METAL CHURCH singer Mike Howe has died at the age of 55. The actual cause of death has yet to be revealed.
The news of Howe’s passing was broken by METAL CHURCH in a social media post yesterday, saying: “It is with our deepest regrets that we must announce the passing of our brother, our friend and true legend of heavy metal music. Mike Howe passed away this morning at his home in Eureka, California. We are devastated and at a loss for words. Please respect our privacy and the Howe family’s privacy during this most difficult time.”
Howe fronted METAL CHURCH from 1988 until 1994 anf then rejoined the band in April 2015.
During the making of the “XI” album, Mike spoke about his return to METAL CHURCH, saying: “Kurdt Vanderhoof got ahold of me in August of 2014, and he proposed [me] coming back to the band. He said Ronny [Munroe] left the band and he didn’t really wanna carry on with METAL CHURCH unless maybe I would consider coming back. So I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’m open to it. But let’s see what kind of music we can come up with.’ So Kurdt went back to the studio and started writing songs in the vein of ‘Hanging In The Balance’, where we left off twenty years ago, and he sent them to me over the Internet. And I was, like, ‘Damn! The guy still has it and he’s doing great work.’ So he sent me another batch, and that batch was just as good [as], if not better than, the other. So, from there, I said, ‘Well, I can’t say no to this. And let’s just see how it goes.’ And we started writing lyrics and getting together, and it’s now morphed into this, being back in Aberdeen in the studio making the new METAL CHURCH record.”
METAL CHURCH’s latest release was “From The Vault”, which dropped in April 2020 via Rat Pak Records. The record was a special-edition compilation album that featured 14 previously unreleased tracks from the Howe era, including four newly recorded studio tracks, among them a redux of the band’s fan favorite classic “Conductor”.
Howe is not the first METAL CHURCH singer to die. David Wayne passed away in May 2005 from complications following a car crash at 47 years of age.