If the origin story of local metal band Age of Fire were a rom-com, there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the theater at this point. Put on some Evanescence and try to dig it.
Boy meets girl in South Florida in 1982—but in this case, the girl is heavy metal. After six years of being in love with the girl, something comes of the relationship: a band’s eponymous debut album, Age of Fire.
The boy and girl part ways all too soon. He moves to Charlottesville, Virginia. After 20 years, the boy makes contact with the girl in 2008. But it’s not the same. For the boy, the girl is frozen in time, a memory of his youth. He’s unable to save her from the nothing she’s become (sorry, Evanescence).
Finally, three decades after first falling for the girl, the boy decides he’ll do whatever it takes to get her back. He wins the girl’s affection again, and their torrid love affair resumes.
The boy here is Greg Brown, founding member of the now-resurgent Age of Fire. In 2018, after re-releasing his band’s debut album for the second time in 30 years, he decided to grab fate by the collar and re-form. Just five years later, the band is touring to support its second album. They’ve played Atlanta, Birmingham, Myrtle Beach, and several dates in Europe. They’ve announced a streaming show on September 5 from In Your Ear Studios in Richmond, and will head to L.A. to play the Whiskey a Go Go, opening for Burning Witches, on December 6. And in the meantime, they’ll be back in the studio this fall to work on the band’s second full-length album—on Sliptrick Records—since getting back together.
“I’m laser-focused on what we are trying to do,” says Brown. “Richmond has been great to us—really embraced us. In this town, metal doesn’t seem to be very well supported. It’s a different beast.”
Charlottesville’s metal scene has been beset by recent losses, both of venues and promising acts. And while Brown admits he operates in “a bit of a bubble,” he’s never given up on the genre, even while pursuing others after Age of Fire disbanded in 1993.
Brown returned to metal around 2012, after a cancer diagnosis. With a chemo port implanted in his chest, the classical guitar he had come to favor became impractical. The smaller body on his old electrics didn’t rub against the port, and the less technical ax work made playing easier, given his limited mobility.
“I was always into the shredders: Metallica, Megadeth,” Brown says. “But that’s actually the same thing that attracted me to classical and flamenco, the virtuosity of it.”
Working mostly from old-but-never-released recordings, Brown put together a new Age of Fire LP in late 2018, the same year he released the band’s debut for the third time. He “threw it up on the web,” he says, and people listened.
The 10-track Obsidian Dreams, Age of Fire’s first new record in 30 years, caught the attention of Sliptrick Records. Delighted, surprised, and humbled, Brown put together a band. He found a local bass player in Mike Heck and joined forces with a new lead vocalist, Laura Viglione. In 2020, Age of Fire released its first album of all new music since the band formed in 1988: Shades of Shadow. A European tour followed. It was more than Brown could’ve dreamed of when Metallica’s Kill ’Em All first made him fall in love with metal.
Heck and Viglione left the group after the Shades of Shadow tour, but Brown was undaunted. He found local bass player Ric Brown and drummer Bill Morries and decided to retake Age of Fire’s lead vocals. The latest iteration of the band independently released an EP, Through the Tempest, last year, and it’s been well received by indie pubs.
Brown says Age of Fire still has a strong following in Europe, and he’s optimistic about the future, including the forthcoming album on Sliptrick. “Metal is starting to pick up,” Brown says. “It’s still huge overseas. In the United States in the ’90s, we went grunge, but the rest of the world didn’t.”
Age of Fire’s music has been described as dabbling in various heavy metal subgenres, including thrash, symphonic, melodic, and progressive. But for those who grew up with the ’90s shredders like Brown, it’s Metallica they’ll hear first.
Now, what’s old is new again. Age of Fire has been played on more than 1,000 traditional and satellite radio stations around the world after an unheard of four-decade hiatus. The band has attracted attention from media outlets from Portugal to Slovakia to Norway, and endorsements from Solar Guitars, Scorpion drumsticks, and Dirtbag clothing.
Still, Age of Fire isn’t Brown’s full-time gig. By day, he’s an educational services representative for Guitar Center’s Music & Arts. He says working with music teachers to develop in-school programming frees him up to make his own tunes on weekends and during summers.
As Brown tries to help kickstart the local metal scene, he looks back on his career and thinks of all the young musicians who could use a push toward his favorite music genre.
“I feel bad. … I ran a music store in this town for many years, and kids would come in playing Pantera licks or whatever,” he says. “I would think, ‘Where do these kids play?’ There doesn’t seem to be a supported infrastructure in this town for this type of music, and I would have been lost without it my entire life.”
Watch Age of Fire’s livestream performance on September 5 at In Your Ear Studios via youtube.com/@shockoesessionslive.