C.J. PIERCE of DROWNING POOL Talks “Strike a Nerve” Album: ‘We Have Never Been More Solid as a Band’ @SonicPerspectives

Uploaded November 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

Drowning Pool recently released their first album in six years, "Strike a Nerve", via T-Boy/Ume. Though the album's lyrical sentiment may sound as if it was written about the hardship of the pandemic, it was actually written and recorded prior to the lockdown. Perhaps a foreboding sense of the grim things that awaited the world!

"Strike a Nerve" is well worth the six-year wait as it's a fierce and diverse album from Stevie Benton [bassist and founding member], C.J. Pierce [guitarist and founding member], Jasen Moreno, [lead singer since 2012]; and Mike Luce [drummer and founding member].

The album is a testament to their rebellious spirits that drive these finely crafted songs. One could only imagine how difficult it was for the band to wait for the right time to unleash it on the world. The lead-off track, "Hate Against Hate," lets you know right out of the gate that these guys aren't messing around. They keep their foot on the gas for two-thirds of the album only to slow down for a moment with the powerfully haunting song, "Everything But You," and then instantly ramp back up with one of the album's most sonically devastating songs, "Down in the Dirt" that hits you in the face like a brick.

Jasen, who has been with the band for over ten years, crushes it vocally while the band takes listeners on a roller coaster ride with its never-ending stream of ingenious yet brutal riffs and propulsive rhythms. "Strike a Nerve" raises the bar for the band and will leave listeners breathless by the time it reaches the last power chord. The band is currently on their second leg of the tour and playing five new songs off it. Tickets for the tour can be purchased here (https://drowningpool.live/tour/)

Correspondent Robert Cavuoto spoke with guitarist C.J. Pierce about the difficult decision to wait to release the album, how all members contributed to the writing, the work that went into sequencing this album to take fans on its wild ride, and his old-school metal approach in writing, recording and playing guitar live.

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C.J. PIERCE of DROWNING POOL Talks “Strike a Nerve” Album: ‘We Have Never Been More Solid as a Band’

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$JARED JAMES NICHOLS Talks New Album: “I Feel Like I’m Really Saying Something Here With My Guitar” Hard-rocking guitarist and vocalist Jared James Nichols is back with Louder Than Fate, out June 5 via Frontiers Music Srl. The 10-track collection is his most fully realized statement yet, balancing his signature crunchy guitar tones with a stronger focus on vocal melody and songcraft. Whether he’s delivering a fluid solo on “Running Hot,” burning through the lead track “Let’s Go,” or laying bare something more vulnerable on “Killing Time,” Louder Than Fate is a record that earns the weight it carries. Two years is a long time to carry songs in your head, and Nichols sounds like a man who can finally breathe. “These songs have been floating around in my head in rehearsal spaces and sound checks for the last almost like two years,” he told Robert Cavuoto. “Finally, to put this together and not only compile these songs but also to get this record out, it feels like I’m finally just like getting a weight off my shoulders.” That relief is audible in the record itself. Louder Than Fate moves between hard rock muscle and something more emotionally exposed, a range Nichols says came from a deliberate effort to let the songs go where they wanted rather than forcing them into a predetermined mold. Tracks like “Dustin Bones” and “Let’s Go” operate in full-throttle mode, while “Killing Time” and “Show Me” pull back into something closer to ache. “One of the big things I’ve always had just because of the way I play guitar is it’s always been really, really guitar focused,” he said. “With this record, I feel like I was able to bridge that gap where there is that natural kind of rawness when you hear songs like ‘Dustin Bones’ and ‘Let’s Go.’ As a vocalist, I get my best vocal takes when I’m holding or playing my guitar. It’s like my blanket. But with songs like ‘Killing Time’ and ‘Show Me,’ it’s almost as if I was able to have the guitar play rhythm to a vocal and to a melody, which is something that I’ve been really, really focused on. This record, we finally captured that.” The writing process was looser than anything Nichols had attempted before, leaning on co-writers based in Nashville and letting the material find its own footing. “Way Back” is a prime example, built around a chorus riff that simply fell into place once the right people were in the room. “The more it feels natural and the more it feels easy, the more it comes across as honest in me,” he said. “That thing basically wrote itself.” That track also reflects the eclectic musical diet Nichols grew up on. Raised on a rotation of Steppenwolf, Mountain, Cream, and Led Zeppelin courtesy of his Vietnam vet father, AM radio softness from his mother, and Alice in Chains and Stone Temple Pilots from his brother, he never really belonged to a single genre and stopped pretending otherwise around two years ago. “I said, let’s just write songs. Let’s just let it go where it’s going to go,” he said. “I have this weird kind of misfit of all this blues, rock, country, heavy stuff, and I just try and cram it all in there to try and sound like me.” Lyrically, Nichols admits that while not every song is strictly autobiographical, each one carries personal elements that reflect his own experiences. “Killing Time” is where the personal and the universal collide most directly. The song started from a fractured family relationship rather than a romantic split, but the two threads ended up pointing in the same emotional direction. “Sometimes you have to let songs go where they want to go,” he said. He played it for Lzzy Hale of Halestorm while it was still taking shape. “By the time we got through the chorus, she goes, ‘Oh, this is a good song.’ And I was like, got it. We’re doing that.” The guitar work on that track also marks a personal milestone. Inspired by David Gilmour‘s melodic approach, Nichols went home the night before recording the solo, didn’t touch his guitar, and just listened back to the rough track on his phone, humming melodies rather than rehearsing licks. “I walked into the studio the next morning, fired up my amps, went through like three passes, kind of figured out where I wanted to go, and then we did it,” he said. “After we were done, the engineer looked back at me and went, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘I think we got it.’ That one was really special because I felt like I was really saying something with my guitar.” That commitment to feeling over perfection runs through the whole record. Nichols and his team made a deliberate call to leave the imperfections in, no auto-tune, no going back to fix the rough edges. “If you hear the guitar and it goes or it scratches up, that’s me. That’s my mistake. And we left it because there’s an honesty there,” he said. “With ‘Killing Time,’ there are parts where I can hear a string kind of buzzing underneath it. But it was like it’s part of the energy. It’s the way it was captured.”$

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