‘MotorPsych’ Band Chemical Spell Wants You to Saddle the Fuck Up

If you ask any metalhead what the most important TV show of all time is, the likely response would be MTV’s Headbangers Ball, the long-running music video show of the 1980s and 1990s that promised metal was more than music. It was a theater. It was a ritual. It was a spectacle. Most importantly, though, it was fast and loud. Metal fans of every subgenre gathered around that weekly water cooler. You might see dazzling fare like the BulletBoys, followed by heavyweights like Black Sabbath, then alternative acts such as Helmet. The show offered a collision of styles but also a unifying truth: metal was performance as much as sound.

Decades later, Dallas band Chemical Spell feels like the redux, or maybe the logical continuation of that wave. They don’t just play shows. They are the show. Formed in acting studios and forged in garages, the quartet — Cameron Mills on drums, Braden Socia on guitar and vocals, Petra Milano on bass and vocals, and Aaron Heath on guitar — brings the theater’s sense of ensemble to the stage, where equity, performance and raw energy fuse into something volatile. Their self-described style is “motorpsych” – a fusion of the band’s love of motorcycle mythos and psychedelia’s free-wheeling nature.

“Don’t blink, cause you’ll miss it,” Socia warns before every set. He means it. The band’s shows are short, sharp bursts — about 28 minutes of frenzy where every stomp threatens to put his footprint through the floor. Onstage, he wields his guitar like a barbarian with an axe, gripping the upper back of his flying V and swinging it with both menace and precision. At times, he hoists it like a rifle, aiming it at the crowd as if the next chord might be lethal. Hair plastered to his forehead, chains rattling across his chest, he looks less like a leader and more like someone fighting for survival in a battle. Blink, and the spell is gone.

The name Chemical Spell nods to alchemy, the old pursuit of transformation. Fittingly, the band transforms the conventions of metal. Instead of hierarchy, they insist on equity. (To the point of deciding their band name through three rounds of ranked choice voting with Socia serving as barrister.) There is no frontperson towering over sidemen, only four performers working in lockstep. Their acting-school roots are evident; they play like an ensemble cast where every role is crucial and every voice is heard. Milano shares vocals from the bass, an extra spotlight seemingly antithetical to many a metal band that chooses to spotlight only one singer.

Performance is not an afterthought; it is the end-all, be-all. Sets are paced like plays, arcs designed to maintain the attention of the audience. Between songs, Socia calls out, “Saddle up!” — not a polite nudge but, as he puts it, “a battle cry, like, ‘Saddle the fuck up!’” Living on the border of invitation and command. The audience is part of the show, and if they can’t keep up, they’ll get left behind.

The music itself is metal energy and heaviness, but with velocity, intensity and theater-level stakes. Mills’ drums drive like a Harley Davidson revving at redline. Socia and Heath’s guitars weave between chaos and control. Milano locks the structure in place while adding her own voice to the fray. It is not about perfection. It is about presence. It’s twisted chaos done their way.

“Don’t blink” and “saddle up” are not just slogans. They are philosophies. In Chemical Spell, a show exists only once, burning fast and disappearing just as quickly. Miss a moment, and it is gone forever.

Energy can’t be created or destroyed; it only changes form. That on-stage alchemy that Chemical Spell traffics in so as to transform into bigger stages, more theatrical production and sooner rather than later, records that capture the intensity like their fabled Manganese Violence EP are steadily in the works. What is certain is this: Chemical Spell is not playing for half-attention.

So take the warning.

Don’t blink. Saddle up. Because there is no rewind once the chemical spell hits.