SIGNATURE SOUND
Tetrarch comes into its own with debut full-length album
Tetrarch prefers not to be referred to as a thrash band.
The Atlanta band, whose founding members met when they were 12 years old, has grown from mimicking its musical influences to blossoming into its own signature sound on its recent and debut full-length album, “Freak.”
“A lot of our early EPs were kind of in that thrash vein, but definitely with ‘Freak,’ we kind of moved away from being like a thrashy band to being a metal or what people call now maybe alternative metal/hard rock kind of band,” said Tetrarch lead guitarist Diamond Rowe. “It really opens up who Tetrarch is instead of when people listened to our older stuff and they’re like, ‘Oh that’s a thrash band.’ That used to irk me so bad until we got a little bit older. It’s definitely a label that we are kind of getting rid of nowadays.”
Audiences will get to hear some songs from “Freak” that the band has not played live on tour. Tetrarch also might sneak in new work it’s been writing, too.
“It’s definitely helpful, like when you have a song that you think is pretty killer and you want to test it out and see how people receive it,” Rowe said. “It’s really cool to play it live, and that will really tell you.”
The popularity of the band has boomed over the past two years since the release of “Freak.”
“We wanted to give it a shot putting it out independently, and we had some expectations, some goals, but it really exceeded everything we thought,” Rowe said. “You know, you always hope but it exceeded everything we thought we could do on our own, which is charting on active rock charts and all the magazines that picked up on it, American ones too, which is extremely competitive, and just our fan base going like crazy, it really set us up and put us in a great place for another product to come in the near future.”
Metal and rock publications also took notice of Rowe and her guitar skills. She is the first African-American female metal/hard rock lead guitarist to be featured in major industry publications such as Guitar World and Guitar Player.
“I was always that kid. I was always into stuff that my demographic of a person would not be into,” Rowe said. “From an early age, when we would play live, people always say, ‘That’s crazy.’ You know, we live in Atlanta, so they’re, like, ‘I’ve never seen a black girl play guitar’ and I was, like, you know, whatever. I’m just playing guitar because I love it.”