Gatecreeper and Spirit Adrift No Longer Share Any Members
Gatecreeper and Spirit Adrift don’t have much in common sonically, other than being totally excellent, with Gatecreeper’s Deserted and Spirit Adrift’s Divided by Darkness both ending up on a ton of 2019 year-end lists (including my own). But they do share a trio of members: Gatecreeper vocalist Chase Mason also plays bass in Spirit Adrift, while guitarists Nate Garrett and Eric Wagner also play with both bands.
Er… make that played in both bands: in a new interview with Metal Injection, Garrett reveals that he has exited Gatecreeper to put all of his attention on Spirit Adrift, while Mason and Wagner are exiting Spirit Adrift to put all their attention on Gatecreeper (got all that?).
“Eric and Chase are going to continue on with Gatecreeper and then Marcus [Bryant, drums] and I are doing Spirit Adrift. Gatecreeper has got a new live guitar player and we’ve got a new live bass player and guitar player.
“Eric and Chase write the Gatecreeper stuff and they started that band. I write all the Spirit Adrift stuff and I started that band. It just kind of went without saying. We just reached a point of diminishing returns. For awhile it was cool and it was working, but I think we reached a point where both bands were suffering by sharing the members. We’re gonna be two separate entities moving forward.”
Garrett didn’t reveal who would be replacing Mason and Wagner in Spirit Adrift, but he did say it wouldn’t affect the band’s next studio album:
“As far as studio stuff goes, it’s not really going to change there because Marcus and I play on this newest record and then his brother also contributed some keyboard parts. And that is exactly how we recorded ‘Divided by Darkness.‘ Marcus on drums, me playing all the stringed instruments and doing all the vocals and his brother contributing synth. It’s exactly the same.”
Prosthetic Records will reissue Spirit Adrift’s debut album, Chained to Oblivion, on March 27 (pre-orders), but Garrett says the band’s follow-up to Darkness will also be released this year:
“Our new record will be out in 2020 for sure. I didn’t even intend to write a new record. And in fact, I didn’t want to because ‘Divided by Darkness’ took so much out of me. It was really difficult, really challenging. And a lot of that was self-imposed challenges. So, yeah, I didn’t even mean to write a record but seriously every time I picked up a guitar I was writing my favorite riff that I had ever written. Riffs grew into more riffs, which grew into songs and suddenly I realized that it probably wasn’t something that I wanted to relegate to an E.P. or a seven inch because it was all really good. And then more kept coming out.”
Read the entire interview here.
