Photo: Robert Manna

Walking through droves of bicycles and beards to the back alley behind Lee’s Palace, the members of Blood Ceremony stop intermittently to greet the cadre of friends and fans they recognize along the way. It’s obvious they’re comfortable being back in Toronto.

It’s their hometown, after all, even if they rarely make it through on tour. While they’ve been known to play isolated dates across the city, their most recent stop supporting Kylesa is only their second mid-circuit trip through the big smoke, a curious footnote on the resume of a Canadian export that’s sold out shows in England and run successful headlining stints in Europe.

By all instances Blood Ceremony are a band defined not as much by their foundations—interesting as their proto-metal interpretations are—but by their eccentricities. And talking to them, they seem fine with that.

“Any group is going to need some sort of talking point, some kind of 10-second sound bite,” says bassist Lucas Gadke. “For us, it’s like, ‘witch rock! With a flute! And a girl singer!’”

Singer Alia O’Brien is the first to acknowledge that she takes a theatrical approach to her performance, but as she explains, their “witch rock” image is just a part of her personality the stage allows to emerge.

“I mean, the guys from Cannibal Corpse don’t act like that around their moms,” jokes Gadke.

“A lot of people ask, ‘why the flute?’ and for me it’s because that’s what I learned to play at a young age,” says O’Brien. “It’s not a novelty for me. It’s the instrument that I practice for hours and hours each day. It’s my tool.”

And if that tool has come to define them over the years, it’s the execution, not the existence, that’s done it.

Blood Ceremony’s latest album The Eldritch Dark continues to chase the quartet down the mystical rabbit hole, distancing them further from their already straggling metal roots and towards a more heavily defined folk influence.

“I think with this one we wanted to show off everybody’s musical tastes,” explains Gadke, who says he and guitarist Sean Kennedy’s love of folk helped shape the band’s evolving sound.  Still, he’s not ready to abandon heaviness altogether, and when he mentions the massive breakdown at the end of album closer “The Magician,” O’Brien can’t wait to interject.

“I wrote it,” she says. “But you pushed for it to be heavy as fuck.”

This article originally appeared in the July 2013 issue of AUX Magazine. Download and subscribe for free in Google Play for Android devices, and the App Store for iPhone and iPad.