Hard Rock/Heavy Metal band Drowning Pool have just emerged from an over five-year saga of creating and releasing their new album Strike a Nerve. Writing and recording it independently and in full by 2019, they signed to release it with T-BOY/UMe, and then had to hold the album during the pandemic period. Now the album is out in the world and Drowning Pool are energetically touring through late-November with a full slate of guests.
As fans are introduced to the new songs, they’ll notice some sonic branching out and also a wide swath of songwriting as all four members contributed to the album. Song like “A Devil More Damned” may be their heaviest sound yet, while “Running to a Red Light” takes on classic 80s and 90s vibes. Something that binds the album together, other than particularly relatable angst, is plenty of finessing with extra electronic elements that feels like a bonus to the experience of the songs. I spoke with guitarist and founding member C.J. Pierce from the road about the band’s 25-year milestone and the total determination the band summoned at each stage of the process to bring their new album to the world.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I feel like you all have been laser-focused on getting this album out to fans for some time and letting people know that it’s coming, with shows you did in the Spring, and the touring that you’re doing now. You have an absolutely commitment.
C.J. Pierce: My drummer Mike [Luce] likes to say that we’re gluttons for punishment. We’ve been hit with almost everything that destroys other bands, obviously with Dave [Williams] passing away, who you hear on the first album, but we’ve also been through everything from label mismanagement to lawsuits to personal things. We’ve had all that. We’ve checked all that off the list and we’re still here doing it. We’re super passionate about what we do.
HMS: You’re hitting 25 years, so that’s a milestone for sure.
CJP: Even Jasen Moreno’s been in the band since 2012, so he’s done 10 years.
HMS: I think that it means something to fans when bands stick together for this long, not just for the music, but for the example of friendships and creative relationships that last.
CJP: You stick with what you love. That’s really what it comes down to at the end of the day. Everything in my life has always been music. It’s just my whole life. People play music for different reasons, but I love music and I want to write great songs. We love writing songs together. As far as writing goes, we write what we feel straight out of the gate, but sometimes I think, “I’m feeling something, but I don’t hear a song out there for it.” So some of my inspiration is writing something that expresses my feelings and helps get me past them and there was a lot of that in mind with this record. We also all bring stuff to the table and when it starts to come together for us, as a band, it becomes a Drowning Pool song.
HMS: Sometimes with songwriting it is about having feelings and realizing it’s not something that people talk about but you feel that others might be having the same feelings. Then the song response often shows that’s true.
CJP: Yes, there are songs like that for sure. The whole thing with the song “Choke” on this album, lyrically, is that there was once a label we were on and we needed to switch singers. The label didn’t want us to do another singer switch and didn’t want to stick by us. But we needed to do it to better our band. They gave up on us. So here we are now, and we’re still doing it, so the song says, “I hope you choke on your words.” This is our life, our art, and our passion, so we are saying that now, “choke on your own words.” It’s right from the heart. The song’s about people who have given up on us before and now that we’ve succeeded, they can choke on their words.
HMS: I really like the music on that song as well as the lyrics. It made me think about and wonder whether there are consequences for people who treat others badly, and we hope there are, but also we make the choice to move on.
CJP: Right, we didn’t go so far as saying, “Die, motherfucker!” It’s not like that. It’s a nicer way of just saying, “Go fuck yourself. We’re doing alright now.”
HMS: It sounds like creating the song also might help create some distance from that experience.
CJP: Yes, you get past it. It’s definitely therapy, like all our songs. Jasen’s said that before, and I say it, too. We play some heavy stuff on this record, too. We started the writing process on this record more than five years ago. We spent more time writing and recording than we ever had before, with anything. And the record was all done before Covid, in 2019. We had signed a whole deal and everything, but we had to wait another three years.
A lot of musicians are guilty of this, and I do it, too, that when I go back and listen to things, I said, “This part could’ve been better.” They think their art’s not finished. But with this record, we are listening back and brushing up on things to play it, and we’re saying, “I did that? That’s cool!” and “I like that part!” We are loving exactly what we did. There’s not one note we’d change. There’s a lot of what Mike calls “ear candy”, too, accentuating different words or sounds.
On the song “Rope” there’s a little rope sound. We’re a Metal band and we’re in your face. We’re not an electronic band, like NIN, though I do love that music, but there is some of that in the album as an influence. We’re a four-piece Rock band, but with the record, because we could do it, if you put your headphones on, you’ll hear the little ways in which we accentuated the lyrics.
HMS: Thank you for commenting on that because I felt like I could hear a little bit of that on the album and it was something that set it apart from your previous albums. I also felt that way about “Racing to a Red Light”.
CJP: What do you think about that one? That one’s a different one for us. From the band, it’s more old school, inspired by the 80s and 90s. It’s on that side of the fence. I love the song and the lyric.
HMS: I loved it. I thought that the lyrics were particularly beautiful on that, really classic, but direct, and the song was very much your sound, too.
CJP: We try to keep an eye on that. We like to branch out, but we still want that core sound that’s still Drowning Pool. On newer stuff, like “Hate Against Hate”, and “Everything But You”, those ideas are pretty extreme and they started with Jasen Moreno. To us, “Everything But You”, is a new style, but we love the sound and the sentiment. When we first heard it, and Jasen was singing, “I hate everyone and I hate everything…”, I thought, “Damn, man, what’s going on?” But then he sang, “…but you”, and it turned into a dang love song. Wow, that was awesome.
HMS: I didn’t know if I should ask about your ballad, since people tend to ask about the ballads, but I think it’s a really strong song. It feels almost like a Rock opera, with a kind of story to it, even though it’s not spelled out.
CJP: Yes, it has a pretty deep meaning for Jasen. It’s on the record because it’s a great song. We had a lot of material to pick through for the record and that one was left-field but it fits with the mood of the record and it’s beautiful.
HMS: I know this record was done before the pandemic, but I think that sentiment, “I hate everything but you”, has probably come up a lot in relationships over the past couple years. Sometimes there’s even some humor in that.
CJP: A lot of these songs do easily relate to stuff during the pandemic, even though they were written before that, like “Hate Against Hate” saying, “This world is a test.”, which is the first line of the record. That’s exactly what’s been going on in the pandemic. Jasen hit it on the head with that one, straight out of the gate. I think we had some premonitions. [Laughs]
HMS: I heard that you made the record with full creative control because you weren’t doing it for a label at that point. Was that helpful?
CJP: In 2017, 2018, and 2019, when we recorded the record, we didn’t have a record deal, and we were just recording it for ourselves. We were just looking to be independent. We paid for the record ourselves. We weren’t under any guidelines.
We’ve actually never been in a situation where we were told what to sound like, but this was us writing without any game plan. We didn’t know who we’d shop it to. We have a few friends who started their own independent labels under other labels, and it just happened with us that our manager happened to know people over at Universal and they liked it. So we went with a Universal record deal. One thing about us, as well as being independent, is that we all write. We all bring songs to the table.
HMS: That must take the pressure off from it being only one person who has to come up with all the ideas.
CJP: It was like that a little bit in the beginning, but it turned into all four of us, and that’s how it should be making Drowning Pool records. We still play all the songs off the Sinner record. We stay up on all our songs when we rehearse and we can play everything. I like that because we won’t have a completely set setlist and we can change it nightly. But we are playing five or six new songs in the set right now.
HMS: I’m sure people are ready for that, having been waiting so long for the album.
CJP: It’s great for us. We’ve been opening with “Sinner” a lot, but then we’re coming out with two new songs, and we have faith in the songs. The songs are jamming. The responses have been great. The songs have been out already and people are going nuts. We come out swinging. The way new ones are flowing, and the crowd participation has been great.
HMS: I wanted to bring up, “A Devil More Damned” which has an interesting video as well. That’s a very emotional song that I think a lot of people will be able to relate to.
CJP: It’s a heavy one! There’s a lot of screaming in that one. That’s a fun one to play, too. That was one where we were working on it in the studio, and it had a lot of lyrics and parts that Stevie [Benton] brought to the table. It was fun to go through and make it solid. The video for it is bad ass. It was made by Matt Whiteman. It’s probably the longest song on the record. It has that down-picking, old school, head-banging Heavy Metal feel to it. We’ve played it a couple times live now.
HMS: I agree that the lyric video is far more than a visualizer. It’s really an animated video.
CJP: I love the way the imagery works in that with the song. We’ve talked about this in the past, and I’ve noticed that some bands do lyric videos for every song on the record, so I’m hoping that throughout the next few months, we’ll get more out there. I like that people can get to know the lyrics.
HMS: I think that song’s a great example of how this album feels like it addresses all the things that have been coming at us at once in recent years. This song even lists a lot of those things.
CJP: I don’t know if it’s the planet, or just me getting old, but it feels like there’s more coming at me than ever before. With every year, there’s more added on top of the basket full of baloney that we already have to deal with.
