Heavy Menace Limited Edition

With its wide range of high-gain tones, advanced EQ, and adaptive noise gate, the Heavy Menace has carved out a spot as one of the most versatile distortion pedals around. For Halloween 2025, Empress is dressing it up in a limited-edition opalescent blue-purple sparkle colourway that draws your eye like a scrying pool.

The artwork comes straight from the original sketches that Ottawa tattoo artist Kaylie Seaver created for the Heavy Menace, making this not just stunning, but a collectible piece of Empress history.

Empress only made 350 of these. Miss this one, and you’ll be haunted by it forever.

The Heavy Menace is an evolution of the Heavy distortion pedal in a compact enclosure. A new Lite(ish) mode joins the original Heavy and Heavier settings to cover everything from crunch to crushing. The three-band EQ features a sweepable midrange frequency, and the Weight control sculpts low frequency response for thick, full chords or tight palm muting. The footswitchable gate adapts to your playing, decaying naturally over sustained notes and clamping down during fast stops, with a key input for additional flexibility. However you get heavy, find your perfect sound with the Heavy Menace.

Features

• Three versatile distortion modes - Lite(ish), Heavy, and Heavier
  
• Footswitchable noise gate
  
• Gate key input (1⁄8” TS or TRS)
  
• Three-band EQ with sweepable midrange frequency
  
• Weight control to sculpt low frequency response
  
• Linked or independent switching of the distortion and gate
  
• True bypass or buffered bypass
  
• Requires 9-12V DC, 250mA (centre negative)