The husband-and-wife duo fusing Gaelic folk music and melodeath to explore Scotland’s rich mythology
LIKE THE SCOTTISH whirlpool that lends its name to their second album, Corryvreckan, Hand Of Kalliach’s rush of melodic death metal and Gaelic folk music will pull you into a vortex of powerful guitars and ethereal siren songs. The Edinburgh-based husband-and-wife duo weave tales around ancient myths as grand as their homeland.
“It was a wild and weird project that we wanted to do just for us,” guitarist and vocalist John Fraser says. “It started as something to really escape and break up the monotony of the pandemic lockdowns.”
John and his wife, co-vocalist Sophie Fraser, have three young children and have led a quiet life in the nine years they’ve been married. Never in their wildest dreams would they have thought they’d be releasing music together, let alone sign to a record label.
“I got asked in an interview how I feel about being a musician,” Sophie says. “I don’t think I’d actually realised that I was a musician. It’s just very strange to think of myself like that. I’m a very accidental musician.”
Stuck at home in 2020, the Frasers fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole of Scottish folklore, tinkering with putting those stories against an undertow of death metal, amplified by melodies of traditional Gaelic music.
“We’d talked about doing something for a while with a Celtic vein that had a very different interpretation of folk,” John explains. “Obviously at the moment you’ve got a lot of popularity of Nordic mythology, but there’s as much on the Scottish mythology side of things that nobody knows about, including Scottish people. So it was a lot of fun digging into that – the more you dig, the more there is.”
On a whim, they released their first few demos through Bandcamp, expecting to get lost in the ocean of new and independent music. But instead, they found an audience, inspiring them to self-release their debut album, Samhainn, in 2021. In January 2024, it was announced they had signed with Prosthetic ahead of the release of new album Corryvreckan a month later.
“I think we were emboldened and confident that we had the right sort of sound and that we were in the right ballpark,” John says about their evolution to Corryvreckan.
John and Sophie met about 12 years ago in what she recalls was “a really grubby, crusty rock club in Aberdeen”. Folk music has been part of their relationship since the start.
“One of our first dates was at this little pub called The Blue Lantern,” she recalls, turning to John. “There was this incredible folk night and this female singer
