Count Jeffery didn't come to black metal first. He came to it through AC/DC and Black Sabbath, learning basic rock riffs on guitar before he ever touched a tremolo pick, and The Last Drop is the record where that history shows.
Vampiric Coffin is the Jackson, Mississippi project he leads, released through Grime Stone Records - the DIY black metal and dungeon synth label run by Abysmal Specter, whose own Bloody Keep shares a similarly unpretentious streak. The Last Drop arrived in October 2023, four songs across barely ten minutes: the title track, "I Am a Vampire", "Vampire's Grave" and "Lord of the Night".
It doesn't sound much like the genre's Norwegian blueprint.
Where most vampiric black metal reaches for atmosphere - synthesiser, reverb, funeral tempos - Vampiric Coffin reaches for a riff and a runtime under two minutes. That's thrash and punk showing through, not black metal orthodoxy, and Count Jeffery says as much: "I think it just came naturally, because I grew up with that stuff, and it was some of the first music I learned to play on guitar after learning basic rock stuff like AC/DC and Black Sabbath riffs."
The band also plays live, a genuinely unusual thing in a subgenre still mostly made of bedroom projects and mail-order cassettes, and it's a discipline that shows in the songwriting: nothing overstays its welcome, and every riff earns its place inside two minutes flat.
Abysmal Specter, who has put out some of the more interesting new vampiric black metal through Grime Stone this decade, singles out Count Jeffery's playing specifically. "People don't realise Jeff is one of few legitimate shredders in the scene," he says. "We all write riffs, sure, but this dude can throw a finely crafted solo on songs about spooky vampire bloodlust."
The song titles carry the joke openly - "Vampiric Stoner Bat" and "Giant Fucking Bat" among them - but the music refuses to be a novelty act about it.
"I take the music part of it seriously, but everything else, not so much," Count Jeffery says. "I like to try to have a little fun with it, which is a big 'no-no' in black metal!"
The Last Drop was one of two EPs Vampiric Coffin put out in 2023, alongside Give Your Blood to the Night, and together they make the project's case in miniature: a corner of vampiric black metal built less on dread than on velocity, and unembarrassed either way.
