Hell Dormant: “Serve Our Blades”

Someone killed the lights, and something came over the PA.

It was an open-air show in Karachi, with Autopsy Gothic on the bill. Soundcheck had wrapped up just after maghrib, the last of the light was going, and nobody was expecting anything.

It didn’t open with a wall of noise. It opened with a voice: pitched unnaturally low, drained of every scrap of human warmth. It didn’t sound panicked or angry. It sounded clinical, like a tape-recorded autopsy from a Clive Barker nightmare, calmly taking inventory of an open grave:

What we have here is another bottomless pit of those who once lived… Buried together, the eternally deformed mutilated corpses… are the true symbol of endless pain and tortured infinity…

Then the guitars hit: a suffocating, down-tuned sludge, carved open by a lead line with a dry, Middle Eastern curl. It wasn’t flashy shredding. It was a tight Phrygian dominant tremor, coiled like a desert viper over a hail of blast beats, and it turned the Karachi dusk hostile in an instant.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I didn’t know what it was yet. I just knew it wasn’t meant to be comfortable.

It was “Mass Grave”, by a band called Hell Dormant, and it was the first time the song had been played to a crowd that size. It worked like a trailer for a film nobody knew was being made. Hardly anyone knew the project existed, let alone that the record was called Mass Grave. We found out later that Wasi Raza had been working on something with Kamran Farooq, and this was it.

Some bands matter because of what they release. Others matter because of where they turn up in your life. Hell Dormant did both. It was an anomaly in Pakistan’s underground: a side project that got further than most of its members’ main bands, a death metal record made in a living room, and a band that never played a show under its own name. It didn’t sound recorded. It sounded dug up.

This is the story of Hell Dormant.

The Machine and the Guy Who Muted Growls

Hell Dormant was two people.

Kamran was already a name. As Coffin Feeder he fronted Autopsy Gothic, growling and writing its lyrics. He was also a frightening drummer. “He was a mind-blowing drummer,” his Hell Dormant partner says. “This guy was like a machine. Give him a guitar, he’d play guitar like crazy. He was the prodigy kind of person”. Cannibal Corpse, Kamran once told an interviewer, was “in my blood”. Mortician was his all-time favourite.

Wasi, Nokturnal Rust’s guitarist and later BlacKtearZ, came from the opposite direction. He grew up on Iron Maiden, Dio and Savatage, a melodic metal guitarist through and through. As a kid he and his brother taped songs off MTV’s Headbangers Ball until they had 20 or 30 volumes of their own, with one strict rule: any band with growled vocals, they turned the sound off. “We did not consider that music at all,” he says. “Which is pretty ironic, considering that this is what I ended up doing later on”.

Wasi has a small, permanent place in my own listening history. Around 2000, my friend Fahad Aziz spotted him asking Dave Murray a question in a Q&A on the Iron Maiden forums and got in touch. Wasi introduced him to Savatage, and he made the rest of us listen. We still love them, and we still barely know anyone else in Pakistan who does.

The two met in Nokturnal Rust, the band Hadi Naeem put together through a classified ad in Dawn (a story for another day). Wasi played guitar. When the band wanted to take on material built on double-bass drumming and needed a drummer who could handle it, Hadi, who could find anyone, found Kamran.

Most of what we know about how Hell Dormant was made comes from Wasi. When I got him on a call this year, he opened with a warning: “I don’t know if I remember a lot of things”. He remembered plenty.

The Guitarist Who Hated Death Metal

At some point during the Nokturnal Rust years, Kamran told Wasi he wanted to make a pure death metal album.

Why a side project? Kamran had, in his own words, a “huge collection of written songs”, and nowhere to put them out. Nokturnal Rust spent its energy rehearsing and playing live rather than writing, so there was little room there for his originals. The songs in his head needed a band of their own, and they came straight out of Six Feet Under and Cannibal Corpse.

The strange part was who he asked. “Funny thing is that he didn’t ask anyone else except me, who hated those bands,” Wasi says. “My playing style was more ’80s, ’90s, kind of melodic metal. So I was surprised that he asked me. But it turned out to be quite something”.

Kamran handed him a stack of Six Feet Under and Cannibal Corpse and told him to go away and listen for a few weeks. Wasi forced himself to. “I had to understand where this was coming from,” he says. It took a few weeks, maybe a month or two, and then the noise turned into architecture. “Even though death metal sounded crazy to me, completely chaotic, when you listened to it you started to understand the structures”.

That is the secret of the record. It wasn’t made by two death metal lifers reproducing a shared language. It was made by one musician who knew exactly what he wanted and another who had to learn the genre from outside and brought his melodic instincts in with him.

The name came early and caused regret. Aneeq Zaman, a founding member of Autopsy Gothic alongside Kamran, told me the project was originally called Hell Torment. The suggestion to change it to Hell Dormant came from him. Decades later he still wishes he hadn’t made it. “Every time I think of it,” he says, “I hate myself”.

He drew the band a logo too. It isn’t the one on the album. Kamran hated band logos nobody could read, and Aneeq thinks he swapped in a cleaner, typed version. Aneeq’s approach was the opposite: art first, readability a long way down the list.

Hiding in Plain Sight

On paper, Hell Dormant had a third member.

The band’s own early interview credits him only as “Faisal (frost)”. His full name is Faisal Maqbool, and the stage name came from his favourite drummer, Satyricon’s Frost. Wasi barely knew him. What Wasi remembers is a man deep into death-doom, who knew an enormous amount about metal and seemed to exist outside the scene altogether. “He didn’t know anybody. He was not friends with anyone. He did not play any instrument,” Wasi says. “But this guy, his lyrics were amazing”.

Yasir Jalbani remembers a different man: “a very good friend of ours” who came to Autopsy Gothic’s jams all the time. Aneeq explains the gap simply. With people he knows, Frost is great. Everyone else, he takes his time with.

Faisal got into metal the way most of us did. Radio shows first, taping dance and alternative rock off the air. Then music shops after college with a like-minded friend, buying rock and metal and playing it day and night. A drummer in his neighbourhood, Roger Faria, kept handing him CDs. He met Kamran at university, Kamran brought in Aneeq and Yasir, and the rest of the circle came together at Autopsy Gothic’s first show at PACC.

So Frost was hiding in plain sight: at home inside Kamran’s small circle, and a stranger to almost everyone else, including the guitarist on his own album.

The plan, Wasi thinks, was for Frost to sing. At some point that plan quietly died. “It’s so obscure,” Wasi says. Even at the time, Frost was “so incredibly private, it’s insane. He didn’t want to be known. He didn’t want anyone talking to him”.

Faisal’s own account is smaller still. He never sang for Hell Dormant, and he didn’t write the lyrics either. Kamran wrote all of it. Faisal sat in while they worked out whether the words fit the music, and that, he says, was about the extent of it. Nobody can check. There was a booklet once, and nobody I’ve asked can find a copy. So the third name on Hell Dormant belongs to a lyricist who says he wrote nothing, and a singer who never sang.

Frost did end up singing, just not for Hell Dormant. Aneeq remembers a session for what was meant to be his own song, with Faisal on vocals. It started at Faisal’s home and moved to Yasir’s place for better gear. Kamran sat at the computer, programmed the drums, and recorded, mixed and mastered the track. Aneeq wrote the lyrics. Faisal sang them on the spot in a high register, and Yasir added lead harmonies at the start. Somebody decided it should be an Autopsy Gothic song, and it became “Halls to Immortality”. The singer Hell Dormant never got ended up on an Autopsy Gothic track instead. Faisal doesn’t remember recording it. Aneeq does.

Whoever held the pen, the lyrics were extreme enough to shock the guitarist. “He would show them to me and I would be horrified,” Wasi says. “Every single time, I’d be like, dude, this is sick in the head, you’re crazy”. He understood it was the genre talking: “This music is about gore. It’s a genre”. Not everyone saw it that way. The band got some angry emails from people who took the lyrics as an attack on religion, which is one reason everyone involved used a stage name. “We’re talking late ’90s, early 2000s Pakistan,” Wasi says. “You had to be a little bit anonymous”.

Twenty Packs of Smoke

Mass Grave was made in Wasi’s living room.

“We set everything up, the computer, my old Pentium,” he says. “He would bring his hard disks. He had all the studio software and the drum software. He was programming, I was set up with the guitar, and we spent a few weeks. He would stay over”.

Kamran wrote in his head. He often knew a song completely before a note was recorded. He would pick up the guitar, play a riff roughly, and ask Wasi to turn it into something precise. “He wasn’t a great guitar player,” Wasi says, “but he’d pick up the guitar and go, okay, can you do this? And then I would play it and he’d go, oh, I love it. This guy was a multi-instrumentalist. He created music in his head”.

The sessions were brutal. Weekend after weekend, they barely left the room. “Nobody was looking at their watches”. One night, with a track rolling and the metronome clicking, Kamran was supposed to hit pause. Wasi looked over and saw that he was asleep, eyes half open. Back then, in the band’s only interview, BlacKtearZ summed it up in one line: “six long and cold nights… twenty packs of smoke… empty bellies… heavy bleedin eyes… mess of wires on the floor”. Twenty-odd years later, Wasi is proudest of one thing: “We didn’t really fall apart during that process”.

The sound came straight out of those conditions. There was barely any processing. Kamran sang raw into the mic with no effects at all. “His vocals were insane,” Wasi says. “This guy was like raw into the mic”. The poor monitors left the record bass-heavy, which the interviewer at the time called out, and which makes it feel even more like something pressing up out of the ground.

Kamran picked six songs for the album, and the whole thing is over in 26 minutes. The songs came from different places. “Necro Obsession” started as one of Kamran’s rough riffs, shaped by Wasi.

“Twisted” was Wasi’s own riff with Kamran’s drums on top, and you can hear it: it swings more, less Cannibal Corpse and more metal-rocking, with a driving riff and a proper solo.

Kamran’s favourite was “Dissected”, which he described as starting “with a Cannibal Corpse touch” and a headbanging chorus, about an undead corpse at the mercy of “medical people”.

And then there was “Mass Grave”, the title track, seven minutes long and the one that stuck.

Fold, Sticker, Repeat

While all this was happening, almost nobody knew. “It was a very hush secret,” Wasi says. “People had a clue we were doing something, but not many people knew what we were doing”.

That changed when it came time to make the physical object. The CDs and inserts were assembled at Hadi’s place, which turned into a production line full of friends who had nothing to do with the band: one person folding covers, another putting on stickers, another doing something else. “There were all these people involved who had nothing to do with this project,” Wasi says. The cover image came off the internet, Aneeq says, and the logo on the front wasn’t the one he drew. The CD opened on the left, which led one foreign interviewer to wonder if the band was imitating Arabic releases. Kamran said he had never even owned a CD by an Arabic band.

The label was Outcry, an underground community Hadi started under his stage name, Lord Thor, with a fan named Omer and other diehards. In early-2000s Pakistan, a commercial label for anything that sounded like metal was out of the question. “Outcry brought us to life,” Kamran said at the time. “Outcry is our life”. Wasi’s version was blunter: getting a commercial label for metal in Pakistan was “worse than drowning in a pool of shit”.

Metal Archives lists two versions of Mass Grave on Outcry, a demo dated January 12, 2003, and a full-length CD dated February 15, 2003, and gives the band an active span of 2001 to 2005. The band itself always called it an album. The motto on the promotional material, “Serve Our Blades”, occasionally gets mistaken for the title. It wasn’t the title. It was, in Kamran’s words, “our motto or insignia”.

The Anti-Poser Commission

The band did exactly one interview I know of, with an Indian zine, as Coffin Feeder and BlacKtearZ. It is a perfect artifact of early-2000s extreme metal, and it shows the two personalities clearly.

Coffin Feeder went big. The band, he said, rose “from the ruins of a black dark crypt in Karachi”, formed by the restless souls of Autopsy Gothic and Nokturnal Rust to give the region something “heavier than hell” and to shake the “fancy looking towers of nu metal, rapcore and shitty pop”. Its basic theory was “a fantasy to be locked forever in HELL with intense pain being inflicted upon us”. Asked whether he had witnessed the horrors in his lyrics, he said no. It was all imagination, and a lifelong appetite for gore. His mother, he said, remembered him as a kid chewing uncooked meat, spilling red paint on himself and screaming.

Not everyone bought the “just imagination” line. Records like this breed urban legends, and Hell Dormant had its share. The story went around that someone involved had actually seen a real mass grave site, and that “Mass Grave” came from somewhere closer to home than a Cannibal Corpse sleeve. Nobody has ever put a place or a date to it, and that is probably how it should stay.

BlacKtearZ mostly replied with one word. His answer to the band’s origin story was “numb”. His answer on the lyrics was that they were Coffin Feeder’s “brain waste”. On commercialism: “death to the corporate bastards”.

Underneath the theatre, the interview has real things in it. Kamran said the point of the album was “to show the ugly face of humanity”, that a mass grave on the TV news is easy to watch, and the band wanted to put the agony back in. He pitched Hell Dormant as the “grindcore” band the scene had never had, while naming Autopsy Gothic, Dusk and Nokturnal Rust as the country’s death and black metal. BlacKtearZ called Dusk the oldest and added Seth and Sickore to the list of live acts. Kamran was studying for a master’s in mass communication. Wasi was 26 and working as an electronic engineer, six days a week, dawn to late night. Asked about spare time, he said that was what you got “when you are stuck in a wooden box six feet under the earth”.

Kamran also complained about crowds full of nu metal kids posing at underground gigs, recalled someone screaming for the Backstreet Boys, and floated an “anti-poser commission” to throw them out. Which is funny, because on October 28, 2000, at the Alliance Française, Kamran had got up with Messiah and sung Korn’s “Blind”. He promised the next album, Dawn of Impalement, would be “heavier, gorier and uglier”. It was never made.

No Stage Required

Hell Dormant never played a show. It couldn’t, really. “When I was recording it, I was thinking, how would we ever play it live?” Wasi says. “The only guy who could do those kind of drums at that time was Kami. But then he’d have had to sing as well”.

So the record did the touring instead. That’s why that night stuck with me. Hell Dormant wasn’t on the bill. The song took over the venue between soundcheck and show, played in the dark to a crowd that had come to see other bands.

It went further than that. Wasi left Pakistan in August 2003 and took copies with him to London. His girlfriend at the time knew the DJ at a long-running Friday metal night in a pub in East London, the one Wasi remembers as the place where Iron Maiden got its start, which would make it the Ruskin Arms. The night ran from nine until three in the morning and was, as Wasi remembers it, the most popular metal night in London. One Friday the DJ played “Mass Grave”. Another time, “Twisted”.

“At first they were like, what the hell is this?” Wasi says. “Then everyone came around to the DJ and he said, oh, this is a band from Pakistan. And they were like, what? Pakistan had metal music?”

“All Right, This Is Good Enough”

The timing tells you how completely Hell Dormant took over. In the summer of 2003, a couple of weeks before Wasi left for London, Nokturnal Rust finally recorded its only original song, “Fades to Eternity”. Kamran played drums, but his head was elsewhere. “He was so heavily involved in Hell Dormant at that time,” Wasi says, “that I think Kami just did like, all right, this is good enough”.

Wasi still thinks Nokturnal Rust made a mistake by concentrating on rehearsing and playing live instead of writing. “We could have done an entire album,” he says. The side project did the thing the main band never got round to.

Lifetimes Two and Three

Hell Dormant didn’t end so much as stop. Metal Archives calls it split up after 2005. There was no farewell, no last show, because there had never been a first one.

Kamran carried Coffin Feeder onward: Autopsy Gothic, a spell drumming in Babar Sheikh’s reformed Dusk in 2006, Karachi Butcher Clan, and drums with Faraz Haider, both in Andher and in Faraz’s solo band. Wasi thinks the darkness on that record was real. “It’s in him,” he says of Kamran, “and it comes out in forms of art”.

Wasi left in 2003 and built what he calls two or three more lifetimes: the gothic/alternative band Mystica in London, then Lyre of Zurah, a melodic progressive rock project he formed in 2015. These days he still works in engineering, somewhere it snows in May, and runs a boutique amp and pedal company on the side.

Aneeq is still making music and art in the underground. Frost, true to form, took the longest to find. He lives in North America now. When he finally talked, it was mostly to say how little he’d done.

Based on my 2026 interviews with Wasi Raza and Faisal Maqbool, notes from Aneeq Zaman, Hell Dormant’s early-2000s zine interview as Coffin Feeder and BlacKtearZ, and Metal Archives. Additional details from Yasir Jalbani. If you have Hell Dormant or Outcry material, get in touch.