With Netflix’s teen music movie Metal Lords, Game of Thrones’ D.B. Weiss gets personal

polygon.com:

In August 2019, just a few months after the polarizing finale of Game of Thronesaired on HBO, showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff inked a $200 million deal with streaming giant Netflix. Their eagerness to move on to other projects was apparent by the end of Thrones’ run, but the stream of new material has come at a trickle so far. The two served as executive producers on 2021’s Sandra Oh-led miniseries The Chair, but the new teen movie Metal Lords is the first taste of post-Thrones writing from either of them since they made the Netflix deal. The duo co-executive produced the film, but the screenplay is a Weiss solo project, based loosely on his own adolescence spent playing in high-school bands. It’s a slight film, and an almost self-consciously low-key follow-up to the massive Game of Thrones, but Weiss has the personal experience to make its humbler ambitions work.

Metal Lords centers on a pair of childhood best friends with a gulf widening between them in their middle teens. Hunter (Adrian Greensmith) constantly bristles against the contours of a world he’s grown to abhor — a dully affluent, overwhelmingly white suburb. His lean, angular frame is a physical echo of his sharp-edged temperament. Kevin (IT and Knives Out’s Jaeden Martell, styled to uncannily resemble a young Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree) is a gentler presence. He’s mild-mannered and nervous, and frequently gets swallowed up in the wake of Hunter’s bigger personality. But he’s also curious about girls, parties, and everything else his more popular classmates get to enjoy.

Hunter is a dyed-in-the-wool metalhead and a serious guitarist. Kevin doesn’t know much about the music, but he agrees to play drums in Skullfucker, the high-school band Hunter