White Reaper
Rising Kentucky stars on their hardcore punk roots, and not being afraid of pop music…
Muhammed Ali casts a long shadow over Louisville. A little of the late boxing champ and all-round icon’s superhuman swagger can’t help but rub off on everyone who comes out of his old hometown. It was certainly there in the title of Kentucky power-pop upstarts White Reaper’s second album, 2017’s The World’s Best American Band.
“Oh man, we were joking when we called it that,” protests frontman Tony Esposito, sitting next to drummer Nick Wilkerson in a noisy North London pub. “But people missed it: ‘How can they say that about themselves?’ It’s, like, ‘Come on, we’re not serious. We’re not that arrogant…’”
Neither Esposito nor Wilkerson come over as remotely egomaniacal, but the band decided to back off from the ironic titles on this year’s follow-up, You Deserve Love. Thankfully, they’ve kept their sparkling, spilling-out-of-a-70s-FM-radio sound intact: single and feel-good hit of the (late) summer Real Long Time finds the midpoint between Cheap Trick and Thin Lizzy and rides it home.
“We were really into hardcore punk as young kids,” says Wilkerson. “Real DIY, playing-on-the-floor stuff. We definitely did some vandalising and things like that. But you grow up and realise that punk music isn’t the be all and end all.”
The pair met as school kids in Louisville and formed White Reaper as a two-piece at college. They gradually began accumulating extra members. Wilkerson’s bass-playing twin Sam was first, followed by brilliantly named keyboard player Ryan Hater and even-more-brilliantly named guitarist Hunter Thompson (not that one). As they did, they shed their old punk rock skin, emerging as a full-colour power-pop butterfly. “We’re better musicians than when we started, it’s that simple,” says Esposito. “It used to be that I could only play one power chord. Now I can play two.” They haven’t quite lost their old irreverence. You Deserve Love might hark back to the old days musically, but it fizzes with a 20th century garage-punk energy. Nor are they afraid to load up their songs with the kind of massive pop melodies that seem to have gone out of fashion. “We’re not afraid of pop music,” says Wilkerson. “We love Thin Lizzy and Ozzy Osbourne, but we love The Killers and [Brit pop star] Charli XCX as well.”
Where The World’s Best American Band and their 2015 debut, White Reaper Does It Again, both came out on US independent label Polyvinyl, the new album is their first on a major label. But are they ready for the uphill battle that comes with being a rock’n’roll band in the 20th century?
“Sure we are,” says Wilkerson. “It’s tougher for bands like us. It’s easier for people to make money and be successful these days if you’re just one person playing to a bunch of tapes. But we grew up listening to electric instruments. We just want to rock.” DE
You Deserve Love is out on October 18 via Elektra/Parlophone.
“It used to be that I could only play one power chord. Now I can play two.”