Two metal acts from Fresno and Spain bring their current tandem tour to San Francisco Sunday when Haunt and Hitten take the stage at the Bottom of the Hill with local openers Blackwülf.

Guitarist Trevor William Church, the son of Bay Area rock icon and Montrose/Sammy Hagar Band bassist Bill Church, first came to fame with now defunct doom metal band Beastmaker before founding Haunt.

With Church writing the songs and playing all the instruments, he took Haunt in a more classic, melodic metal direction on two EPs and two albums issued in the band's first two years in operation. While echoing New Wave of British Heavy Metal influences of Iron Maiden and Angel Witch, Church's songs are as hook-heavy as some of the best Maiden and Priest singles issued back when metal actually got radio airplay.   

During the pandemic shutdown, Church would if anything ramp up his productivity, recording four more new albums as well as a collection of acoustic recordings of earlier material that he self-released. Haunt's latest full-length effort, last year's Dreamers, was the project's first to come out on the musician's own Church Recordings imprint in partnership with Iron Grip Records, which is run by Jarvis Leatherby of Night Demon and Cirith Ungol fame.   

The live version of the band has gone through a number of line-up changes over the years, but Church and his collaborators never fail to bring an incendiary stage show when visiting the Bay Area. Haunt will be joined by current tour partners Hitten from Murcia, Spain. The quintet ably celebrates melodic '80s metal ear candy full of shredding, tandem-lead guitars and hooky choruses that hearken back to the hits dealt out by the Scorpions, Ratt and Skid Row. The bands' Sunday night show at the Bottom of the Hill marks the final date of their spring tour. 

Opening the gig is East Bay standard bearers Blackwülf. Over more than a dozen years, the band has established a reputation for dishing out colossal Sabbath-influenced riffs and memorable metal anthems. Coming together in 2012 around longtime collaborators guitarist Pete Holmes and drummer Dave Pankenier -- who have played music together since they were growing up in Arizona --  the original line-up of Blackwülf was rounded out by singer Alex Cunningham and bassist Scott Peterson.

Working from the classic quartet model that served so many great hard rock and metal bands during the '70s, Blackwülf crafted a handful of doom-laden originals for their self-released album Mind Traveler in 2014. While the group's sound owes an unquestionable debt to Black Sabbath, even on that debut effort Blackwülf stood apart from the many stoner-metal outfits who are content to pilfer riffs and song ideas wholesale from the iconic metal godfathers. 

With Cunningham's commanding delivery and memorable vocal melodies at times recalling singer Pete Stahl (who fronted notable bands Scream, Wool and Goatsnake) and Holmes' hefty chord progressions and stinging, concise solos ably propelled by the group's hard-swinging rhythm section on "Royal Pine" and "Thunderwitch," the album quickly earned the band fans locally and abroad while catching the ear of Bay Area heavy rock imprint Ripple Music. The label would partner with Blackwülf to release the group's sophomore effort Oblivion Cycles late in 2015, earning another round of rave reviews, including the endorsement of Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich in a video posted on YouTube.

The East Bay headbangers took some time to get their next batch of songs together, but Blackwülf returned in 2018 with their second sternum-rattling effort on Ripple Music entitled Sinister Sides that was released to wide acclaim. The album featured guest appearances by legendary doom-metal guitarist Geof O'Keefe (a founding member of Pentagram and Bedemon) on several tunes and further refined the crew's heavy, psychedelic metal sound.

In addition to having O'Keefe play on the album, the band prevailed upon the doom legend to visit the Bay Area to appear at their local record release party in addition to filming a couple of videos for songs from Sinister Sides. The band would go on to make appearances at Desertfest London and Planet Desert Rock in Las Vegas that same year.

The band has played regular local shows since 2019 (including a short surreptitious set in the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum parking lot before a Raider game before security pulled the plug), but focused most of its energy before and during the pandemic on writing and recording new material for the fourth Blackwülf album. Released once again on Ripple Music in early 2023 -- and the first feature second guitarist Jesse Rosales, who joined the band a year earlier --Thieves & Liars was quickly hailed as the band's most ambitious album yet.  

Kicking off with the lead single "Shadows," the latest salvo from Blackwülf raises the already high bar that the band has set for itself over the course of nine tunes that show the quintet refining the art of stoner riff rock on the pulverizing title track and the cowbell-punishing "Failed Resistance" while pushing into dynamic new territory on the epic "Psychonaut/Edge of Light." In the summer of 2023, Blackwülf celebrated a release of a different kind after partnering with Oakland's Original Pattern Brewing Company to create Blackwülf Pilsner. 

Sunday, April 6, 8 p.m. $15-$20
The Bottom of the Hill