The Black Dahlia Murder

Waterford, Michigan, 2001

The Black Dahlia Murder formed in Waterford, Michigan in 2001, taking their name from the unsolved 1947 killing of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles. Metal Blade Records signed them in 2003 and released the debut, Unhallowed, the same year. The label relationship has held ever since, which in this corner of extreme metal is close to unheard of: every full-length the band has issued has come out through the same company.

The template was set early. Swedish melodic death metal supplied the harmonised guitar lines, Carcass and At The Gates and Morbid Angel supplied the appetite for speed and grotesquerie, and Trevor Strnad's two-register vocal — a high shriek dropped against a low growl, often in the same bar — supplied the signature. Strnad also wrote the lyrics and did most of the talking, on stage and off, which is part of why what happened in 2022 looked for a while like the end of it.

The records that built the audience

Miasma followed in 2005 and Nocturnal in 2007, and it is Nocturnal that the audience has fixed on hardest — enough that the band are now taking it around Europe for its anniversary. Ritual, in 2011, remains their highest-charting album, reaching No. 31 on the Billboard 200. Abysmal arrived in 2015 with Ryan Knight on guitar, Nightbringers in 2017, and Verminous in 2020.

What runs through all of it is a refusal to slow down or soften. The arrangements got more technical across the 2010s without ever abandoning the chorus-shaped hooks that made the early records travel, and the touring was close to continuous. By the time Verminous came out the band had spent the best part of two decades as one of the few American acts able to headline rooms of a couple of thousand on melodic death metal alone.

May 2022, and the decision to continue

Trevor Strnad died on 11 May 2022. He was the co-founder, the lyricist and the public face of the band, and there was no obvious reason for the remaining members to keep the name going.

They did, and they did it from within. Brian Eschbach, the other founding member and the rhythm guitarist since 2001, moved to lead vocals. Ryan Knight returned to fill the rhythm guitar seat he had vacated after Abysmal. No outside singer was auditioned into the role; the band simply rearranged itself around the hole.

Servitude

Servitude, the tenth studio album, came out on 27 September 2024 through Metal Blade, produced by then-guitarist Brandon Ellis with Mark Lewis. It was trailed by two singles, Aftermath on 13 June 2024 and Mammoth's Hand on 6 August 2024. At 32 minutes and 49 seconds it is the shortest record they have made.

It charted at No. 11 on the US Top Album Sales list, No. 15 on the UK Rock and Metal albums chart, No. 41 on the UK independent chart, No. 49 in Austria and No. 55 in Germany. Kerrang! and Metal Hammer both gave it four stars out of five, Distorted Sound 8/10 and Metal Storm 7.7/10.

The critical consensus turned on Eschbach's vocal. Last Rites noted that he makes no attempt to reproduce Strnad, going instead for a more feral delivery with a different range and attack, and praised Evening Ephemeral's chorus, the hooks on Mammoth's Hand and Alan Cassidy's drumming on the title track. The same review described the record as sounding less like a tenth album than a debut, which is roughly how the band have treated it on tour.

Servitude is also the last album to feature Brandon Ellis.

Lineup churn and where they stand now

Ellis announced his departure on 20 February 2025 after nine years, saying the time had come to close the chapter. A run of Mexican and South American dates set for that month was postponed and rescheduled to December 2025 — Guadalajara on the 4th, Monterrey the 5th, Mexico City the 6th, Bogotá the 8th, Buenos Aires the 12th and São Paulo the 14th — with Gatecreeper supporting. Wes Hauch came in as touring lead guitarist and played his first show with the band at Sonic Temple in Columbus, Ohio on 9 May 2025.

2026 has been the busiest year of the post-Strnad period. On 13 January the band announced the Spring Fling headline tour, 23 dates from Indianapolis on 2 April to Milwaukee on 2 May, with The Acacia Strain, Disembodied Tyrant and Corpse Pile. On 19 May came the announcement of Wrath Across North America, a 31-date co-headline run with Arch Enemy from 5 October to 19 November, supported by Septicflesh, Crypta and Thrown Into Exile. Drummer Alan Cassidy's contribution to the press release was a joke about taking his arch enemy to the show.

On 30 June 2026 the band confirmed Two Decades Of Nocturnal, a European headline tour running from Frankfurt's Batschkapp on 14 January 2027 to Karlsruhe on 14 February, taking in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Austria, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the UK, with London on 4 February. Eschbach said the set would be built around the 2007 album with fan favourites from across the catalogue around it. No eleventh studio album has been announced.

On stage in 2026

The co-headline format has given the band two quite different shows this year. On Wrath Across North America they play fourth of five, after Septicflesh and before Arch Enemy, with the band going on around 8pm and off a little over an hour later. The opening night in Riverside, California on 5 October ran from 8.15pm to 9.25pm; Houston on 12 October was 8.15pm to 9.15pm; Dallas on 11 October, earlier in the running order, was 7.40pm to 8.35pm.

That compression suits them. Reviewing the Riverside show, Metal Addicts described rapid-fire riffs and a relentless attack that started the pit almost immediately, and called the band a devastating live force despite the lineup changes. The current stage lineup is Eschbach on vocals and guitar, Knight and Hauch on guitars, Max Lavelle on bass and Cassidy on drums.

The headline shows earlier in the year were a longer proposition. At House of Blues Anaheim on 24 April the band played 22 songs to around 1,700 people, drawing most heavily on Servitude, Nocturnal and Miasma. The production is minimal — no theatrics beyond a bubble machine that appeared briefly and sat oddly against everything else — and Eschbach spent much of the set on the lip of the stage with a hand out to the front rows. The crowd skewed noticeably young, and security spent the night catching a steady stream of bodies coming over the barrier.