Ice Nine Kills

Ice Nine Kills (INK) is an internationally successful metalcore band from Boston, Massachusetts, known for its unusual combination of heavy music and cinematic horror storytelling.

“Horror metal heroes.” – Rolling Stone 

Ice Nine Kills craft anthems full of passion and precision. The band’s theatrical bombast created a community of self-described “Psychos” and launched the type of pop culture lore celebrated in their songs. They create timeless, timely music, blending metalcore, melody, and punk with power. 

Hard-rock-meets-horror tracks like “Hip to be Scared,” “The American Nightmare,” and the gold-certified “A Grave Mistake” demonstrate their unapologetic fascination with fright and cult classic curiosities, unleashed with inescapable melodic hooks, heavy riffs, and clever twists of phrase.

Led by Spencer Charnas, Ice Nine Kills spread cavalier carnage with a knowing smile, as evidenced by the densely catchy songs on their pair of breakthrough albums, The Silver Scream and The Silver Scream 2: Welcome to Horrorwood, which propelled them to death-defying new heights. They toured with Slipknot in 2022. Internationally acclaimed, they won UK tastemaker Rock Sound’s 2023 Best Live Act Award. Metallica handpicked INK for their M72 World Tour in 2023, 2024, and 2025. 

Today, the INKverse boasts a series of high-concept, cinematic videos; the Psychos Only club; a mock “true crime” book; the Inked in Blood graphic novels; monthly “Nightmare on the 9th” merch drops; and the annual INK-curated Silver Scream Convention weekends. In 2024, Silver Scream Con moved into the DCU Center in Worcester, Massachusetts - the same area where Ice Nine Kills first began. 

The horror community Spencer grew up loving has embraced his band in return. 

INK’s “A Work of Art” (featuring System Of A Down’s Shavo Odadjian) plays in 2024’s Terrifier 3, a No. 1 box office hit that became the highest-grossing unrated film ever. The mischievously gory music video features Art the Clown himself (actor David Howard Thornton) and Terrifier franchise stars Catherine Corcoran and Leah Voysey, alongside Shavo and SiriusXM radio host Jose Mangin. “A Work of Art” quickly became a smash, debuting at No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot Hard Rock Songs chart. 

“Twisting the Knife,” featuring Mckenna Grace, plays over the closing credits of 2026’s Scream 7, a jaw-dropping full circle moment for a band whose frontman embraces the franchise with reverence. The music video boasts screen-used Ghostface masks and Spencer’s own screen-used Scream knife. 

Long before he graced the covers of Rock Sound, Metal Hammer, Revolver, and Outburn, Charnas began his career at a battle of the bands while still in high school. Known simply as “Ice Nine” from 2000 to 2006, Spencer persevered through lineup and stylistic changes as a teenager and young adult. 

Even the group’s high-school pop-punk band incarnation dabbled in horror-related imagery. As a kid, Charnas was drawn to the horror aisle of his local video store, inside the supermarket where his mom did her shopping. “I'd gaze upon the box covers of movies like Sleepaway Camp and Silent Night, Deadly Night,” he recalls. “I became obsessed. Around Halloween, I would walk the neighborhood as Michael Myers. It was the idea that if I was the monster, then the monster couldn't get me.” 

The wickedly creative marriage of music and fiction began in earnest with the Boston-based band’s Top 5 Hard Rock album, Every Trick in the Book, which brought the themes of the previous three records to new levels with literary-immersed tracks. Decadent, devious, and fiercely insane, with sardonic wit to spare, Ice Nine Kills celebrates pop culture’s darkest edges, mining a cinephile library’s worth of B-movie schlock and iconic horror on their pair of most recent albums. (Both records eventually got the deluxe edition treatment, with THE FINAL CUT and Under Fire, respectively.) 

Each song is slightly (and) slyly more subversive than the last, offering immersive and escapist trips. Dan Sugarman (guitar/vocals), Ricky Armellino (guitar/vocals), Joe Occhiuti (bass/vocals), Miles Dimitri Baker (guitar), and Mike Cortada (drums) are the current co-conspirators behind Charnas. 

The No. 1 Billboard Hard Rock Album The Silver Scream (2018) mercilessly chopped down the doors, announcing Ice Nine Kills’ arrival as an unrivaled force of unnatural nature. Helpless teens, unhelpful authorities, supernatural forces, masked killers, and “final girls” abounded. Each piece focused on a different horror classic, paying loving homage to sinister icons like Freddy, Jason, and Michael. 

Naturally, there’s always a sequel. The Silver Scream 2: Welcome to Horrorwood imagined a world where Charnas is the chief suspect in his fiancée’s murder. His body of musical and visual work with INK is the primary evidence. The sequel expanded the lore of The Silence, a new slasher for the ages. 

Horrorwood mixed the soaring choruses, witty lyricism, and post-metalcore riffs that are the band’s signatures, as heard in Top 10 Mainstream Rock single “A Grave Mistake” and Top 20 hit “Savages.” 

“A Grave Mistake” saw INK slash through the Golden Age of the Silver Scream, earning gold certification for 500,000 units in 2025 from the Recording Industry Association of America. 

Drew Fulk (A Day To Remember, As I Lay Dying, Emmure) produced The Silver Scream and returned to collaborate on The Silver Scream 2: Welcome to Horrorwood. Spencer’s longtime lyrical partner-in-crime, Steve Sopchak, and multi-instrumentalist Francesco Ferrini also returned. 

A mobile game inspired by the music video for “Merry Axe-Mas,” released by the band in time for the holidays in 2019, earned a bronze award at the prestigious Clio Awards. Since its founding in 1959, The Clios has honored innovation, creativity, and excellence in advertising and marketing. 

As its predecessor mined cross-generational horror classics like A Nightmare On Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and The Shining, The Silver Scream 2: Welcome to Horrorwood unleashed fresh hell upon listeners with songs inspired by a VHS aisle’s worth of Fangoria Magazine cover-worthy inspirations.  

Bloody properties consumed by INK on Horrorwood include Eli Roth’s infectious and claustrophobic Cabin Fever (“A Rash Decision”); Don Mancini’s Child’s Play franchise (“Assault & Batteries”); Alfred Hitchcock’s cultural milestone Psycho (“The Shower Scene”); Stephen King adaptation Pet Sematary (“Funeral Derangements”); video-game-series-turned-film-series Resident Evil (“Rainy Day”); Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (“Hip to be Scared”); 1981 mineshaft slasher My Bloody Valentine (“Take Your Pick”); Clive Barker’s supernatural Hellraiser (“The Box”); David Cronenberg’s The Fly (“F.L.Y.”); tortuous travel nightmare Hostel (“Wurst Vacation”); the Evil Dead franchise (“Ex-Mørtis”); and the Chicago-set urban legend Candyman (“Farewell II Flesh”). 

Loudwire hails Ice Nine Kills as “one of the most unique acts in metal right now.” Visionary trailblazers and multimedia raconteurs, INK hosts a thrilling world for a growing legion of devoted true believers with immersive shows, captivating videos, and an inventive band-and-fan community. 

Charnas launched the personal care line Pretty Evil in 2025 and revealed he’s co-written the script, together with Paul Soter (Super Troopers), for The Slashin’ of the Christ, a forthcoming feature film from producer Greg Nicotero (The Walking Dead). However, the postscript to the “A Work of Art” music video revealed that a seemingly comatose Charnas escaped from a Hollywood hospital, even as he’s been allegedly and controversially replaced in Ice Nine Kills by some strange new AI imposter. 
Produced by Drew Fulk and mixed by Fulk and Zakk Cervini (Blink-182, Bring Me The Horizon, MGK), the Matrix-inspired “The Great Unknown” began an ambitious new chapter for Ice Nine Kills. 
"‘The Great Unknown’ optimizes aggression and melody in a format our core user base consistently engages with,” reads a statement attributed to Charnas. “This audio file represents a genre expansion protocol, targeting action and sci-fi verticals proven effective via cross-platform sentiment analysis. ‘The Great Unknown’ is designed to seamlessly interface with current simulation conditions, as categorical boundaries between organic and synthetic continue to experience accelerated erosion.”
At Silver Scream Con 4, Spencer and Matthew Lillard (Scream) announced their Horrorwood Reserve collaboration and Lillard’s entrance into the INKverse with “The Laugh Track.” 

The gleefully unhinged anthem “The Laugh Track” paid homage to Jack Nicholson’s Joker and Tim Burton’s iconic Gotham City, with makeup effects once again from Oscar winner Christopher Nelson. It debuted at No 4 on Billboard’s Hot Hard Rock Songs chart, measuring streaming, sales, and airplay. 
2025 closed with a headlining performance at Ovo Arena Wembley and the first Silver Scream Con London. 20 years on from Ice Nine Kills’ debut album, “Twisting the Knife” marked a bloody step forward. The official collaboration with the Scream franchise further validated Spencer’s grand vision. 

Ice Nine Kills blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction, skewering Hollywood in the process, stabbing with a satire to rival Patrick Bateman. As the song “Welcome to Horrorwood” declares: “Stardom’s just an afterthought for all those stabbed in the backlot, piled up and left to rot.

“So, how’s this for an establishing shot?”