Artist Profile: Iguana Death Cult

Photo Credit: Siem van Woerkom

Iguana Death Cult came to life as the garage-punk passion project of four teenage friends, and it has seen its fair share of transformations over the roughly 12 years since its inception. But their newest record, Guns Out, represents more than just a sonic evolution for the Rotterdam-based band. After two of the band’s original members made the difficult decision to move on from the project, Guns Out is a triumphant and searing continuation of the psychedelic and funk-rooted influences that defined their earliest efforts.

As unsuited for children as the name may sound, Iguana Death Cult’s story truly extends back to frontman Jeroen Reek’s childhood— from the time he was young, his infatuation with music had taken hold of his life. He had an elderly neighbor that would sit for hours and play the piano, and he would often knock on her door to see if she’d be willing to let him sit and watch.

After attending a classically-oriented music school where he was trained on the trombone, he picked up a bass guitar for the first time, later grabbing an electric guitar around the age of 15. From essentially that moment, he was hooked. He began routinely jamming with his friend, Tobias Opschoor, and the duo’s earliest collaborations would later become the basis for Iguana Death Cult.

When they decided to form a band, they linked up with bassist Justin Boer and drummer Arjen van Opstal. They all came from a very alternative rock-centric background, and their early work wears those influences on its sleeves.

But everything changed when Reek happened upon a ticket to the Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht, where he saw acts like Ty Segall, the Allah-Las, Jacco Gardner, and the Night Beats for the first time. He was immediately enamored by their fuzzed-out, raw sound, and he reported back to the band that, from that moment on, their sound would lean toward what he perceived as a new musical world.

“Of course the White Stripes, for instance ,is also garage rock, but it's more bluesy— it's way more rooted in blues music— and I think the even more unpolished psychedelic sound of bands like White Fence and Ty Segall… it's just a little weirder but freer and very expressive and there felt like there were less boundaries in a way.”

They sold a large portion of their existing equipment and replaced it with pieces more suited for their new sonic pursuit. Their first full-length project, The First Stirrings of Hideous Insect Life, is very heavily influenced by these changes— songs like “The Dreamer” and “Mutterschiff 308” infuse the classic, distorted tones of the garage rock revival into the deeply plaintive lyrical delivery that has characterized the band since its early days.

Their second project, 2019’s Nude Casino, took a leap into a more psychedelic sound, one that was largely influenced by their move into a full-blown studio. During that recording process, they had access to instruments and tools they had never had before, and they wholeheartedly dove into incorporating those within their songwriting and arrangement process. 

The inclusion of those layers made it necessary to add a fifth member to the band, and they sought out and invited Jimmy de Kok to take over the keys for the group. On their third project, Echo Palace, de Kok took on a major songwriting role, and you can feel his presence and experimentations deeply over the course of the album’s 11-track run.

But when that album was released in 2023, it felt almost as though something intangible had come to an end. Each of the band’s members had jobs and other commitments to juggle in addition to Iguana Death Cult, and when van Opstal and Boer officially left the band in 2024, Reek and the band’s other founding member, Opschoor, had a serious talk about bringing the project to its natural conclusion.

But they knew in their hearts that, at the end of the day, they were truly just getting started.

“It was like, ‘Are we gonna keep on doing this? Maybe it's a good time to just stop now.’ We said that to each other, and within a week, me and Tobias [Opschoor] were on the phone like ‘We can not stop this now— we don't want to.’ So we decided to write a new album and got so much energy from that decision. It was like we were in sort of a manic state almost for a couple weeks.”

Guns Out was ‘manic’ not only in its creative process but also in its final manifestations. Once they added a new drummer in Uri Rennert (who had recently concluded a stint with The Brian Jonestown Massacre), the band got together as frequently as they could in a short span of time, riding the wave of creative inspiration they had found with their decision to keep the project alive.

The result was a blistering, charismatic, and deeply energetic work of art. From the very first track, Guns Out takes a distinctly post-punk-influenced approach while managing to maintain the tight rhythms and intentionally dispersed sonic force for which Iguana Death Cult has become known. It is, across each of its 10 tracks, a testament to the ongoing creative force of the band’s remaining members and the new energies and rhythms that Rennert has brought into the fold.

Now, just a month removed from the release of Guns Out, Reek already has a grouping of songs written for their next project— one that he hopes will take the evolutions of their recent release and, through a longer and more drawn-out writing process, multiply them in their enthralling power.

“I don't want to make the same album again, so it's going to evolve into something different… This one we wrote so fast, and we just wanted to get an album out. For the next one I'm thinking, let's go on an adventure again and discover some new possibilities and take our time a little more.”