Written By Remy Chillmister
If You’re Going to Fire Your Singer, Maybe Don’t Do It Like This…
Metal Church announced on November 21st 2025 on social media that they’ve hired new members…
…which is how Marc Lopes, Steve Unger, and Stet Howland reportedly found out they were no longer in the band.
Bands change. Lineups evolve. But firing a lead singer without the courtesy of a direct conversation isn’t “business as usual,” it’s amateur hour.
We also understand that emails, text messages, phone calls, and basic human decency have existed for quite some time.
What we don’t understand is how a professional band lets longtime members find out they’ve been replaced the same way fans do via an announcement and a shrug.
Especially for a legacy band that’s been doing this longer than most of its fans have been alive.
“There was a time when you at least had the decency to make the phone call.”
For a long stretch of time, nobody outside the camp really knew what was going on with Metal Church and as it turns out, neither did Marc Lopes.
The vocalist, who joined the veteran metal outfit in 2022 following the tragic passing of Mike Howe, has finally spoken at length about how his brief tenure with the band unraveled.
Lopes fronted Metal Church on just one studio album, 2023’s Congregation of Annihilation before quietly disappearing from the lineup while the band regrouped behind the scenes.
Appearing on a recent episode of The Big Truth Podcast, Lopes didn’t sugarcoat the experience.
“For most of 2025 nobody knew what was going on with METAL CHURCH. When METAL CHURCH canceled the tour in 2024, there was a lot of things going on behind the scenes that we didn’t make public, obviously,” he said.
At the time, Metal Church had halted its 2024 touring plans due to ongoing back issues suffered by founding guitarist Kurdt Vanderhoof. According to Lopes, that pause turned into something much deeper and much quieter.
“People get mad, people have disagreements, and we kind of just let things lay for where they were in hopes that maybe we could have a conversation, like adults should,” Lopes explained.
“But there was no communication for that whole time.”
That lack of communication, he says, left him fielding questions he couldn’t answer, not because he was dodging them, but because he genuinely didn’t know.
“I did a lot of interviews and a lot of people would always ask [about METAL CHURCH’s status], and when I said I didn’t know what it was, it was the truth. I did not know.”
Behind the scenes, the uncertainty took a personal toll.
“I definitely wasn’t a happy person,” Lopes admitted.
“To just not get any kind of respect of an answer for anything… after the amount of work that I put into that band, that didn’t go over too well with me for a long time.”
While financial frustration was part of the picture, Lopes says it wasn’t the core issue.
“Financially, that sucked too, but [I knew I would be able to] make it up in other ways. So it really wasn’t that.”
What ultimately pushed things past the point of repair was how Lopes learned the band had moved on, not through a conversation, but online.
“The cowardice of not confronting any of the issues… that doesn’t fly,” he said.
“And then, obviously, the conclusion of it is to find out everything on the Internet. That was the ultimate ‘fuck you’.”
By November 2025, Metal Church officially re-emerged with a revamped lineup featuring Vanderhoof, guitarist Rick Van Zandt, bassist David Ellefson, drummer Ken Mary, and new vocalist Brian Allen. For Lopes, that announcement closed the door for good.
“Oh, no, dude. They announced a whole new lineup, new single, new album. Oh, yeah. That’s all done,” he said.
“They totally bamboozled us. And, yeah, it’s pretty, pretty disgusting what happened.”
Lopes also pushed back hard against accusations that he was “playing the victim.”
“Listen, motherfucker, you have no fucking idea, ‘cause you’re not in it,” he said.
“I’m not playing victim. Fucking victim of what?”
He insists nobody quit and nobody was fired. The situation simply dissolved without explanation.
“Nobody fucking quit. Nobody was fired. You just threw it under the table,” Lopes said.
“You think that you are working with people that are supposed to be comrades… and then they just totally blow you off and disregard [you], like not even having a conversation.”
Despite the bitterness, Lopes doesn’t regret his time with the band.
“The album did great. It got great reviews. The tours were awesome. I have no regret in any of that,” he said.
“Do I wish it would’ve went down different? Absolutely.”
His takeaway is simple and pointed.
“Communication is very important in everything,” Lopes concluded.
“A lot of those things could have been avoided just by having a simple conversation.”
Metal Church made its live debut with Lopes on June 3, 2023 at Chicago’s Legions of Metal Festival, and Congregation of Annihilation was released May 26, 2023 via Rat Pak Records (U.S.) and Reaper Entertainment (Europe), produced by Vanderhoof.
As for the band’s future, Metal Church released its first single with the new lineup, “F.A.F.O.”, in November 2025. Those sessions have since grown into a full new album, currently slated for a 2026 release via Rat Pak Records.
Update: January 19th 2025
Former METAL CHURCH drummer Stet Howland says that he is “100%” in agreement with the band’s former singer Marc Lopes after the vocalist described METAL CHURCH as “a shit show” and blasted the group’s founding guitarist Kurdt Vanderhoof over the way METAL CHURCH‘s recent lineup changes were handled.
As Lopes put it bluntly but without regret:
“Go enjoy the new record. Do what you want. But I’m not there.”
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