Alright, let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate: this track doesn’t mess around. “Dead Man Walking” by Zach Adams hits you with a busted muffler—loud, raw, and dripping with that old-school metal grit. But it’s not just another headbanger’s anthem. This thing has a story, and Adams isn’t shy about letting you know it.
Based out of Anchorage, Alaska, this guy operates way outside the usual music-industry bubble. He calls himself a fantasy writer, music maker, and a “general nuisance”—and honestly, that self-deprecating humour shows up in everything he does. He runs his own label, Splitting Adams Entertainment, which means he answers to nobody. No corporate suits, no A&R guys telling him to soften the edges. He produced and recorded this entirely on his own terms, and you can hear that freedom in every distorted chord.
The song is the first piece of an eleven-track soundtrack he’s building for his horror/fantasy novel Dead Man Walking: Narrator’s Cut. But don’t think of this as background music for a book—it’s a stand-alone beast. Adams describes his sound as “progressive grunge,” and that label fits like a torn leather jacket. You’ve got the sludgy, downtuned riffs that nod to Black Sabbath, the dark, melodic unease of Alice in Chains, and the sheer thrash energy of Metallica. But then he throws in a curveball—he says the first demo came out of him trying to learn Danny Elfman’s Batman theme on guitar. That cinematic weirdness seeps into the arrangement, giving it a dramatic, almost theatrical lift without losing any of its punch.
The track dives straight into the anxiety pit. Adams has been open about his own battles with anxiety and depression, and he channels that into the song’s central character, a regular guy named Isaac who stumbles into magic and then has to panic his way through supernatural horrors. The music mirrors that spiral: it starts tense, builds like a pressure cooker, and then explodes in a cathartic roar that feels less like a performance and more like a release.
“Dead Man Walking” is a doorway into a larger universe where horror, fantasy, and heavy guitars collide. And for a first chapter? It’s a hell of a hook.