Embalmer by day, rock star by night: How Carla Harvey bridges death and music in L.A.

Clad in a sleeveless leather top that clings like Saran Wrap, a black belt with silver metal eyelets, and shorts that look two sizes too small, veteran rocker Carla Harvey wriggles, shimmies, headbangs, and bounces around the tiny stage of the Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood. It’s her second-ever gig with her new group Violent Hour, and backing her are four young, similarly dressed musicians. “You are a rock star, girl!” shouts someone in the audience. “You’re a rock star,” Harvey shoots back in a breathy whisper, sprouting a wide grin. As Violent Hour launch into the set closer, the Motorhead-meets-Guns-N’-Roses barrage of “Sick Ones,” fans bob their heads to the beat. The song is the fastest, heaviest track on the band's eclectic self-titled debut EP, which features music styles that soundtracked Harvey’s adolescence, including ’80s metal, hard rock, and alternative. More than anything, Violent Hour marks a rediscovery of joyful vitality after Harvey’s ugly split with her former metal band, Butcher Babies, which she co-formed and performed in for 14 years. If Harvey's departure from Butcher Babies marked the death of a dream, Violent Hour has triggered a resurrection that resounds with symbolism from her chosen careers. Having worked with the dead and dying almost as long as she has been in bands, the singer has discovered a strong connection between death and music. “For me, the two inspire one another,” she says. “Knowing death is on the horizon makes me want to create art and music. Having those kinds of things to leave behind is the only way you can live on after you’re gone. Thinking of some kid 50 years from now playing something I’ve recorded is kinda magical.” Harvey is as knowledgeable about death sciences as she is about metal. Over the past decade, she has been an embalmer, funeral director, hospice worker, and end-of-life therapist. She recently earned her master's of science degree in thanatology (the study of death), and by day she’s a grief therapist for Parting Stone, a company that makes rocks out of cremated remains so friends and family members can keep reminders of their loved ones or leave them in places that were important to the deceased. Her first exposure to death was at age five when she attended her grandfather’s funeral. At the wake, family members tried to soften the blow for the impressionable young girl. “Granddad’s in heaven,” said one relative. “He’s just sleeping,” said another. Harvey was unconvinced. “When I looked at him in the casket, I was like, ‘Wait a second. He’s gone. He’s dead. He’s not here and there is no heaven,’” she recalls on a Saturday afternoon over a Zoom call from Galpin Auto Sports Speed Shop in Van Nuys, where Violent Hour will soon pose for their first promotional photo shoot. “I knew that everything people told me about death wasn’t true. I became an atheist on the spot.” Early exposure to mortality didn’t upset Harvey, it fascinated her. When she saw dead animals on the ground, she wondered what killed them. At the local library, she skirted the kids’ section and went straight to the adult nonfiction shelves to read about terminal diseases in medical textbooks. When she wasn’t studying death, she was thinking about it. “Anyone who knew me from back home would probably say, ‘Yeah, she was a bit odd,’ says Harvey with a laugh. “If people hurt me, I would pretend they were dead. I would think of how it happened — whether they had a heart attack in the front lawn or died in a car accident — and it was a coping mechanism for me. I practically convinced myself that they were really gone and not in my life anymore. Then, I could move on.” Growing up in Michigan was hard, especially after Harvey’s father left the family to start anew. Harvey and her brother were uprooted from their family home in Detroit and moved to suburban Southfield to live with their grandmother. The abrupt shift left Harvey resentful and disenfranchised. Worse, her classmates teased her for being biracial. “Kids would say, ‘What exactly are you?’ and I was so ashamed,” she says. Learning about death offered Harvey some escape from her grim reality. So did listening to the radio. When she was 11, the local rock station played Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle,” and Harvey had an epiphany. “It was such a powerful moment and the feeling I got reverberated through my whole body. I didn’t want that to ever go away, so I started to seek it out.” At 19, she piled everything she owned into a car and drove from Michigan to Los Angeles. She held court on the Sunset Strip, spent many long nights at the Rainbow Bar & Grill, and played in various unknown bands. Before she had any real success in music, she traded the jam room for the classroom, enrolling in a mortuary science program at Cypress College. “For a while, I lived a fast life and was not on a good path,” she explains. “A lot of people around me who were doing the same thing were either lost or dying. That’s the main reason I enrolled in mortuary school.” At school, Harvey applied herself and graduated valedictorian. She worked as an embalmer and hospice therapist and was the director of a funeral home. Thought she quit to record and tour with Butcher Babies, Harvey remained connected to the death industry, and during downtime from the band she worked as a grief therapist and end-of-life counselor. It might seem unusual for a lively woman to be equally passionate about death studies and music. That’s what Harvey’s husband, Charlie Benante (Anthrax, Pantera), thought when he met her in 2014 on Ozzfest. “I guess I felt like the mortuary school thing was morbid,” he says from the Chicago home they’ve shared since 2020. “But once I realized it’s all about helping people through grief, it made total sense because she has so much empathy and such an appreciation for life.” It was Benante, though, who came to Harvey’s rescue in 2024 when she was squeezed out of Butcher Babies for being unable to endlessly tour. At first, she was furious. Then, she became depressed. “Grief doesn’t just affect people who have lost a loved one,” says Benante. “Carla was grieving because something that she started had been taken away from her, and I could tell she was pretty lost about it. I wanted to help get her out of her funk. She was questioning whether she could even do music again, so I thought of a way to make sure she could.” During the pandemic, Benante had worked with Harvey on covers of songs by Tom Petty and Massive Attack, so he knew she had the chops to sing in a variety of styles. He wrote a new batch of songs in rock genres they both liked, recorded the guitars, bass, and drums, and then helped Harvey lay down the vocals. The couple recorded five songs for the "Violent Hour" EP during the first half of 2025. A second EP will follow next year, as will more shows. Though he was the primary force in the conception and development of Violent Hour, Benante didn’t want to play with the band live. Instead, he and Harvey held auditions and hired four young female musicians — guitarist and background vocalist Allie Kay, lead guitarist Kiana De León, bassist Jewel Steele and drummer Sasha De León. Benante compares the band to ’70s female hard rock group the Runaways, hatched and molded by rock Svengali Kim Fowley, which marked the debuts of Joan Jett and Lita Ford. With the Violent Hour lineup cemented, Benante can fully dedicate himself to Anthrax and Pantera, and Harvey can devote herself equally to music and death sciences in a way that was impossible with Butcher Babies. Not that she hasn’t sacrificed or gone a little stir crazy along the way. “Man, as soon as I got off work every day, I hit it hard,” she says. “I wrote music all night while we did the EP, and I still do. But I get a kick out of working all the time. It’s what I love. I'm very aware that life is short and that, if you want to do something, there is an urgency there. If you put it off, you might be too late. You have to do it now.”