After a dozen or so years with the pedal to the metal, all while hard-rockin’ with uncommon panache, Jason Rivera wasn’t so sure he wanted to keep Gaytheist going. The Portland-based trio had quit their jobs, acquired a van, and booked a 40-date tour across the continent when COVID-19 came along and squashed those plans.

“After the pandemic, I got a full-time job working at a clinic and it’s rewarding, but it’s also (long) shifts,” said Rivera in an interview from his home in downtown Vancouver, Washington. “I was like, ‘I’m in my 50s. Maybe it’s time to kind of step back.’ But I wasn’t sure.”

Stepping back isn’t exactly the nature of Gaytheist—the band has had the same lineup since 2011: Rivera on guitar and vocals, plus bassist/vocalist Tim Hoff and drummer/vocalist Nikolas Parks. Rivera and Hoff, being longtime friends, have been making music together since high school, adding to the depth of intimacy of Gaytheist’s music. Together, they more or less found Gaytheists’s sound early on—a bracing blend of barreling punk, thunderous metal, and hooky noise-rock—and they’ve been cranking it out ever since, releasing half a dozen albums on Northwest labels including Good To Die and Hex Records.

The most recent of those, The Mustache Stays, is an 11-track blast of Gaytheistic fun that reeled Rivera all the way back in. “I guess I got bit by the bug again,” he said. “The recording turned out so good, in our opinion. We were really happy with it. Now, as we’ve had some time to sit with it, Tim went and got another van, and we’ve been getting some really good feedback.”

The band made The Mustache Stays with longtime collaborator Stephan Hawkes, who has engineered each of the last five Gaytheist full-lengths. This time, though, Rivera spent more time than usual on the songs themselves. “This is the first time we actually just sat and worked on the album a lot. Usually I don’t rewrite things and whatnot, and I don’t have a lot of time to just sit and overanalyze how to sing everything,” he said. “But I did this time and I’m actually really happy with the results.”

As always, Gaytheist adds up to more than the sum of its parts—which is saying something, because its parts are pretty beastly. Rivera is a world-class rock ‘n’ roll singer who deftly combines power and melody, and, though he’s modest about his guitar skills, his riffs are uniquely sludgy and speedy at the same time; Hoff’s scuzzy bass lines dig so deep they feel like they could rupture a sewer line; and Parks is presumably half-man, half-octopus, and capable of mind-boggling machine-gun drum fills that anchor the band’s sound in controlled chaos. “Throughout all our albums, we’ve kind of maintained our sound,” Rivera said. “But I think each time, the songs themselves have become a bit more involved, more interesting and more complex—there’s just more happening throughout them.”

Thematically, The Mustache Stays is a grab bag of mythological transformation, scoundrels and disgrace, songs from an abandoned concept album, along with an ambitious cover of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Silverfuck,” all coupled with Rivera’s resilient sense of humor, even in the face of pervasive doom and gloom.

“I mean, obviously everything going on in the country right now is a fucking nightmare. But at the time, I had a lot of personal stuff going on, too, and overall …” Rivera said, his voice trailing off. “I don’t know, we're all just trying to navigate life on Earth, basically.”

Gaytheist released The Mustache Stays via Portland’s Hex Records on Feb. 21, 2025. The band is playing a record release show at Music Millennium on Sun, March 9 at 6 pm. The show is free and open to all ages.