Black Smoke Trigger might come from a small city in New Zealand, Napier, but their outlook is vast. Everything about them screams ‘ambition’. They work with A-listers.
They trained for cold exposure and breath-holding, freediver-style, for their 2020 breakout video . And their music is refreshingly fearless, marrying muscular hard rock with rich, grungy grit on soaring debut album . “The idea with this band is to push it as far as we possibly can,” says guitarist Charlie Wallace, having just wrapped up a UK support tour with .
“We are all extremely passionate about music, we want to play as many shows as we possibly can, write as many songs as we possibly can, and record as many albums as we possibly can.” A hard worker by nature, Wallace grew up playing basketball and working in his stepfather’s Chinese restaurant. After school he’d shoot hoops in the alleyway, wash dishes and wait tables.
“My mum and my dad always instilled the necessity of hard work,” he says, “and as much as I was provided for, we had to kind of earn everything that we got.” In school he befriended future BST frontman Josh ‘Baldrick’ Rasmussen (so named by a teacher for his class-clown personality), a budding guitarist yet to discover the thunderous, Layne Staley-meets-James Hetfield voice you hear on . But it was Black Sabbath’s Paranoid riff that really steered Wallace into music: “It was one of those things that, instantly, I just liked the way it made me feel.
” At 15 .