Music · Studio

Holy Anvil Recording Co.

The Anvil Sessions cost the bands nothing. Raif Box films Northwest Arkansas punk, indie, and metal acts in his Fayetteville studio, and KUAF 91.3 — the region's NPR affiliate — carries the videos on a standing page; Box has put the purpose plainly to the Fayetteville Flyer, “a free resource to artists.” By his account to the Flyer, he took the format whole from KEXP and Audiotree, noticed KEXP sits at Seattle's NPR affiliate, and wrote to the affiliate here to ask if they'd collaborate. Nearly everything about the operation is borrowed like that: the space, by Box's 2023 telling in the Flyer, is a two-room setup inside Huntsville Road Studios, handed to him by an owner he credits with “a heart of gold,” and the anvil is a tiny John Deere one his mother bought, kept on his desk in place of the full-sized version he once daydreamed about striking into recordings in an abandoned church. Out of those borrowed parts comes a document of the scene that didn't otherwise exist: 28 sessions filmed as of August 2024 by the count Box gave the Flyer, 50 the milestone he named for himself, and Anvil Session #34 — Holy Smokes! — the one KUAF fronts as most recent. Finished records leave the room too; by the Flyer's reporting, The Chads tracked “Chad to the Bone” there across four days, Box producing and mixing, released June 2025. One caution: the studio's own website has lapsed. The Sessions live elsewhere: KUAF's standing page has carried them since the collaboration Box asked for, and the studio's YouTube channel holds the numbered run.

Filed under