Niagara band Revive the Rose featured in NHL 21 game
‘Bar Down’ from Welland rockers is part of franchise’s next video game
As a kid, Andy Colonico would often play EA Sports’ NHL video games with his Welland friends. While he wasn’t so hot at the game, he loved grooving to the pumped-up rock tunes.
He probably hasn’t gotten better at the game, but he’ll still be a winner when the NHL 21 edition comes out Oct. 16: His band Revive the Rose and their rocker “Bar Down” are among the featured songs.
“Video games are a huge part of my growing up, and I’ve always thought that would be cool to ever get on a video game one day,” says Colonico. “Here it is now.”
It’s a track already familiar to Niaga
ra IceDogs fans, as it was played during game nights for the 2018/19 season.
Colonico says he had a good riff he
knew would sound good in arenas, so he pitched it to IceDogs manage
ment.
“I said, ‘We’ll write you a song, man. We’re local and we’ll write the IceDogs a pump-up song.’ They were down for it. They had no idea what the song sounded like, though, until maybe two weeks before the 2018 season. They took my word for it.”
The next year, the song was picked up by the Toronto Maple Leafs, becoming one of their official warm-up tunes. Colonico then contacted one of the producers for NHL 21 asking about getting on the soundtrack.
“He was all on board for that,” he says. “A year later we found out they wanted to use it.”
It’s one of the biggest scores yet for the rugged Welland band, who first made waves locally with when their songs “Moxie” and “Nine to Five” were spun on Niagara rock station 97.7 HTZ-FM.
To celebrate the game’s release, the band is debuting its own brand of beer at Taps Brewery in Niagara Falls with an acoustic show (50-person maximum) Oct. 16.
Street Pharmacy frontman Ryan Guy produced and cowrote the track and loves the fact that a song “recorded and produced in my mother’s basement is in NHL 21.”
Colonico says the song does what it’s supposed to do — get a hockey crowd riled up.
“I think the song just gets you stoked,” he says. “It’s a good arena rock anthem, and that kind of genre is a huge part of the Canadian hockey culture. It goes hand in hand together.”