Every great band has an origin story, but few are as serendipitous as the tale of how Metal to the Core came to be. It all started in 2014 with a failed audition, two disappointed musicians, and a decision to drown their sorrows in beer and conversation.

Normand Lewis, a 19-year-old guitarist and vocalist from Los Angeles, had been perfecting his craft for years when he heard about an open audition for an established metal band looking for a new frontman. Meanwhile, Veyra Shade, fresh from Amsterdam’s electronic music scene and eager to break into American rock, had learned about the same opportunity through online forums.

“I remember walking into that audition room thinking this was my big break,” Lewis recalled in a recent interview. “I’d prepared for weeks, worked on their songs until I could play them in my sleep. I was so confident.”

Shade’s preparation had been different but equally intense. Having recently transitioned from DJ decks to bass guitar, he spent countless hours adapting his electronic music sensibilities to rock structures. “I knew my background was unconventional,” he admitted. “But I thought that might actually work in my favor.”

Both musicians were rejected.

The reasons were different – Lewis was deemed “too experimental” in his vocal approach, while Shade was told his bass playing, though technically proficient, “didn’t fit the traditional metal sound they were seeking.” Both left the audition feeling dejected and questioning their musical futures.

“I was sitting outside this little dive bar near the audition venue, just staring at my guitar case and wondering if I should give up,” Lewis remembered. “Then this guy with an Amsterdam accent sits down next to me and starts laughing – not in a mean way, just this frustrated, absurd laugh.”

That guy was Veyra Shade, who had recognized Lewis from the audition waiting room. “We started talking about how ridiculous the whole situation was,” Shade explained. “Here we were, two musicians who had traveled significant distances for this opportunity, both rejected for essentially the same reason – we didn’t fit their mold.”

What followed was a four-hour conversation over increasingly cheap beer, during which the two musicians discovered they shared not just similar frustrations, but complementary visions for what metal music could become. Lewis’s songwriting explored themes that resonated with Shade’s electronic background, while Shade’s innovative approach to bass playing offered the perfect foundation for Lewis’s experimental vocal ideas.

“By the end of that night, we had basically outlined what would become our sound,” Lewis said. “We decided that if nobody wanted us as we were, we’d create something entirely our own.”

The addition of drummer Draven Holt came months later, in circumstances that have become part of band folklore. A chance encounter that began with an argument and ended with laughter, Holt’s inclusion completed the trio that would spend the next decade developing their craft in venues that most major label scouts never visit.

“Looking back, getting rejected from that audition was the best thing that could have happened to us,” Shade reflected. “If either of us had been accepted, Metal to the Core would never have existed. Sometimes failure is just redirection toward something better.”

The band’s decade-long journey from that disappointed evening to their recent record deal with NotJustPrompts Records serves as a testament to the power of persistence and the importance of finding collaborators who share your vision, even when the rest of the world doesn’t understand it yet.

“We spent ten years proving that our ‘unconventional’ approach was actually exactly what we needed to be doing,” Lewis concluded. “That failed audition didn’t end our careers – it started them.”