Priestess

Priestess rose out of the ashes of a Montreal punk band called the Dropouts: when everyone but Mikey Heppner walked out, he changed the sound, found new bandmates and changed the name. The lineup that stuck had Heppner singing and playing guitar, Dan Watchorn on the other guitar, Vince Nudo on drums and Mike Dyball on bass, with Watchorn and Nudo pitching in on vocals too.

Their debut, Hello Master, came out on the independent Indica label in 2005, and it's a riff-heavy slab of hard rock and stoner sludge that had everybody reaching for Black Sabbath and AC/DC comparisons. The band idolized both but swore they weren't trying to copy anyone, and they ended up counted among the most important names in that decade's retro rock boom. "Talk to Her" is pure swagger, and RCA picked the album up for the rest of the world the following year. Then "Lay Down" landed in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and took the band much further.

The second album was trouble. RCA didn't like the prog-leaning Prior to the Fire and feared it wouldn't sell, so the band walked, and the record finally surfaced on Indica in Canada in 2009 and on Tee Pee Records elsewhere in 2010. In 2012 they postponed a third album and scrapped a European tour, and nothing more was heard from them.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.