It’s a beautiful day in the neighbourhood, and Alex Terrible is arguing with a bear. The Slaughter To Prevail frontman is standing shirtless and tattooed on a suburban street corner in Los Angeles, confronting a grizzly that stands nearly three metres tall. Suddenly, he begins grappling with the beast, burrowing into its thick brown fur.
The bear and the Russian-born singer stagger in a death-grip on the sidewalk until the monster shoves Alex down onto a neatly trimmed lawn. That’s when a tall, blond figure appears behind the bear. This is Alexander Volkov, a Russian UFC heavyweight fighter. Volkov taps the animal on a shoulder, and it runs away in terror.
Thankfully, there isn’t a real-life bear running wild on the streets of LA. Alex is shooting a video for Russian Grizzly, a single from Slaughter To Prevail’s upcoming third album, Grizzly, with a Russian/Ukrainian camera crew. The bear is an elaborate costume with an animatronic head that grimaces and growls on command. The scene is played for comedy, but Alex is quick to point out the reality.
“In Russia, when you see a bear, it is not fucking funny,” he says with a laugh. He should know. This bear may be fake, but he has experience of wrestling the real thing back in Moscow – specifically a lumbering brown bear named Tom. Alex Terrible is that kind of guy.
Grizzly represents a big step up for Slaughter To Prevail. Since releasing their debut single, Crowned & Conquered, in late 2014, they’ve risen through the deathcore ranks. Each successive release, including their two previous albums, 2017’s Misery Sermon and 2021’s Kostolom, has taken them further out of the underground and closer to metal’s mainstream.
By at least one metric they’re the biggest deathcore band around right now, with more than 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify – almost 200,000 more than Lorna Shore, 400,000 more than Whitechapel, and nearly twice as many as Suicide Silence. In 2024, they played Download, a welcome shot of brutality at an event headlined by Fall Out Boy, Queens Of The Stone Age and Avenged Sevenfold. It’s a trend Alex hopes to continue, following the likes of Knocked Loose and Turnstile onto such US festivals as Coachella and Bonnaroo.
“This underground music is becoming like pop – mainstream,” says the singer. “I love that, because it was my goal to bring that shit outside.”
Where Slaughter To Prevail music videos have typically been low-budget DIY productions made by a friend with a camera, the video for Russian Grizzly steps things up. Yesterday, the band shot performance footage at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip, with the bear in a circle-pit. This morning, the band and film crew were on the boardwalk of Venice Beach, facing off again with the bear and lining up for gut punches from Volkov’s gloved fists. For atmosphere, the video production team have rented an old Lada wagon, a boxy little Soviet-era car painted utilitarian beige. In one scene, Alex struggles and fails to squeeze the bear into the backseat.
Between takes, Alex and Volkov stand on the street to test each other’s toughness. At 6’ 7, the golden-haired fighter is a full head taller than the singer. Alex braces himself as a smiling Volkov sends his fist into the singer’s stomach, landing with a loud thud. Alex immediately doubles over with a genuine groan of pain. He then returns the favour, firing a punch right into Volkov’s abs. The fighter doesn’t flinch.
“Was it good?” the singer asks in Russian. Volkov nods with a grin, and Alex adds a hopeful, “Hurts?”
“A little bit,” Volkov answers, and Alex laughs out loud. Despite a fearsome exterior and a singing voice from the depths of the netherworld, in person the frontman is quick to laugh at himself and the scene around him. Slaughter To Prevail are built around Alex, a superhuman metal screamer who bounds to the stage like a warrior. He looks like an inked-up Wolverine up there, with his beard and ripped musculature, a deep scar intentionally carved into his face as savage decoration. The fact that his hobbies include bear-wrestling and cagefighting isn’t a surprise.
He’s fiercely ambitious too, and the new album is a signifier of that ambition. Last year’s single, Behelit, was a relentless metal anthem that wore the influences of Rammstein, Pantera and Slipknot. Its lyrics were inspired by the character Guts from the anime Berserk, based on a Manga comic about a warrior fighting his way across medieval Europe.
“When we wrote this track, we were thinking about trying something epic, and maybe change a little bit with the vocals, and put some... not clean vocals, but more understandable, emotional,” says Alex. “We’re not afraid to try something new.”
Another track, 2023’s Viking, was a swirling, intense, bloodthirsty rant, opening with a threatening growl and a military beat.
“I say, ‘I will shed the blood. I prepare for war. I’ll go into war’, and it’s just art,” says the singer. “I’m not a political guy. I’m just a musician and I do music. It depends on my mood.”
That idea of art versus reality is backed up by a statement Slaughter To Prevail released in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022: “No to war! Our band has nothing to do with politics, we do not take sides... We do not accept ANY military action.”
These days, Alex and his Russian bandmates – rhythm guitarist Dmitry ‘Dima’ Mamedov, bassist Mikhail ‘Mike’ Petrov and drummer Evgeny Novikov – live in Florida, where Grizzly was mostly recorded. British guitarist Jack Simmons lives a nomadic life between the UK, Poland and Florida.
Alex first fell in love with the Sunshine State during a stop-off on tour with Florida deathcore act Bodysnatcher. After the war in Ukraine began, he decided to relocate there.
“Palms everywhere, beach, good weather, perfect roads, positive people. They’re not in a rush,” Alex says dreamily. “I like this lifestyle. My town is very grey sky, brutal winter, very dirty roads, very angry people, because all of this shit is around. When I was in Florida, I was like, ‘Wow, this is sick.’”
Grizzly represents a big step up for Slaughter To Prevail. Since releasing their debut single, Crowned & Conquered, in late 2014, they’ve risen through the deathcore ranks. Each successive release, including their two previous albums, 2017’s Misery Sermon and 2021’s Kostolom, has taken them further out of the underground and closer to metal’s mainstream.
By at least one metric they’re the biggest deathcore band around right now, with more than 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify – almost 200,000 more than Lorna Shore, 400,000 more than Whitechapel, and nearly twice as many as Suicide Silence. In 2024, they played Download, a welcome shot of brutality at an event headlined by Fall Out Boy, Queens Of The Stone Age and Avenged Sevenfold. It’s a trend Alex hopes to continue, following the likes of Knocked Loose and Turnstile onto such US festivals as Coachella and Bonnaroo.
“This underground music is becoming like pop – mainstream,” says the singer. “I love that, because it was my goal to bring that shit outside.”
Where Slaughter To Prevail music videos have typically been low-budget DIY productions made by a friend with a camera, the video for Russian Grizzly steps things up. Yesterday, the band shot performance footage at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip, with the bear in a circle-pit. This morning, the band and film crew were on the boardwalk of Venice Beach, facing off again with the bear and lining up for gut punches from Volkov’s gloved fists. For atmosphere, the video production team have rented an old Lada wagon, a boxy little Soviet-era car painted utilitarian beige. In one scene, Alex struggles and fails to squeeze the bear into the backseat.
Between takes, Alex and Volkov stand on the street to test each other’s toughness. At 6’ 7, the golden-haired fighter is a full head taller than the singer. Alex braces himself as a smiling Volkov sends his fist into the singer’s stomach, landing with a loud thud. Alex immediately doubles over with a genuine groan of pain. He then returns the favour, firing a punch right into Volkov’s abs. The fighter doesn’t flinch.
“Was it good?” the singer asks in Russian. Volkov nods with a grin, and Alex adds a hopeful, “Hurts?”
“A little bit,” Volkov answers, and Alex laughs out loud. Despite a fearsome exterior and a singing voice from the depths of the netherworld, in person the frontman is quick to laugh at himself and the scene around him. Slaughter To Prevail are built around Alex, a superhuman metal screamer who bounds to the stage like a warrior. He looks like an inked-up Wolverine up there, with his beard and ripped musculature, a deep scar intentionally carved into his face as savage decoration. The fact that his hobbies include bear-wrestling and cagefighting isn’t a surprise.
He’s fiercely ambitious too, and the new album is a signifier of that ambition. Last year’s single, Behelit, was a relentless metal anthem that wore the influences of Rammstein, Pantera and Slipknot. Its lyrics were inspired by the character Guts from the anime Berserk, based on a Manga comic about a warrior fighting his way across medieval Europe.
“When we wrote this track, we were thinking about trying something epic, and maybe change a little bit with the vocals, and put some... not clean vocals, but more understandable, emotional,” says Alex. “We’re not afraid to try something new.”
Another track, 2023’s Viking, was a swirling, intense, bloodthirsty rant, opening with a threatening growl and a military beat.
“I say, ‘I will shed the blood. I prepare for war. I’ll go into war’, and it’s just art,” says the singer. “I’m not a political guy. I’m just a musician and I do music. It depends on my mood.”
That idea of art versus reality is backed up by a statement Slaughter To Prevail released in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022: “No to war! Our band has nothing to do with politics, we do not take sides... We do not accept ANY military action.”
These days, Alex and his Russian bandmates – rhythm guitarist Dmitry ‘Dima’ Mamedov, bassist Mikhail ‘Mike’ Petrov and drummer Evgeny Novikov – live in Florida, where Grizzly was mostly recorded. British guitarist Jack Simmons lives a nomadic life between the UK, Poland and Florida.
Alex first fell in love with the Sunshine State during a stop-off on tour with Florida deathcore act Bodysnatcher. After the war in Ukraine began, he decided to relocate there.
“Palms everywhere, beach, good weather, perfect roads, positive people. They’re not in a rush,” Alex says dreamily. “I like this lifestyle. My town is very grey sky, brutal winter, very dirty roads, very angry people, because all of this shit is around. When I was in Florida, I was like, ‘Wow, this is sick.’”
Alex Terrible was born Aleksandr Shikolai in the Ural Mountains of west-central Russia in 1993. His childhood was spent first in a small village called Bolshoy Istok, before he moved to nearby Sysert, where his stepfather, a veteran of the Russian navy, co-founded a military school for boys (Alex’s biological father left when he was six). Most of the students there were kids with no parents. Alex has compared the school to a “prison for children”. It was a tough, angry crowd.
It was there that another student introduced Alex to the music of Slipknot, Bring Me the Horizon and Suicide Silence. “The vocals were so aggressive, but at the same time, it was like art for me,” Alex recalls of the latter’s landmark debut album, The Cleansing. “It was the scream from the bottom of the soul, from the bottom of the heart.”
At 13, he tried singing in that same guttural style, and was serious about it from the beginning. He began to collect tattoos over his arms and chest, paying with the money his mother gave him to buy breakfast every morning. The designs echoed what he saw inked onto the skin of Bring Me The Horizon’s Oli Sykes and Mitch Lucker from Suicide Silence.
“I was like a copycat: I’m gonna do the same because this works,” recalls Alex, who ignored the concerns of his mother, sister and friends that the skulls, snakes and horned demons inked onto his skin would ruin his chances of ever finding a job. “I always said, ‘I will not work for anybody. I will be a big rock star.’ I was sure.”
He adopted the name Alex Terrible, an echo of brutal 16th- century Russian Tsar Ivan The Terrible. His biggest challenge was finding musicians to play deathcore with the same level of seriousness. He began posting videos of himself on YouTube singing cover songs in his bedroom, taking on anything from Nirvana and Linkin Park to the bleakest deathcore songs he could find. One of his earliest clips showed the boyish singer in a red Nike polo shirt, fresh tattoos on his neck, roaring with guttural rage through Unanswered by Suicide Silence. He soon heard from musicians looking to collaborate.
The one who stood out was Jack Simmons, a member of UK deathcore band Acrania. Jack reached out to Alex through Facebook, and they soon began writing songs together online. The guitarist constructed instrumental tracks and sent them to the Russian.
“I was so excited to put my own vocals on this new music, our music,” says Alex, who added heavily accented vocals that mixed Russian and English lyrics. “It was not just brutal slam. Jack has these visions for making this sound fresh and interesting. And it always sounds catchy. You start to headbang and the melody has this soul.”
Their first releases were explosive, leading with the Crowned & Conquered single in 2014 and the EP Chapters Of Misery in 2015. The band’s first US tour in 2016 was with Cannibal Corpse, and Alex could hardly believe it was happening.
“I was like, ‘I’m living in The Matrix.’ It was unreal,” he notes of a feeling that continues for him even now. “I didn’t even dream about all of this.”
In those early years, bandmembers came and went, including UK and US musicians, before they settled on a mostly Russian line-up. Alex wore a demonic mask of his own design, inspired by Slipknot and the comic book antihero Spawn, with horns and a moving jaw. At first, only the singer wore the mask onstage for their opening song, but gradually the other members began sporting them. Today, Alex sells the masks for more than $100 each, while their recent single Kid Of Darkness refers to the name of the mask.
Slaughter To Prevail’s second album, 2021’s Kostolom, was a turning point. The flailing, layered track Demolisher represented the kind of growth Alex had hoped for. Then, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the band responded with the punishing single, 1984, named after the George Orwell novel about a totalitarian society. Alex had already expressed opposition to the war on social media, but this put the full muscle of the band behind an antiwar message: ‘Please stop the violence / please stop the bloodshed on Earth!’"
“As a musician, what can I do? I can do only music,” Alex says. “So I write a song about war, and it is just disgusting. I would never go in for war because I don’t want to be killed. I don’t want to kill somebody. I don’t want to see this chaos... But I never say I’m against my own country. I love my country. I love Russian people. I just don’t like this stupid situation.”
That unfiltered approach has also gotten him in trouble. In 2023, he posted an exaggeratedly macho video titled ‘4 Rules for Real Men’, which instructed men to demonstrate heavy metal devotion, enjoy combat sports, eat with their hands, and perform oral sex on women. He’s said it was meant to be comedy, but when he was criticised for it, he responded with a combative note to Instagram: “There are a lot of people who start pointing fingers at me and calling me a homophobe or a women-hater. You’re crazy! If you don’t like that I’m a straight man and have traditional family values, please unfollow me!”
The tone was both aggressive and defensive, and he went on to cloud the issue further in the same statement: “I hate propaganda in any form, especially when trying to brainwash children! I consider it a crime, children absorb everything like sponges and do not realise until they are of a conscious age.”
Some interpreted his words as a sign he agreed with right-wing commentators who don’t want LGBTQ-inclusive education in schools. Alex hasn’t addressed the outcry since. Today, he doesn’t come over as someone who has given much thought to why people were upset, or the challenges facing the LGBTQ community.
“Sometimes it hurts my reputation because I’m an honest guy and I’m not a clever guy,” he says. “I’m from a small village. I never finished high school. I’ve always been in the music industry, so I never learned about politics, business, philosophy or all of this smart shit. At the same time, I’m a very open person. My philosophy is live your life... don’t touch others’ religion, don’t touch others’ opinions about this life, don’t touch others’ morals. But at the same time, I stand up with my morals, with my views, and I’m never propagandist.”
It’s not the only controversy surrounding him. Among the many tattoos on his body was a so-called ‘black sun’, an ancient European symbol later appropriated by the Nazis. The tattoo prompted questions on the internet about his political and racial beliefs.
Alex has made no secret that he fell in with a far right clique in his late teens and early 20s (before that, he hung out with a far left, Antifa-style group), though has insisted that he is no longer that person.
“Of course, I’m not a Nazi”, he told the Rock Feed podcast in 2024, adding: “I’m not regret [sic] about anything, about mistakes in my life or any stupid shit or whatever, because I will never change it, I will move forward. And right now, I’m a different person.”
The tattoo has now been covered up, but his rationale for getting it in the first place – that he was young and stupid and looking for a place to belong – combined with a refusal to completely denounce that period in his life because it’s part of what shaped who he is today isn’t enough for some, and controversy still simmers. But anyone expecting Alex Terrible to back down from a fight will be waiting a long time.
A week after the video shoot, Alex calls us back. He’s back in Yekaterinburg, Russia, where it’s midnight. Most visits back home last a couple of weeks, but this time he’s staying with his parents for a few months so that he can compete in a bareknuckle/mixed martial arts Russian Cagefighting Championship (he won his very first bout in January 2025). He trains hard in the gym every day.
He’ll otherwise be on the road with Slaughter To Prevail for much of 2025, determined to spread his enraged music around the world. He remains thrilled to be playing for the masses and for whatever comes after.
“Maybe in a few years you will go back to smaller venues, because nobody will give a shit about you,” he says with a laugh. “But I’m ready for this, because I’m doing what I love to do, and this is from my heart. If we get popular, it’s cool. If we don’t, I don’t give a shit.”
New Slaughter To Prevail album Grizzly is out July 18 via Sumerian. Order an exclusive red splatter vinyl variant with pop up art via the official Metal Hammer store, where you can also pick up a limited edition Slaughter To Prevail bundle with exclusive Grizzly tee.
