Hell’s Heroes: Gammacide, One of Arlington’s Thrashiest Bands, Reunites

Dueling electric guitars ignited chaos onstage at the historic Haltom Theater over spring break as if it were 1989 again, the heyday of thrash metal. Gammacide ax-men Rick Perry, the band’s founder and white wizard on the guitar, and Scott “The Beast” Shelby, the original second lead guitarist, left skid marks on their guitar necks and ears bleeding for nearly an hour as they blazed through their 1989 debut album Victims of Science.

Perry had waited nearly 40 years for this moment.

Shelby joined Perry in the Arlington-based thrash metal band in 1988. A year later, with bassist Eric Roy, drummer Jamey Milford and vocalist Varnam Ponville, they released Victims of Science, a thrash metal masterpiece that brought to mind early Sepultura.

But Gammacide had bad timing. The ’90s gave way to Nirvana and the grunge/alternative rock wave. Even Metallica-one of thrash metal’s “Big Four”-rode a new wave by releasing “the Black album,” a less thrash metal, more commercial radio-friendly recording. In 1992, three years after their debut album, Gammacide split up.

Now 33 years after their split, Gammacide has reformed with three original members – Perry, Shelby and Ponville – and two new ones: drummer Joey “Blue” Gonzalez, the youngest of the group, and bassist Alan Bovee, both of whom were part of Warbeast’s original lineup with Perry and Shelby in 2010.

“Whenever we started Gammacide, the thrash scene was exploding and we were all in our early 20s,” Perry says. “Playing as 60-year-old men would be unthinkable, yet here we are.”

They played an intimate thrash metal show over spring break at Haltom Theater in preparation for last week’s appearance at Hell’s Heroes VII, a three-day thrash metal festival at White Oak Music Hall in Houston.

The seventh year of the festival featured dozens of bands shredding thrash metal on indoor and outdoor stages for three nights. Abbath, Crimson Glory, and Saxon closed each night on the main stage outside.

“I’ve been doing shows since 1985, and it is incredible that 40 years later, this is the biggest show that I have ever played,” Perry says. “It’s really an honor to be playing at a festival like this.”

Two weeks ago, Gammacide offered a precursor of the thrash metal they unleashed on the main stage at Hell’s Heroes with the intimate performance at Haltom Theater. They went hard, fast and intense like Gammacide circa 1989, blazing through cult classics such as “Victims of Science,” “Gutter Rats” and “Chemical Imbalance.”

“That’s me at 59,” Shelby says. “We’ve slowed things down to make it more feasible. Back then, we were going 100 mph ourselves and music-wise. We tried to tighten the range and make it groovy and catchy by slowing it down. And it is blazing.”

Active from 1986 until 1992, Gammacide opened for several national acts, such as Exodus, Morbid Angel and Testament, when they came through Dallas. The guys released Victims of Science in ’89 with a small label that was unable to hook them up with a booking agent to promote it.

Their debut album found a second life online in the early 2000s, leading to Gammacide’s first reunion in 2006, 14 years after they said goodbye to the band. Perry says they picked up Bovee via a Craigslist ad.

Perry soon found himself in interviews to discuss the underrated album.

“We tried to make the most aggressive, bombastic thrash record, even though we were on a tiny label,” Perry says. “If we were heavy and fast and intense enough, it would get noticed. That record has stood the test of time and has a new generation of fans. I still get magazines and podcasts that put Gammacide’s Victims of Science as the ‘Holy Grail’ of underground thrash.”

Though they never kicked off a full tour, Perry says they would play shows with other bands such as Rigor Mortis from Fort Worth and jammed all over Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and California. They were mostly playing clubs and traveling in Milford’s van with their equipment in the back. Gammacide dominated stages at the Arcadia Theater, Dallas City Limits and Joe’s Garage.

Krushing It

“We were lit by the fury of playing metal music,” Perry says. “It’s all we cared about. Metal was a total way of life. We would practice all week and, after practice, go on flier missions and staple and paste fliers all over town and then play the shows.”

Shelby says they’re playing with that same fury now.

Shelby’s first official gig with Gammacide in late ’88 occurred at the New Year’s Evil show at the Arcadia Theater, featuring Rigor Mortis, Sedition and Morbid Scream. Shelby says Z Rock DJ Madd Max Hammer told him he enjoyed Shelby’s “fucking crazy leads.” That’s when Shelby realized he was “ready to rock ‘n’ roll.” Opening for thrash metal legends Kreator and Dark Angel, both bands Shelby looked up to, made him feel like he “was in a real band.”

Though they only released one album and a ’91 demo with four cuts, Shelby says they had other music written for Gammacide, but the group “fizzled out” over “usual band stuff.”

Several years later, when they decided to turn Texas Metal Alliance, a heavy metal supergroup, into Warbeast, Perry and Shelby took those songs and turned them into Warbeast songs for the band’s 2010 debut album Krush the Enemy.

“Half of those songs were supposed to be Gammacide,” Shelby says.

Last summer, Shelby says Christian Larson from Hell’s Heroes approached him at the Obituary show where Larson’s band Necrofier also played and asked him if he’d be interested in getting Gammacide on the bill for the 2025 festival. They discussed the band’s past turmoil and uncertain future. Shelby asked about Warbeast but recalled Larson telling him that they didn’t fit the criteria since they were looking for thrash metal bands who were around during the thrash metal era or current bands playing music from that era.

Larson calls the festival a super niche one, with most attendees coming from the U.S., Canada and Europe.

“The response to the festival has grown every year, and people are super excited,” Larson says. “Older bands are playing and reuniting, and younger bands are doing traditional metal that still fits in the vein. It is the biggest thing for this scene.”

Gammacide fans from Dallas, Florida, St. Louis, and even Tokyo arrived on March 21 to watch the band perform 45 minutes of pure thrash metal mayhem.

They brought items for the band to sign, Perry says. A couple of people still had Gammacide concert T-shirts from the ’80s.

A lot of the fans who came up to the band after the show on Friday, Perry says, knew about the band and history yet weren’t even born when Gammacide released the debut album in 1989. Perry says he heard repeated stories from them about their fathers being into thrash metal and introducing them to Gammacide.

Now Perry wants to introduce Gammacide to even more fans. He says they plan to pursue other festivals to play, such as Keep It True, an underground metal festival in Europe, and possibly cruise ships featuring metal music.

“I had never signed so many autographs and taken so many selfies with people nonstop for two hours,” Perry says. “It made us feel great and blown away by this experience. I’m glad we were working on it for so long… It was just a really cool experience.”