Goblin, the Most Menacing Cinematic Rock Band, Makes Its Music City Debut

For more than four decades, Goblin has been the apotheosis of musical malevolence. Across hiatuses and permutations of their assorted membership, they’ve helped shape the imagination of horror cinema by rocking as hard as your metal favorites, harnessing the baroque instrumentation of legendary classical composers, making asses shake on the dance floor with unbridled disco delight, and hurdling time signatures with the ease of the freest of free-jazz ensembles. 

The group began in 1972 as Oliver, a prog-rock project featuring keyboardist Claudio Simonetti, bassist Fabio Pignatelli and guitarist Massimo Morante; their evolution into a major authority in the sound of the sublimely sinister began in 1975. That year, the success of their first release as Goblin, the soundtrack for Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (aka Deep Red or The Hatchet Murders), catapulted them to a degree of international recognition that few Italian rock acts of any stripe have enjoyed. 

Their next project with Argento is what cemented their reputation with horror cinephiles worldwide. The soundtrack to 1977’s Suspiria remains an untouchable classic, in which the group masterfully manipulates music-box fugues, Philip Glass-style synth arpeggiation and ferocious percussion into an unnerving, disorienting haze. Like Bernard Herrmann’s piercing strings in Psycho or John Carpenter’s eerie synthesizers in Halloween, Goblin’s distinctive sounds have become inextricably intertwined with the visceral experience of watching the highly influential film. 

Goblin’s compositions for subsequent movies spanned an array of genres, adapting to shifts in musical aesthetics both inside and outside the cinema universe. They expanded their reach to include the motorcycle-mayhem-and-Cathedral-of-Commerce vibes of George Romero’s Zombi (only on the European release, unfortunately, as the U.S. release titled Dawn of the Dead features stock music in place of Goblin’s cues); the Italian release of the Australian psychokinetic shocker Patrick; the goth sleaze of Buio Omega (aka The Final Darkness or Buried Alive); and even Luigi Cozzi’s bonkers James Bond-meets-Alien-meets-Brundlefly film Contamination.

Goblin made a big stylistic leap for Argento’s 1982 film Tenebre, offering up a careening carousel of art funk and disco. Due to a dispute over the name “Goblin,” the music was credited to “Simonetti-Pignatelli-Morante,” but it is still defiantly a Goblin score. It’s a remarkable record, the missing link between Cerrone’s Supernature and Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam With Full Force. It slides into Halloween playlists just as easily as it sits alongside Talking Heads records of the time and freestyle, which was then an emergent sound on New York dance floors. When France’s epic house duo Justice sampled the film’s main theme for their track “Phantom” in 2007, it led to a whole new generation of Goblin fans, completely outside of the usual horror channels.

The story of Goblin’s hiatuses, re-formations, spinoffs and restructuring is as twisty and turny as any film they’ve scored, but the reunion of the core late-’70s lineup — Simonetti, Pignatelli and Morante, with Agostino Marangolo on drums — for Argento’s 2001 thriller Nonhosonno (Sleepless) was cause for rejoicing. Sleek and versatile, with crunchy guitar hooks and the occasional drum and bass loop, this was a sign that Goblin had found that old dark magic again.

After another decade of various reincarnations, the group headed out on its first North American tour in the fall of 2013, which skipped right over Nashville. But there’s been another new wave of Goblin awareness, thanks to the 40th anniversary of Suspiria (which had two smash screening engagements here), and they’re back on the road. One becomes grateful to the internet for keeping track of who exactly is doing what: Currently, Goblin is Pignatelli, Morante and Marangolo, without Simonetti but with keyboardist Maurizio Guarini, whose credits as a Goblin member include Suspiria, Patrick and Buio Omega. 

On Thursday, the band that’s carried the torch for inventive musical mayhem for some 45 years finally makes its Music City debut. Horror fans and prog partisans have known the group for decades, but this intimate engagement at Exit/In offers everyone the chance to experience one of the greatest cinematic rock bands in all its bone-chilling glory. Menacing, magical and merciless, Goblin is coming, and the night is right for something monstrous.

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To set the mood properly, stream some of Goblin's most fiendish compositions below.