POWER TRIP
handpicked by lamb of God. Backed by Rob halford. BFFs with cannibal corpse. here’s why Power Trip have become the band everyone’s talking about
Your favourite band’s favourite band are on our tour, too! We shoot the shit with the thrashers’ frontman, riley Gale.
They say life comes at you fast. For Power Trip, it’s come at them like a freight train going off the rails so fast it’s on course to hurtle itself into the centre of the fucking sun. In the space of around 18 months, the Texan thrashers have gone from being a killer, word-of-mouth underground band, grinding away at local metal and hardcore scenes and propping up a few US tours along the way, to being held up as one of the most exciting names in the game, sharing stages with everyone from crossover kings hatebreed and thrash legends exodus to extreme metal royalty cannibal corpse and Napalm Death. They’ve been cited by noted personalties as varied as the metal God Rob halford, Fox News host Greg Gutfield, Ryan Adams (yes, that one) and, erm, Prince harry (yes, that one). Basically, it’s been a hell of a time.
“It’s been surreal,” exhales frontman Riley Gale. Dressed in a white hoodie and black snapback as we shoot the shit on a sofa somewhere backstage in the Forum in Kentish Town, london – where he and the rest of Power Trip will later play a crushing set in front of more than 2,000 aggro hatebreed fans – the singer is a ball of energy, barely sitting still for two minutes and regularly standing up, tapping his hands or pacing around the room as he talks.
You can’t blame the guy for being a little fired up; he’s basically spent the last year-plus either being praised by his heroes or touring with them.
“When I read about Rob halford talking about us, I thought it was an onion article or something,” he laughs. “We were all sitting around, like, ‘Where do you go from halford?’ Anyone that you can look around at that’s bigger than Rob halford is dead. he’s the God! That was a really cool moment.”
While Riley will happily admit that he and the rest of Power Trip are stoked
about their acceleration to metal’s frontlines, the Texan’s feet remain firmly grounded in reality. After all, while things may have sped up in more recent times, this is a band who have been on the scene in some shape or form for a decade now. With four-fifths of the quintet hailing from the suburbs of the expansive Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, the seeds were sown for the band to come together when most of them were either still in, or barely out of, full-time education.
“Remember the TV show, Dallas? Not a bad representation of the way the upper middle class lives there,” Riley laughs. “There’s a lot of money there, it’s a clean city. But me and Blake [Ibanez, guitar] grew up in the North Dallas
“WHere Do You Go FroM HalForD?”
POWER TRIP HAVE BEEN GETTING PRAISE IN HIGH PLACES
suburbs, in more tight-knit neighbourhoods, which is why we got together in the first place; he had heard that I wanted to start a crossover band and got in touch. he was young; I was 22, but he was only 16, and I was in college about 45 minutes away in this town called Denton. It was like, ‘Sure, we live in the same suburb, I’ll come check out your riffs.’”
Before long, a demo was recorded, and the band was completed by another guitarist in
Nick Stewart, plus bassist christ Whetzel and drummer chris Ulsh (the closest thing to an ‘outsider’, as a native of Austin). What followed was a fairly productive five years that saw Power Trip put out two ePs and a debut album, 2013’s Manifest Decimation – all produced while the band were either in school, college or having to juggle full-time jobs. For Riley, it was a chance to hone a passion for heavy music that had been burning away for years.
“my parent’s house wasn’t a musical home at all,” he admits. “my mum was born and raised in Detroit, and my dad spent his teens and 20s there, so there was lot of [Detroit-based powerhouse label] motown in the background – Al Green,
The Temptations, marvin Gaye, stuff like that. When I first fell in love with music was when I discovered punk rock.”
Introduced to the likes of NoFX, Strung out and hot Water music by a “cooler” older cousin while in seventh grade, Riley began to hungrily consume whatever heavy music he could get his hands on, and was soon a dedicated regular to any gig that happened to roll through his hometown.
“The Dallas metal scene is a bit older than us, so you get bands like Warbeast and then you have Vinnie Paul floating around sometimes,” he explains. “So I was more on the hardcore end of things.
But when I was getting into music in the first couple of years at high school, I wanted to see everything. I would see metal, hardcore, punk, whatever. I started a small local band that really helped grow the scene, ’cause we were friendly with everyone and it was a good time at our shows, so when Power Trip started, people knew who we were.”
It didn’t take long for Power Trip to start getting attention from outside their homeland, and by the time Manifest Decimation was released, they’d earned a reputation as one of the most promising bands in the underground. While outside commitments meant a second album took an undesirably long time to see the light of day, the five-piece kept their momentum going over the following years by landing as many tours across as many different fanbases as possible – most noticeably bagging a slot alongside lamb of God and Anthrax at the start of 2016 that put them in front of thousands of metalheads across the US.
“That was the breakthrough tour,” agrees Riley. “It was the perfect litmus test. People didn’t know who the fuck we were, but we went out there and won a lot of fans.”
By the time a follow-up album was finally ready for release, Power Trip were already on
the verge of something big, but few were prepared for the scene-igniting, poll-smashing behemoth that is Nightmare Logic. An apocalyptic clatter of buzzsaw guitars, thrashy hooks and filthy breakdowns, it was an album that had old-school thrashers and young hardcore kids drooling in equal measure, catapulting them into the attention of fans, the wider rock media and a certain aforementioned metal God or two.
“For years I’ve always said, ‘Put us in a room with people who like heavy music, and the worst thing they’ll say is that we didn’t suck’” Riley offers modestly. “People didn’t know who the fuck we were on the lamb of God tour, but we went out there and played, and we won a lot of fans Because we’re not just heavy. We’re catchy! And we’re always ourselves. I have a big sense of pride in the amount of individuality we bring to our band, you know? We don’t constrict ourselves.”
Individuality is something that bleeds out of their frontman as much as the band he helms. educated to university level, with a bachelors degree in technical writing that, he says, taught him “every word matters”, with Power
Trip Riley expresses deep musings on everything from politics to ethical issues to philosophy. Songs about dungeons and dragons, this definitely ain’t.
“Take, for example, Executioner’s Tax,” he offers on their breakthrough single, which has steamed past more than a million streams.
“It sounds like it’s just a catchy song about swinging an axe around, but really it’s about us finding comfort in death. We will gladly, in a capitalist society, pay to numb that existential pain of death, whether it be drugs, food, television, booze, gambling, sex, whatever. We pay the executioner’s tax to feel better about the fact that all of this is for nothing.”
Riley will also happily wax lyrical on everything from gun laws (“Do you really need an assault rifle for defence?”), to gender fluidity (“It’s a vast spectrum”), to the disparity between being a musician with most other ‘glamorous’ professions (“When a basketball player steps off a court, he’s got a team of doctors, an ice bath, a massage… I’m lucky if I don’t have to sleep on the floor.”). And if you’re thinking that this makes him sound like a bit of a motormouth trying to push liberalism onto everyone, you’d be way off.
“I think it’s so silly so say ‘left’ and ‘right’,” he muses. “Some racist asshole isn’t gonna convince me that a black person has lesser genetics or some bullshit. We’re intolerant of people’s intolerance. That’s the bottom line.
But, when it comes to, ‘I think there should be higher taxes for the rich’ versus ‘I think there should be a flat tax’… I don’t give a shit! That’s something we can talk about.”
As for where Power Trip and their generation of bands stand in the grand scheme of things, Riley is a little more direct, if unsurprisingly thoughtful on the matter.
“metal is at a very big tipping point,” he stresses. “When you think about the fall of hegemonies, like Rome, one of the big markers of the end of a civilisation is that culture becomes stagnant. movies, art, music, things like that… it’s a sink or swim thing. And I think we’re at a big sink or swim moment, and people have to decide: do they want to support the music that’s out there? Because you have to understand that if you want to keep seeing our bands over these next years, you have to put money into it somehow. There are so many of us, and the hype cycle is so fast.”
If there’s any justice in the world, the “hype cycle” will keep Power Trip at the front of the line for a long time to come. And, all going well, we won’t have to wait nearly as long for a new album – even if the very idea of it gives Riley the shits right now.
“I’m terrified about our third album!” he admits, wide-eyed. “That’s a really big make or break moment for us. But it’s all about keeping this momentum going. As we go on, I think our songs may become a bit more memorable, a bit catchier – but never accessible, because you’ll never hear me clean sing. And hey, if the metal scene is looking at Armageddon instead, you know what? Bring it on. It’ll make life interesting.”
It’s hard to see anything but big things in Power Trip’s future, but if the apocalypse hits us before then, at least we know we’ll have a hell of a soundtrack.
“Metal is at a siNK or
sWiM MoMeNt”
RILEY THINKS IT’S TIME FOR THE NEXT GENERATION TO STAND UP
NIGHTMARE LOGIC IS OUT NOW ON SOUTHERN LORD.
POWER TRIP PLAY THE METAL HAMMER
TOUR THIS APRIL – SEE P.107 FOR DATES