Keri Kelli + Greg Koch Discuss the Animated World of Metal Warrior, From Craft Beer to Heavy Metal

Keri Kelli and Greg Koch joined Loudwire Nights on Wednesday (Aug. 13) to dive into the debut album from the new animated band Metal Warrior, The Crushed Souls of Our Enemies.

Listen to the full conversation in the player near the end of this article.

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"We've been working on this project for a few years," Kelli shared with Loudwire Nights' Chuck Armstrong.

"It's a very expansive project, but we're just happy everything has come to fruition and the album is out and people are enjoying it. It's rad, you know, out of the gate we come with a double album. Why not?"

Having worked with artists like Alice Cooper, Night Ranger, Slash and others, Kelli is no stranger to the world of rock and roll. For Koch — who co-founded Stone Brewing and is considered a pioneer of the West Coast IPA revolution — writing and creating an album is new ground for him.

And for both, Metal Warrior is a brand-new experience as the band is intergalactic and completely animated.

"We went really deep with this," Koch said.

"We imagined this world, this universe, really, the Metal Warrior-verse. It's graphically rich. We worked with a guy named Ben Fellows, an illustrator who is just phenomenal with his style and his character and bringing these things to life with graphic novels."

Metal Warrior's debut album is accompanied with an extensive vision of graphic novels that follow the adventures of four heroes, each with their own complex backstory, as they come together to fight for righteousness across the galaxies.

"Greg had asked me to make some bumper music, like 30 seconds, 90 seconds, for clips of these characters," Kelli explained.

"I made these four little clips and he goes, 'Wow, these are rad.' And the next thing we know, we started working on this project, developing them into full songs, developing these characters, the comic books, the complete story."

As Kelli said, it started out as a fun project that grew and grew into something bigger than either of them had expected.

"We just started developing it into this huge thing," he said.

"It was really that simple. It was little bumper music for each character and now it's a double album and nine comic books and tokens and NFTs and everything."

What Else Did Keri Kelli + Greg Koch Discuss on Loudwire Nights?

How they became friends: "Our band used to rehearse at [Greg's] rehearsal studio in L.A. Obviously, we weren't necessarily great friends, but he was the guy we had to pay the checks to. And then we later connected 20 years ago along the lines of craft beer."
What it was like for Koch to write with Kelli: "I had been a songwriter previously, not terribly successful. It wasn't until I started writing with K.K. that, really, it just came out and came out in the right way. And I'm like, 'Oh, man, I love that.'"
The live aspect of Metal Warrior: "I've thought about it constantly and seriously from the very beginning. Visuals are a big part of it. I'm a big fan of some of that spectacle, bringing what we envision together...like the most amazing metal show you've ever seen with the storylines and the characters woven throughout."