Before Mt. Dagger had a name, it was just two people in a room trying to land on something mid-tempo enough that they wouldn’t walk out dripping after every take.
Kay (drums) and Kaitro (guitar) built the earliest shape of the band around that idea, trading loose demos in a shared cloud folder and numbering them as they went.
The track that eventually became “Inertia” carried the placeholder “Song 01” for so long that the name might as well have been permanent. As Kay puts it, “Odds are it’s literally the first song we ever wrote,” and back then it actually sat in that slower lane.
The spark came from outside—technically from Nico of Jvlith Krishvn, who pitched the idea of starting a band with Kay and then never appeared at rehearsal again. Still, that nudge pushed Kay and Kaitro to keep jamming.
Things shifted when Rico (bass, formerly of Crowns & Thieves) stepped in. He lived in Leipzig, so the only way to function was to cram everything into heavy, non-stop weekends. Rehearsals ran eight hours at a time in their Berlin-Lichtenberg room, right above a Vietnamese restaurant that hosted weddings on the weekends.
Uniformed generals, couples in formal wear, and the band—sweaty, half-wrecked—sharing elevator rides for quick bowls of food. Kay jokes that somewhere there are wedding photos with them “looking like we just crawled out of a pit, grinning alongside the couple.”
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Dan (vocals, ex-Pleite, ex-Dikloud) joined during one of those stretches, walking in with a beer and a grin, and the tone of the band changed immediately. Any thoughts of mid-tempo drifted out the window.
Kay says, “Every song we’d written got overhauled—faster, harder; it just felt right.” Nothing from the early folder survived except Song 01, which they were still trying to salvage. Speeding up the intro became the first experiment. They worked all day, hit a wall, hit the restaurant again, then returned to find themselves staring at a whiteboard full of tempo curves and arrows that looked more like improvised engineering schematics than a hardcore song. Someone finally said what everyone was thinking: wipe it clean. And they did.
The final “Inertia” only carries fragments of that older version—the intro, a single breakdown, the ending. Everything else is rebuilt.
The lyrical direction followed the album’s broader weight: stories rooted in dark realities without turning into grand declarations. The band explains that “Inertia” deals with violence in a romantic relationship shaped by toxic masculinity, and the point isn’t to moralize but “to tell a story without ignoring issues that have affected so many people within our friends and community.”
They describe the album as drawing from “similarly dark places,” using music as “an appropriate vehicle to deal with a shit ton of disheartening topics.” They say they’re proud of how the track evolved and that making it the opener was completely intentional.
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Those themes line up with the broader identity Mt. Dagger have carved out since solidifying their Berlin-and-Leipzig lineup in 2022.
The project pulls together experience from Jvlith Krishvn, Kommisar X, Throwers, Crowns & Thieves, Dikloud, Pleite, and Total Fraud.
The band frames their sound as a refusal to lean into party-friendly escapism, instead channeling frustration and critique into tight, shifting structures—crust-leaning rhythms, sharp accelerations, and the kind of tension that collapses into sudden, deliberate swings.
Their shows since 2023 carry that same edge, and the DIY thread runs through everything—from the self-recorded 2022 demo to the artwork and merch created through Kaitro’s LogFella Designs.
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The full-length “Nothing Personal. Just Misery.” (Pike Records) was recorded at Tonmeisterei Oldenburg at the end of 2024, packing ten songs into a record shaped by equal parts collaboration and stubbornness. The album arrives January 9, 2026.
“Inertia” lands ahead of it as the second digital pre-release single, streaming December 14, 2025, with today’s premiere offering the first taste.
