Band: Powerball
From: Columbus, Ohio
Their formation story:
(Isaac Hylton, guitar): "Powerball is myself, Graham Ritchie (guitar), Ethan Gerding (drums), Nick Ferda (vocals), and Aidan Schwartz (bass). Graham, Ethan, and I all work in the city doing various stagehand and audio work and pretty quickly started clicking over hardcore and metalcore and started hanging together at shows.
"That inevitably led to Ethan and I having a conversation about wanting to do an older style metalcore band, which turned into a group chat with the two of us, Graham, Nick (who plays in another band with Ethan, True American Grit) and Aidan who we all knew from shows and his insane mosh style. The chat existed for the better part of a year before we actually started working on anything, but once we started it was non stop, and in about a week from that point the demo was done.
"When we played our first show in December, I think the songs had only really been done for about 2 or 3 weeks at this point. It all felt super fast and dirty, but I've genuinely never been in a band with a group of people who are so hungry and driven to just rock and get things done."
Their sound in their own words:
"Powerball is H8000/'90s Euro metalcore worship through and through, obviously influenced heavily by bands like Arkangel, Ashlar, and Undying, and we're all huge fans of Prayer for Cleansing, early BTBAM, Day of Suffering, Kickback, etc.
"There's been a crazy revival of this style going on, we particularly love everything coming out on Ephyra (Balmora, xNOMADx, Adrienne) but there really wasn't a lot of that style coming out around here."
Latest release info:
"The Demonstration is as I said before, something thrown together super fast and dirty, mainly about gambling and swords, but I think it completely captures the style that we were striving for, cool lead harmonies, raw vocals, and cooler mosh parts. All in all, we're all incredibly happy with the demo and feel it fulfilled the lack of this style here in Columbus."
Future plans:
"Right now, we're already in the process of writing this new release, which we're going to give a little more love and time to before we put it out, but you can still expect it relatively soon. Other than that, thankfully the response to the demo so far has been great and we've gotten some cool offers, so expect some show announcements and hopefully lots of travel here soon."
What other bands from their region should we check out?
"We think you should definitely be listening to Anti-Material Rifle, You Die First, Empty Shell Casing, New World Man, Godskin Peeler, Lake Verity, Fatal Realm, Gigan, and Spear of Cassius."
Powerball on social media: Instagram
Tagged: powerball
