When St. Louis-native Rick Giordano formed The Lion’s Daughter in 2007, the singer and guitarist was living through what he describes as one of the worst periods in his life.
“That’s kind of why the Lion’s Daughter started. The band was ugly, bleak, and painful because that was my world at the time,” says Giordano, who pulls no punches when asked about the band’s early days: “18 years ago if you asked me what I would be doing in 2025, I would have said, for sure, that I’d already be a corpse in the ground.”
Get a guide to the region’s booming music scene
Subscribe to the St. Louis Music newsletter to discover upcoming concerts, local artists to watch, and more across an eclectic playlist of genres.
On Saturday, June 21 The Lion’s Daughter will commemorate nearly two decades of performing, recording, and touring with one final show at Off Broadway alongside a lineup of longtime friends and collaborators including Fister, Sine Nomine, Path of Might, and Furnace Floor. While many bands break up due to creative differences or unfortunate circumstances, The Lion’s Daughter made a decision to, in Giordano’s own words, “put out the fire while it’s still hot.”
In contrast to his band’s dark inception, Giordano now lives a more idyllic life. He currently owns and operates The Headless Bat, a heavy metal-themed pizzeria and bar filled with horror posters, pinball machines, and many other oddities including an enormous ceramic sculpture of a tiger.
“I live in a house that rules and I’ve got my dog, Debbie, that I love. I get to choose who I work with, and I have great friends that I trust. There’s nothing less metal than being happy, but here we are,” Giordano says.
With Giordano on guitar and vocals, Erik Ramsier on drums, and Scott Fogelbach on bass and vocals, The Lion’s Daughter spent its early days playing shows with like-minded metal bands at now-defunct venues such Fubar and Lemp Arts Center. From its first major release in 2011, a split with St. Louis band Fister titled And Their Masters Bled For Days, to 2023 album Bath House, the original trio has remained intact—a rarity for any band that has stayed active for such a long period of time. In fact, the only notable changes over the years include the addition of synthesizers and a fourth member, guitarist Aaron Akin.
“There are a lot of people who are part of The Lion’s Daughter who aren’t, you know, the guys in the band. I feel really lucky to have had the privilege to work with the people that we have,” Giordano says.
Early milestones for The Lion’s Daughter include opening for Weedeater and Torche in St. Louis, and hitting the road with Fister in 2013 for the group’s first tour to the east coast. Giordano counts playing with Pig Destroyer in Chicago as the pivotal point when the metal band started to make new goals and explore greater opportunities.
“We started thinking about trying to sign with a bigger label and do this thing for real. We started actually analyzing what we were doing and thinking ‘is this actually any good?’ And that is something a lot of bands forget to do. We upped our quality control big time,” he says.
After signing with record label Season of Mist, known for their wide-ranging catalog of metal subgenres, The Lion’s Daughter recorded a trio of albums produced by Chicago-based engineer and musician Sanford Parker. It wasn’t until 2018’s Future Cult, the second of these records, that the band started to break through.
“It really felt like we were getting way more media coverage, and our label spent a lot of money to make a legit video. Future Cult felt true to who I am and what my interests are. I was pleasantly surprised that people received such a weird album so well,” Giordano says.
In 2019, The Lion’s Daughter embarked on its first European tour and even booked what was once considered to be a dream scenario for Giordano and company: A full tour of the United States opening for legendary progressive-rock band Goblin.
“We were thrilled. It got announced, canceled, then rebooked on two separate occasions in 2020 and 2021,” says Giordano. Despite the setback, the band spent the COVID era writing and refining Skin Show, an album that could easily be mistaken as the soundtrack to a cyberpunk horror film.
Of the 11 releases available through the group’s Bandcamp, 2016’s Nora-Fest stands out as emblematic of The Lion’s Daughter’s ethos. Twenty-five different bands recorded 25 different punk covers for an album that was sold with all proceeds going to benefit Stray Rescue of St. Louis, an organization that rescues strays, restores neglected animals to health and places them in adoptive homes.
“I think doing a final show is a cool way to say goodbye and kind of say thank you to the people who support us. Making the entire thing a Stray Rescue benefit is just a classy move. It kind of encapsulates what’s always been the ideology behind our band: We may be misanthropic and hate people, but we love dogs,” says Giordano, who once volunteered for the organization and witnessed the challenges that the staff faces every day.
“I gave it a shot, and I don’t have what it takes. The way I can sleep at night now is to donate money and help them along. If I can raise money by screaming and playing songs in my stupid little band, then I have to do that,” he says.
From their recurring “Release the Hounds” events to a myriad of other benefit shows, The Lion’s Daughter have helped raise more than $25,000 for Stray Rescue to date. With any luck, that number will grow to over $30,000 after this Saturday’s event.
“To me, there’s nothing sad about this. We’re all going to keep making music. All those albums are still there. You can throw a record on right now and listen. It’s a book that’s full of chapters and the book is coming to end. There’s a new story to write. There’s other stuff out there to do,” he says.
Ahead of the final show at Off Broadway on June 21, we asked Giordano to break down every major release from The Lion’s Daughter and what making each album meant to him personally.
READ MORE: The Big St. Louis Concert List
And Their Masters Bled For Days (Hands Up, May 2011)
Our first LP was a split release with our friends in Fister, partially because we believed that we were only making music for each other’s bands and no one else was going to listen to it. This style of music was non-existent in St. Louis at the time, so why would we think otherwise? Our four songs vary quite a bit, dabbling in different genres, fast tempos, crushingly slow tempos—all extremely hate-filled and misanthropic. Hands Up Recordings released the vinyl, but this was all very DIY. The artwork was even done by my next door neighbor, Coby Ellison.
Shame on Us All (Pissfork, June 2012)
The fact that we rarely played any songs from this album, even right after it was released, says a lot about it. We were trying to push boundaries and expand our sound, but ultimately created a pretty boring album that falls into your basic “blackened sludge” category. We actually knocked out this entire record and an EP on the same day. My voice was so blown that it sounds like I’m trying to force out a dump throughout most of the record. It’s got a decent riff or two on it, but in general, we’d say skip this one.
A Black Sea (Good Die Young, November 2013)
When Good Die Young Records approached us in early 2013 about a new record, we honestly had no interest. Shame on Us All was such a dud that the idea of doing that same album again struck us as tedious and boring. However, we did have an idea to record some music with our friends in Indian Blanket. The idea of collaborating with musicians from such a polar opposite kind of genre was intriguing to us. What we’d been doing felt tired and needed freshening up. Full credit to Joe Andert of Indian Blanket and the crew for everything that’s good about this album.
Existence is Horror (Season of Mist, January 2016)
This is our first of three albums for Season of Mist with Sanford Parker producing. This was an exciting time. We’d been picked up by a giant international label who was home to many of our favorite bands. Sanford was someone I’d wanted to work with for years, and it was great having so much time and so many resources to utilize. This was when we began to focus our sound and incorporate the horror and soundtrack elements we were such fans of. We hadn’t figured out how to incorporate synthesizers yet, so instead relied on a heavy arsenal of effects pedals.
Future Cult (Season of Mist, July 2018)
I think that this is where the band finally found its identity. We finally took the time to figure out how to integrate synthesizers into our music, and this album was really an exciting experiment for us. Once the idea struck to combine synth-driven horror soundtracks with black metal, the album kind of wrote itself. We thought people would hate it, but it was surprisingly well received. We started getting more press, more interest, better tours. We didn’t sound like anyone, and no one sounded like us. I’m still very proud of that record. I can’t believe it worked.
Skin Show (Season of Mist, April 2021)
Ah, the COVID album. This entire thing was written in my house when I couldn’t leave. This was the natural continuation of Future Cult, but all a bit more cold and isolated, which I attribute to the circumstances under which it was written. The intention with this album was to take our already established formula and write bigger and better songs with it. There are many more rock and industrial elements than we’d used in the past. While it’s all still themed in horror, much of it is much more personal. I feel like this is our darkest album for sure.
Bath House (self-released, October 2023)
In many ways, this is the album that I’m the most proud of. Clean vocals, pop song structures, and crooner-style ballads never seemed like an option in this band, and I was super motivated by the challenge of breaking those rules. This album is lean and focused but also dense. It’s brutal but catchy. Strange and intriguing but oddly familiar. I just don’t see how we’d ever write an album better than this one. I never thought I could write a song like “End Credits,” and to me, it really is a fitting conclusion to the story of this band.
