SWAMPSCOTT — The heavy metal band Ice Nine Kills, currently traversing the globe on tour with Metallica, will perform at the Lynn Auditorium on Sept. 9. For the band’s lead singer Spencer Charnas, of Swampscott, the North Shore gig marks a victorious homecoming.
In 2000, Charnas started the band, originally named Ice Nine, with some friends he met attending Swampscott High School. Ice Nine’s first big break, Charnas said, was when the young band made it to the finals of the WBCN High School Battle of the Bands.
“We really just cut our teeth in that scene, growing up playing at the Marblehead Community Center and Swampscott High School in the cafeteria and the gymnasium,” Charnas said. “We were playing all kinds of places all over the North Shore, mainly the Knights of Columbus centers and VFW halls.”
Charnas attended Suffolk University after graduating Swampscott High School for a year and a half before he and his band members hit the road, playing shows and selling albums wherever they could — including sneaking into the Warped Tour music festival to sell their digital albums.
“I was really just sort of going through the motions (at Suffolk) because I really wanted to get out there and out on the road. (Ice Nine) was really the only band I had ever played with,” Charnas said. “For the first 10 years or so, we didn’t have any label. We didn’t have any managers. We just decided that we were going to make this happen no matter what, so we got in the van and we just hit the road.”
The group changed its name to Ice Nine Kills to discern it from another band called Ice Nine. It was Ice Nine Kills’ decision to produce horror-themed albums, Charnas said, that accelerated its rise to success. In 2021, the band’s album hit number two on the Billboard Top 200’s “Current Rock” category.
As Ice Nine Kills rose in popularity, Charnas said he was able to live out a number of childhood dreams, including his band’s poster making an appearance in the 2023 “Scream 6″ horror movie, and perhaps the most significant, touring with his idol: Metallica.
“They’ve always been one of my favorite bands of all time — they’re one of the reasons why I started playing guitar and how I got into heavy metal. I remember seeing them at the Fleet Center with my dad in ’96 or ’97,” Charnas said. “They’re such down-to-earth guys. They come and say hello to us in our dressing room and just really make us feel welcome… It was a dream to get that call.”
Ice Nine Kills will stay on Metallica’s world tour until the end of next summer, when it will wrap up its year of opening for the legendary rock group at Boston’s Gillette Stadium.
While he travels the world playing music, Charnas will make a stop on the North Shore for the band’s sold-out Sept. 9 Lynn Auditorium show, as well as for the Silver Scream Convention — Charnas’ three-day horror festival featuring wrestlers, famous horror actors, makeup artists, and commentators — Sept. 8-10 at the DoubleTree hotel in Danvers.
Growing up near Salem, and attending the Spooky World attractions in Berlin with his father as a young child, Charnas said, kicked off his lifelong love for the horror genre.
“At the end of the haunted hayride you can meet some of the celebrities — the villains, the stars of your favorite horror movie,” Charnas said. “I met Kane Hodder who played Jason Voorhees, George Wilbur who played Michael Myers. I still have his autograph on my masks and I think that really laid the foundation for this.”
Recently, Ice Nine Kills attended a book-signing in Union Square, New York City, for its recent book “The Silver Scream,” which is based on the band’s first horror album.
Despite the band’s international success and rising popularity, Charnas said Ice Nine Kills remains, at its heart, a North Shore metal band.
“We’re still the same guys we always were when we started,” Charnas said. “We just happened to get a little bit lucky.”
