Andy Biersack

Andy Biersack — vocalist, lyricist and founder of Black Veil Brides — put the band together as a teenager in Cincinnati and moved to Los Angeles at eighteen to carry it forward. His wager was on image as much as music. At a moment when American heavy rock tended towards plainness, Black Veil Brides adopted heavy makeup, leather and openly theatrical staging — a visual vocabulary inherited from 1980s glam metal and shock rock, reintroduced into a scene that had abandoned it. The choice earned the band both a mass audience and constant hostility, and Biersack always defended it as part of the work, not as strategy. His lyrics deal with rejection, belonging and resistance to social hierarchies, addressed to teenagers who recognised themselves in the same place — which turned the group into a phenomenon of identification before it was a musical one. On Wretched and Divine: The Story of the Wild Ones (2013) he took this to a full concept album, with narrative and film. He also keeps Andy Black, a solo project working with pop rock and synthesizers, far from metal — and is the author of books and of work outside music, an unusual path for a vocalist formed in that circuit.