatology. She founded a grief-support initiative for musicians, artists and other people who might feel more comfortable discussing mortality in a backstage hallway than a beige therapist’s office. In other words, she can scream in your face and grief-coach you through the aftermath.
After leaving Butcher Babies, Carla found herself staring down the question every artist eventually faces: What would I make if I had absolutely nothing left to prove? The answer was The Violent Hour. Carla began writing with her partner Charlie Benante, and something clicked immediately. The songs came quickly: big, dirty, vulnerable, melodic, pissed-off and alive. Instead of chasing what she had already done, Carla found herself reconnecting with the things that made her fall in love with music in the first place: the danger of rock & roll, the sneer of punk, the hooks of the records she grew up worshipping and the beautifully unhinged spirit of the ’90s Riot Grrrl movement.
Then she built the band she wished she could have seen when she was a kid. The Violent Hour‘s live incarnation brings Carla together with lead guitarist Kiana De León, drummer Sasha De León, bassist Jewel Steele and rhythm guitarist Allie Kaye: five women making loud, feral rock music without sanding off the edges. The result lives somewhere between metal, punk, hard rock and the questionable part of Hollywood after midnight: crushing riffs, massive choruses, sex, humor, vulnerability, anger and enough swagger to make the whole thing dangerous.
And underneath all of it is Carla. The blue-collar Detroit kid. The mortician. The comic-book nerd. The grief scholar who can talk about death anxiety in the afternoon and climb onto a festival stage that night. The rock lifer who has released six albums with a seventh on its way, written comic books and a novel, toured the world, started over, and somehow still gets excited by the possibility of making something she hasn’t made before.
The Violent Hour isn’t Carla Harvey trying to recreate her past. It’s what happens when all of her strange lives finally end up in the same room.
“Pretty Girls Do Ugly Things” Tracklist:
1. You Only Live Twice
2. Already Dead
3. Sick Ones
4. Black Mud Honey
5. Screenager
6. Nice Girls
7. Sex and Cigarettes
8. Other Side Of You
9. Hell Or Hollywood
10. Pretty Girls Do Ugly Things
11. The Violent Hour
