Teenage Headbangers Get a Music-Biz Crash Course in ‘Breaking a Monster’

Going viral guarantees little beyond having your fifteen minutes of fame reuploaded to YouTube in ever diminishing quality, the original video (and its impressive view count) eventually lost to time and/or takedown notices. That makes Unlocking the Truth’s second act as a signed band doubly impressive: The teen group is a two-time anomaly. As that Times Square street
performance that stormed the internet makes clear, the heavy metal power trio’s chops belie the age of its members.

Luke Meyer’s Breaking a Monster follows Malcolm, Alec, and Jarad as their manager escorts them to Los Angeles to sign a $1.8 million, five-album deal with Sony. That process entails graduating from busking on sidewalks with their
angular, downtuned axes to playing a Coachella gig amplified by Orange half-stacks. It’d be easy to dismiss Unlocking the Truth as a flash-in-the-pan novelty, but these kids can play — namely, a kind of breakdown-heavy metalcore that suffers from the same problem as approximately 97 percent of teenage metal bands: bad vocals and lyrics. (“I don’t know if this is real or he’s watching it
on Degrassi,” their manager says after
reciting one of their songs.)

Despite a wealth of esoteric subgenres, heavy metal isn’t known for its
diversity. That makes the all-black
Unlocking the Truth notable beyond
the average age of its three members, whose experiences with metal seem to
be the same as most other nascent headbangers’: thrilled disbelief that music so intricate and powerful even exists. Metal, like punk, inspires its listeners to start bands of their own at a disproportionate rate — Unlocking the Truth is the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

But they’re still thirteen-year-olds, which leads to Breaking a Monster‘s funniest moments: one of the boys proclaiming that his current girlfriend, while not his first, is definitely his best; their manager telling someone on the phone that the three kids all love L.A. because it reminds them of the latest Grand Theft Auto game.

You keep waiting for these kids to be
exploited, of course, and what’s made it onscreen confirms the impression you’ll probably already have — that they signed a major deal not expecting to be subject to executives’ whims with little agency of their own. What’s happened since the cameras stopped rolling is more telling than what the filmmakers’ time frame allowed them to capture: Unlocking the Truth have already gotten out of their five-album deal and just released their first record — without the help of Sony.

As for what comes next, we’ll have to wait and see — the official video for the band’s first single boasts 100,000 views as of this writing, which is impressive until you remember that their most famous street performance has nearly 2 million.

Breaking a Monster

Directed by Luke Meyer

Abramorama

Opens June 24, Landmark Sunshine