Victor Griffin’s 35-year relationship with Pentagram has been complicated. The Morristown native played guitar in the cult doom-metal band through the 1980s and most of the ’90s, contributing mammoth down-tuned riffs to heavy classics like “All Your Sins,” “Evil Seed,” and “Wolf’s Blood.” But Griffin spent most of the 2000s back in East Tennessee, clean and sober, singing and playing in Place of Skulls, a band that seemed to be the complete opposite of Pentagram. Pentagram pioneered the use of eerie, occult imagery and lyrics in heavy metal, and its frontman and founder, Bobby Liebling, is legendary for his prodigious and decades-long intake of serious hardcore drugs. (See the 2011 award-winning documentary Last Days Here for graphic details.) Place of Skulls is Griffin’s Christian metal trio, reflecting the spiritual conversion he underwent in the late 1990s, after one of his many splits from Pentagram.

Then, in 2010, Griffin, who still lives in Knoxville, put aside his reservations and rejoined forces with Liebling. The band played SXSW, toured the United States and Europe, and released Last Rites, produced by local hard-rock engineering wizard Travis Wyrick, in 2011. It was the first official collaboration between Liebling and Griffin since 1994’s Be Forewarned.

And then Griffin quit again at the end of 2012 for his new Christian doom band, In-Graved, which released an album in 2013.

And then, last year, he returned—once again—to the band he helped make infamous.

“It keeps drawing me back in,” Griffin says. “Bobby and I have a lot of time invested in the band and in each other. Of course, the band’s doing better than ever these days. It’s what I’ve been working for my whole life, so it’s not like I can start something new now, I guess.”

The result: the brand-new Curious Volume, released on Aug. 21 on the British boutique metal label Peaceville and also produced by Wyrick. Even if the news hasn’t broken through to mainstream entertainment outlets, the reviews from the underground have been overwhelmingly positive: “This is exactly the kind of ballsy, gritty doom rock I need when cleaning my guns” (Angry Metal Guy); “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and no one knows how to wrangle doom, despair, and tone like Bobby Liebling” (Noisey); “Pentagram riff hard on Curious and offer some surprises, too” (Metal Sucks).

“It’s kind of a throwback a little bit,” Griffin says. “We consciously stepped back—we didn’t want to give it too much production. I think Last Rites was a great album. I like the material on that, and I like the dynamics of the album. But we also wanted to take a step back and do something a bit rawer and just a bit more straightforward—a straight-up heavy rock album. And I think that’s a pretty good description of the new album.”

For years, Pentagram albums have depended on Liebling’s considerable archive of already-written songs. That continues with Curious Volume, which has four songs adapted from Liebling’s collection of aging demo tapes from the ’70s and ’80s. But the rest of it is all new, which indicates the 45-year-old band’s newly recovered vitality.

“Bobby doesn’t write much material these days, other than some lyrics now and then,” Griffin says. “This probably has the most brand-new material on it of any Pentagram album in a really long time, especially within the last couple of decades, anyway, or since Be Forewarned.”

Liebling, whose recovery has been the major storyline of Pentagram’s resurgence this decade, is still hanging on, Griffin says.

“He’s doing pretty good,” he says. “You don’t really abuse your body to the extent he has for so long without consequences, so he has his health issues. But he’s hanging in there, man. He has lots of doctors’ appointments and has to be on certain prescription medications, but for somebody who’s been through what he’s been through, that he’s even still alive is a miracle itself. So he’s doing pretty good.”

And, if it all works out, Liebling and Griffin will finally play together in Knoxville under the Pentagram name. (They played a show at Bundulee’s on Cumberland Avenue in 1982, when the band was known as Death Row.) A Southeastern tour in support of Curious Volume was tentatively scheduled for the fall, with a date in Knoxville, but fell through.

“I was really excited about it, because I’ve never played in my home town with Pentagram,” Griffin says. “But the way the routing was going to work out with some other dates and some European stuff going on, it just wasn’t going to work out. What’s happened is our U.S. booking agent is going to probably just rearrange that whole segment and hopefully there will end up being a Knoxville date on the books, hopefully maybe sometime this year.”

Matthew Everett

Senior Editor Matthew Everett manages the Knoxville Mercury's arts & entertainment section, including the comprehensive calendar section—Knoxville’s go-to guide for everything worth doing in the area. You can reach Matthew at matthew@knoxmercury.com.