Words – killer.solo.music
Original vocalist Adam Glynn returns to the fold as Frankenbok embrace the madness once again with The Arriba War Honkle.
There are bands that spend decades chasing relevance.
Then there are bands like Frankenbok.
Bands that don’t chase a damn thing. They simply exist. Like a cockroach in a leather jacket, fuelled by distortion pedals, bad ideas and the kind of stubbornness that only survives in Australian heavy music.
Frankenbok have never fitted comfortably into any scene. Too weird for the purists. Too heavy for the alternative crowd. Too funny for the serious metal elite. Too brutal for everyone else.
That’s precisely why they’ve lasted nearly thirty years.
Sitting down with original vocalist Adam Glynn feels less like interviewing a musician and more like catching up with an old mate who’s finally found his way back home. There are no carefully rehearsed PR answers. No mythology being manufactured. Just honesty.
And that’s refreshing.
The biggest surprise isn’t that Adam returned after more than two decades away.
It’s why.
Their reunion didn’t begin in a rehearsal room.
It began in a bar.
Cherry Bar, to be exact.
Years of distance and old wounds dissolved not through some grand reconciliation, but through something far simpler. Guitarist Azza complimented Hutch’s artwork.
“He complimented my artwork… and that completely disarmed me.”
Sometimes rebuilding thirty years of history starts with a single unexpected conversation.
The rest happened naturally.
Listening to Adam describe the current Frankenbok is almost the opposite of what you’d expect from a reunion interview.
There’s no ego.
No “we’re back to save metal.”
No declarations that this lineup is better than every previous incarnation.
Instead, there’s gratitude.
“I’m not going to tell these guys what to write anymore… I just appreciate that they all turn up.”
That’s experience talking.
The younger version of Adam wanted to help shape Frankenbok.
The older Adam simply appreciates getting to create alongside friends.
That perspective bleeds directly into The Arriba War Honkle.
The album doesn’t feel like a nostalgia trip. It feels like a band that’s finally comfortable being exactly what it always should have been.
Ridiculous.
Brutal.
Creative.
Completely unrestricted.
Songs like Geppetto’s Scarecrow wrap surprisingly thoughtful ideas inside absurd concepts, something Frankenbok have quietly been doing since the late ’90s while the rest of the heavy scene argued over subgenres.
Even the album title feels like an inside joke nobody bothered explaining.
Good.
Not everything needs explaining.
Some things simply need turning up loud.
Perhaps the most revealing moment came when he described returning to the band with an analogy that perfectly captures the reunion.
“It’s like having a girlfriend you haven’t seen for ten years… you both come back a better version of yourselves.”
That’s not nostalgia.
That’s growth.
It’s easy to forget just how important bands like Frankenbok were to Australian heavy music. Before social media algorithms dictated discovery and before every breakdown was engineered for TikTok, bands earned audiences the hard way.
Night after night.
Town after town.
Venue after venue.
Sticky floors.
Tiny stages.
Broken vans.
Questionable promoters.
And somehow, through all of that, Frankenbok carved out an identity that nobody else could replicate.
They were never trying to be cool.
They were trying to be Frankenbok.
That’s a much harder thing to achieve.
Nearly thirty years later, the joke’s on everyone who thought they’d disappear.
Because while trends have come and gone, genres have splintered into microscopic subcategories and countless bands have faded into memory, Frankenbok remain exactly what they’ve always been.
Irrepressible.
And somehow…
Even weirder than before.
This is the gospel.
I bite crowd surfers.
Killer.
