Castle Rat are metal from another dimension. Denizens of a plane called The Realm, their lore is one of rodent grim reapers, plague doctors, swords, sorcery, white steeds and magic. Their quest has already made them one of metal’s fastest-rising bands. We got Rat Queen Riley Pinkerton to put down her homemade scythe to have a (s)word with us about her rock’n’roll fantasy camp…
Heavy metal, reckons Riley Pinkerton, is at its best when it’s having it large. Large costumes, large production, large ideas, large stages. And, in her case, large hair.
The Castle Rat singer/guitarist – aka The Rat Queen – would know. Nightly, she takes to the stage in armour, like she’s stepped out of an episode of She-Ra, for a show in which she variously plays fantastical psych-metal, wields swords, reads long passages from their lore to explain that they’re being pursued across time and space by demons not of this universe, and fights mythical beasts to the death.
“I used to play folky music, but it wasn’t really me,” she admits. “I’m pretty shy, but there’s something about playing this kind of heavy metal and dressing like we do that’s just a lot more fun.”
Last year’s second album The Bestiary saw Castle Rat suddenly spreading their plague across the world, and Riley and her wyrd band of misfits – vampiric guitarist The Count, bassist The Plague Doctor and mystical drummer The Druid – taking their campaign far further than they ever imagined.
Bloodstock awaits this month, and more. Time to get acquainted with the new masters of rock’s universe…
Or, how a seasonal wheeze gave rise to a whole musical universe
“We were supposed to be a regular doom metal band, then we got booked for a Halloween show. I love Halloween, it’s my favourite holiday, so I went, ‘Okay, we’ll play in costumes.’ I threw the costumes together, and made The Rat Reaperess mask out of a cardboard box and papier mâché. The scythe was made out of a hockey stick with some cardboard and tinfoil. I planned the show really quick, like, ‘Yeah, The Rat Reaperess is going to come out and I’m going to die. Then The Plague Doctor hands me a big plastic rat, and I’ll come back to life.’
“It was pretty interesting in the beginning, calling an Uber to a gig, and fitting a scythe into a Honda Civic, with the driver giving us weird looks. I realised there should be a reason for the costume, so I started writing a lore, kind of retrofitting it to the characters and slowly moulding it into what it is.”
Castle Rat’s background is long, cosmic and mad. Happily, Riley’s on a quest to tell it properly
“Before I became The Rat Queen and before The Count became a vampire, we were peasants, and The Count was writhing with the plague outside the castle gates. As he’s dying, The Rat Reaperess comes to claim his soul because she deals in the plague – she’s a rat. Just as she’s about to steal his soul, The Plague Doctor arrives and uses The Forbidden Potion Of Vampiric Blood to resurrect our guitarist, and that’s what transforms him into a vampire. And because we stole his soul from her grasp, she’s pursuing us and wants to level the score. The Count doesn’t have a soul anymore, so she’s after mine.
“Some of that potion spilled, and a rat that I’d been feeding little scraps of food while waiting for aid laps up some of it. He mutates into this giant, omnipotent beast with eyes of white and wings of leather: The Castle Rat. The Castle Rat is able to travel through space and time, and he tears holes through the veil of reality and ushers us all through to protect us. The Rat protects me because, in his mind, I was a benevolent queen, feeding it when it was just a humble little rat. So we’re ushered into this new dimension, which is The Realm. We’re guided through this inter-dimensional travel by The Druid, who’s our drummer.
“This strange band of four is continually pursued by The Rat Reaperess, because we’ve taken this soul and upset the natural balance of life and death. She’s constantly pursuing us. But, because she’s left her dimension, she’s abandoned her post dealing the plague there, and in turn, the plague ends. So, we saved everybody!”
Play D&D? Nah. For Riley, things are more about making up your own games and worlds
“I’ve actually never played Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve always wanted to, I just never found a group of people who were doing it every week. I’m always concerned that people are gonna be like, ‘Poser!’ Well, I’m doing it on a pretty grand scale now. I’m committing my entire career to what’s basically a D&D campaign.
“I really enjoyed fantasy books when I was a kid, though. I read The Chronicles Of Narnia six times over. Something about talking animals was everything I wanted when I was a kid. I also used to make up games. I was an only child and pretty shy, so in elementary school my way of forming friendships was basically making up a new game and a story and assigning characters to other kids. And now, years later, I’m still doing the same shit that I was doing in first grade to make friends. That gives it an authenticity – me reaching into the depths of my childhood and getting into my own lore!”
Should you ever need chain mail making, Riley’s worth summoning
“I made all the chain mail in my original costume by hand over the course of the pandemic, because I actually had enough time to learn how to do something like that. It was pretty maddening. I did it, but I’ll never do it again! It’s so much math that my brain just kept giving up. I’m good if I’m sculpting something with my hands, or carving something, but my brain struggles once it gets into counting and patterns that need to be the same, and shaping things by doing more math on top of that. But I had endless time to sit down and cuss at it as I did it.
“I have a background in visual arts, so I have a clear vision of what I want, but I tend to just throw myself at whatever I’m doing – ‘I have this thing that I want to make. I don’t really know how I’m going to make it, but I’m going to figure it out on the fly.’
“I didn’t make all of it, though. There’s stuff like The Plague Doctor mask, where I altered an old Halloween mask at first, and then after a while we bit the bullet and bought one from a really awesome Etsy craftsman. It looks so much better!
“And I commissioned someone to do my current costume. I drew the design of what I wanted, and then a brand from New York City called It Is Known made it. She did all the scale mail, which holds up so much better than what I made. What I made was constantly falling apart!”
Perfect for taking out The Rat Reaperess. So long as airlines make sure they get to the gig, that is…
“It’s foam, which is good because I’m always accidentally stabbing The Rat Reaperess! Sometimes some guy will come up and say, ‘You should get a real sword. It’d be so much cooler.’ No – I need these people alive!
“Once it got lost on a plane to Portugal. Our agent knew someone who had a foam replica sword from The Witcher, so they saved the day by being a nerd! But it’s really fun turning up to the venues with all that stuff, because there’s always someone from the opening band or the sound guy who wants to hold it, without fail. They’ll do a bunch of moves with it, and then hand it back and go, ‘That’s so awesome!’ Dude, swords rule.”
Because, dressed like that, you’ll look like an idiot if you don’t
“It’s good, because it gets you in the headspace where I’m not just me. I’ve got some other character to be, even though I’m still Riley. People ask me, ‘Are you purely The Rat Queen?’ No, I’m still up there thinking about what candy to eat after I get offstage. It’s super-cool, though, and it does get your head into it. When you’re dressed in a chain mail bikini, you have to carry it with a certain amount of confidence no matter what’s going on. There have been a couple of shows where I’m suddenly viscerally aware that I’m wearing a costume, but you just have to own it. You have to double-down and be like, ‘We’re doing this.’ I am locked into dressing like this for life now, which is fine, and it solves the problem of figuring out what to wear every night.”
More actors! More staging! Fewer costume changes!
“I would love to build a whole stage set. The couple of times I’ve seen King Diamond, he’s had this multi-tier stage, this hospital structure with steps and everything, and an actress running up and down. It’d be cool to really push that and create a whole castle-scape. You could get clever about it, maybe a curtain pull where everything gets flipped around, and there’s a whole other set on the other side. More stage actors would be cool as well, so that there could be multiple creatures onstage at once. Right now, that part of the show is my friend Reagan – she’s The Rat Reaperess, then she runs off, turns into a wolf, runs back out… It’s a lot.”
The cover of The Bestiary found Riley on horseback in her finery. Worth wearing nothing on an absolutely freezing day for
“I’ve never been so cold! It started as a beautiful winter’s day, but it plummeted really quickly. My body was involuntarily shaking to a degree that I’ve never experienced since. I’m not a cold plunge girl – I like being warm and cosy! But we were on this freaking deadline so we had to do it in the cold. We reached out to a farm in upstate New York that had a beautiful white horse called Romeo that they use for photo shoots. The farm had washed the horse because he had rolled in the mud, so this big-ass horse was also shivering. So there I was, sitting on a damp horse in freezing weather in a chain mail bikini. Between shots, people were tossing my coat on me to keep me warm. But the horse was awesome, very patient. He also had a unicorn horn strapped to his head…”
It feels like Castle Rat spent all of 2025 in Europe. People want the rat pack, clearly
“Last summer we played Copenhell and Hellfest back-to-back, to close out a European tour that was six weeks long, which was insane. Those were huge crowds – by far the most people we’d ever played to. Those were my favourite shows, at the end of a really long tour that was amazing but super-gruelling because were doing it in a van, which broke down halfway through. We really had to grind it out. To wrap up that tour with those two shows was the most amazing feeling. At Hellfest we were on at, like, 11am. I thought, ‘No-one’s gonna be there. Even I don’t want to be there. That’s way too early.’ But then 4,000 people turned up!”
Get working on your costumes now for Bloodstock
“Seeing fans coming in costumes and making their own stuff is my favourite thing. When I look out in the crowd and see chicks in chain mail, that’s amazing. My goal is for it to feel like a Renaissance Festival at our shows. It doesn’t happen everywhere, but we do get some awesome, dedicated fans, because so many of our fans are ren faire people that have really elaborate costumes that they only wear at ren faire, so they’re getting more usage out of it by wearing it to a Castle Rat show!”
Castle Rat play Bloodstock on August 9. This interview originally appeared in the spring 2026 issue.
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