Lore · CUNTPUMMEL

Origins

CUNTPUMMEL formed in Bay 3 of Dutch’s Muffler & Brake: five large, unwashed men who had watched too many action movies and decided, with no evidence, that they were in one. They play metal. They title their songs like pompous Old English poets. They believe they are heroes.

They have no singer. Nobody remembers deciding that; they just never got around to holding auditions, and the music has been instrumental ever since. The band calls it a creative choice. Dutch calls it the only reason the neighbors haven’t called the cops.

Before the Rift

The early years were Earth, stretched to breaking: cocaine jetski pursuits, knife fights in hot tubs, helicopters suplexed out of the sky, and every one of them ending with the band walking away from an explosion in slow motion. Miami Vice cool. Magnum P.I. mustaches. Trucks, guns, grease, and a hygiene situation the health department still talks about.

No zombies. No demons. No aliens. Just men, machines, and a profound misunderstanding of what heroism is. Even the Viking album was only that: five men who bought horned helmets at a gas station and never took them off.

The Rift (1996)

Then they called the devil. Nobody agrees why. Lance says it was for the art; Sal says it was a dare; Buck said nothing, which is his whole thing. The summoning tore a rift between dimensions, right over Bay 3, and the last song on that record, played backwards, finished the job.

It never closed. Dutch has put a tarp over it.

After the Rift

Everything that was ever kept out came through. Zombies at the swamp gas station. The devil’s own 18-wheeler, tailgating. An evil computer virus that crawled out of a dial-up modem in 1999 and took the planet. And further down the road, a far future where the machines won and the band, somehow, ended up in power armor.

Between the apocalypses, they still go home, crack a beer, and pretend nothing happened. Nobody believes them.