I caught Pulling Teeth at a small live house years back, on a flyer-only bill where every band on the night was at least twice as loud as the room could really hold. I went home with my ears ringing and a new favourite. They’ve been one of mine ever since.
Pulling Teeth sit in a corner of Japan’s heavy underground that the rest of the world keeps not quite seeing — the strain of NWOJHM that grew up shoulder to shoulder with hardcore rather than apart from it. The riffs are metal, properly metal, sharpened to a point. But the delivery, the cadence, the way the songs don’t bother building to anything cinematic before they hit you — that part comes from somewhere else, somewhere closer to a basement than a stadium.
Suzuki and the Guitar
The band’s centre of gravity is Suzuki. The guitar is doing the talking on every record. Not in a flashy, lead-break way — the kind of way where you realise twenty seconds in that the riff has already done more work than most bands manage in a whole song. Tight, mean, a little jagged at the edges, completely confident.
It’s the sort of playing that makes the rest of the band’s job feel obvious. The drums lock to it, the vocals chase it, and you the listener stop trying to anticipate where it’s going. You just let it happen.
That’s the trick a lot of NWOJHM-adjacent bands missed and Pulling Teeth got right early. The metal end of the music stays technically capable enough to keep older listeners interested, but the songs never lose the hardcore impulse to just go. No ten-minute openers. No interludes. No grace given.
Why the Name Fits
The band is called Pulling Teeth, and you don’t need to overthink that. They named themselves after the experience of listening to them, basically. The records are not comfortable. The live shows are not comfortable. That’s the point.
What’s striking is how long they’ve been at it. They came up in the 90s, in a Japanese heavy scene that was still figuring out its place in the world, and they’ve stayed working through whatever fashion the underground happened to be obsessed with that year. Through the metalcore wave, through the post-hardcore wave, through the thrash revivals, through the doom revivals — Pulling Teeth kept doing the same thing because the same thing kept being correct.
There aren’t a lot of bands in any country whose answer to “what should we change?” has stayed “nothing, the formula is right” for this long, and been right.
For the Foreign Listener
If you’re outside Japan, this is one of those bands the algorithm won’t hand you. You have to look for them on purpose. The records exist, but the experience — the actual experience of being in a small room in Japan with this band on stage — is the thing.
If you’re ever here on tour-watching duty, scan the small live house bills, the Wednesday-night ones with no headliner, the ones where the venue is a basement and the bouncer is also the sound guy. Pulling Teeth is the kind of band that ends up on those bills, and you’ll know by the third song why I’m telling you this.
Suzuki’s guitar will tell you why. Show up.
