The man standing in line at the Lamplighter coffee shop in Richmond, Va., doesn’t seem to mind that the woman making his drink is wearing a Dropdead shirt.

He is the picture of young Southern gentility on a hot summer day. He’s holding a toddler in his right arm, wearing plaid shorts, sandals, and sunglasses. “Virginia is for Lovers,” his blue t-shirt reads, with the v in the final word replaced famously by a shiny red heart. He doesn’t pay notice to the curly-haired guy in the Municipal Waste t-shirt, either, or the blonde woman perched at the espresso bar in a black Iron Reagan cutoff. He doesn’t balk at the bagel sandwich named “Slayer”-- that is, cream cheese and a pork sausage patty.

He lives, after all, in Richmond.

“To me, Richmond is a blend of a small town and a big city. If you go to a coffee shop, there will be kids in their Disrupt t-shirts and kids talking about Belle & Sebastian. It’s because the city’s not that big,” says Trey Dalton, who plays guitar in the polyglot psychedelic metal band Inter Arma. “There are plenty of places to go and eat and venues, too, but it’s not big enough to where you can have an indie bar or a metal bar or whatever you want. Everything mixes.”

Dalton moved to Richmond in 2009. For years, the city had served as a de facto second home for him; he’d often drive from his hometown-- the city of Roanoke, ensconced just at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains three hours away-- to catch concerts in houses or the city’s long-running rock club at 929 West Grace Street, known now as Strange Matter after several stints under names like Twister and Nancy Raygun.

Roanoke is a third of the size of Richmond, which, though it’s Virginia’s capital, a massive college town and an American historical locus, falls far short of being the state’s most populous city. But for Dalton, the amount of culture and music (particularly of the heavier variety) in Richmond made it Virginia’s artistic epicenter. He’d grown up with Inter Arma singer Mike Paparo back near the mountains. When Inter Arma asked him to join the band just as his lease back home conveniently ended, he didn’t hesitate.

“Richmond is not a ton bigger than my hometown, but seeing how much more stuff was being produced here was mindblowing,” Dalton says. “You show up and see Battlemaster, and those dudes are ridiculous, and then there’s Cough and Windhand and a billion other bands starting up now. There are plenty of places that have a population that quadruples Richmond, but there’s an anomalous amount of stuff happening here.”