Summer time is “replay time” on THE PIT VOD platform, with ‘A Band Called Death’, a documentary on the 1970s punk trio Death and new-found popularity decades after they recoreded music and then disbanded.

“We realized we’d done the best we could with Death. We stuck it out from 1973 to 1980, dealing with rejection of our name, rejection of our music, rejection that we were black and played rock’n'roll, rejection that our music was too fast. So many rejections.”

More than 30 years later, somehow, the story continues… before Bad Brains, Sex Pistols, or even Ramones, there was a band called Death. Punk before punk existed, three teenage brothers in the early ’70s formed a band in their spare bedroom, began playing a few local gigs and even pressed a single in the hopes of getting signed. But this was the era of Motown and emerging disco. Record companies found Death‘s music—and band name—too intimidating, and the group were never given a fair shot, disbanding before they even completed one album. Equal parts electrifying rockumentary and epic family love story, ‘A Band Called Death’ chronicles the incredible fairy-tale journey of what happened almost three decades later, when a dusty 1974 demo tape made its way out of the attic and found an audience several generations younger. Playing music impossibly ahead of its time, Death is now being credited as the first black punk band (hell… the first punk band), and are finally receiving their long overdue recognition as true rock pioneers.