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‘It’s a mind-blower,” says singer Dax Riggs on the surprising TikTok-driven renaissance of the renowned 1990s psychedelic sludge metallers Acid Bath. “In the front row you’ll see an old fan and next to them is a 13-year-old kid singing all the words,” adds guitarist Sammy Duet. “What the hell is going on here?”
Formed in the Louisiana bayou in 1991 with oppressive, swampy sounds soundtracking tales of drugs, death and decay, Acid Bath deftly hopped from treacly, melodic grooves to bluesy licks and fast-chugging thrashers, sometimes in the same song. “Society here was totally decrepit and unfair in a lot of ways, but the beauty of the landscape is supreme,” says Riggs of the backwater wetlands that loomed large in their psyches. Their claggy, peculiar southern gothic style burned bright, before the death of bassist Audie Pitre in 1997 brought their journey to a close.
A revival didn’t seem likely: longtime label Rotten Records kept Acid Bath off Spotify, seemingly enraged by poor remuneration, and removed unsanctioned videos from YouTube – causing fans to upload their albums to less litigious streaming sites such as Pornhub. But a change of heart in 2020 put Acid Bath on Spotify at last, leading to millions of streams, as algorithm-surfing younger listeners – “the satanic e-girls of TikTok” as Duet calls them – yanked Acid Bath’s pitch-black sensibilities from relative obscurity into the mainstream. “It’s the internet’s fault,” says Riggs. “On the internet, the future and the past are the same.”
Spurred on by their post-breakup success, they regrouped in 2025, and this year they’ll play their first ever UK gigs, including two nights supporting System of a Down at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London. That 63,000-strong venue couldn’t be further from the hot, sweaty rooms of their early years, when more than a handful of gig-goers was considered a success.
Fuelled by heroic quantities of mind-altering substances, the band’s original 90s run bristled with mayhem. When Acid Bath weren’t locked out from their tour bus in the delirium of magic mushrooms, crew members on video shoots were having their faces bitten by alligators. There was “plenty of trouble” to get into in New Orleans after dark, says Duet, where producer Spike Cassidy (of crossover thrash legends DRI) would get blackout drunk and tackle everyone. “He really wanted to wrestle you,” says Riggs.
“We were a little chemically enhanced in those days,” acknowledges Duet.
“Our whole life was chaos,” adds Riggs.
Such chaos was witnessed first-hand by an A&R exec from the Roadrunner label, who had got wind of a buzzy band from the bayou and travelled to Louisiana. “There was a lot of violence [at our shows],” says Riggs. “It’d gotten out to the audience that Roadrunner was coming, so the fans went berserk, rushed the stage and grabbed the microphone and shit. They were like: sign this band!” Tables were overturned and a waitress broke her leg. “Roadrunner wasn’t that impressed with the whole thing,” adds Riggs. (No deal was offered.)
But none of the havoc seemed to bother the band, who were “happy if we got our Taco Bell chili cheese burrito” at the end of the day, says Riggs. They just wanted to make the darkest possible music – which they easily achieved, thanks to Riggs’ poetic yet psychotic lyrics of self-mutilation and murder, paired with the band’s menacing sounds.
Their singular style and intense, hallucinogen-powered shows helped Acid Bath build a following, alongside fellow Louisiana sludgesters Crowbar and Eyehategod. Despite being on a small indie label, they managed to sell tens of thousands of records, though they never quite broke through nationally. But by their second album, 1996’s Paegan Terrorism Tactics, creative differences began to appear. “It was a weird time, where we had a lot of big ideas, but we started to fracture, breaking off into our little factions,” says Riggs.
When bassist Pitre and his parents were killed by a drunk driver, the band lost one of their closest friends as well as a creative force. Acid Bath played a few more shows then called it quits. Duet focused on his blackened thrash/death-metal band, Goatwhore, while Riggs intensified his crooning on projects such as Agents of Oblivion.
But if it was the death of Pitre that closed Acid Bath’s first act, it was another that helped to rekindle them. In 2024, keyboardist Tomas Viator died at the age of 55. When Las Vegas’s Sick New World festival reached out to Duet, asking what it would take to get Acid Bath together again, he reflected on his mortality and got in touch with Riggs, who concurred it might be time. “There’s a big weight to it, to make sure that you’re putting a shine on your friend’s name,” says Riggs of the reunion; though he, Duet and original guitarist Mike Sanchez agreed not to record new music under the Acid Bath name out of respect to their dead friends.
They could never have guessed their post-breakup success would snowball to the degree that it has. “I had no idea that it was going to be to this magnitude,” says Duet. “There’s a lot of psychic love that pours from the audience,” adds Riggs. “It’s a wonderfully overwhelming sensation.”
