Sound check: Canadian band Striker mixes good guitar riffs with '80s metal, '90s new wave

Canadian heavy metal group, Striker, returns to Albuquerque with new music and a new album.

“We’re really excited about it,” said vocalist Dan Cleary. “We’re on tour with our friends in Seven Kingdoms and Lutharo. It’s a bit of a long tour for us, so we’re pretty excited to get started. And, happy to come back to Albuquerque. It would be our second time playing there.”

Striker is part of the “Shredding North America Tour” that features headliner Seven Kingdoms and support act, Lutharo. The tour hits Launchpad on Wednesday, Nov. 13.

The first time Striker played in Albuquerque was in 2018 when the band was on tour with Death Angel. Since then, it won Heavy Metal Album of the Year for its album “Play to Win” at the Juno Awards in 2020. The Juno Awards is the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy Awards, on a smaller scale.

“It’s always really exciting as a band to get any kind of sort of mainstream acknowledgement that you know you’re doing something right,” Cleary said. “It’s really nice and it’s a really big honor for us. The most famous Canadians, it’s funny, like Justin Bieber gets a Juno and he doesn’t even come to the award show. But for us, we’re really excited to be a part of it.”

Cleary said the band did not get to celebrate its win due to it being in 2020 during the thick of the pandemic, but it is hoping to get recognition for its new music.

“We’re gonna see if we can get back in and running for the new album, and maybe we can actually go to the party this time,” he added.

The band released its new album, “Ultrapower,” in February.

“We released that earlier this year,” Cleary said. “It’s actually our seventh album, which sounds crazy, but we’ve been working on it for a long time. It’s a really fun album.”

The band worked with producer Josh Schroeder, who is known for producing heavier acts such as Lorna Shore, Tallah and King 810.

“We just thought it would be fun to go to a producer who does something totally different, to get a kind of a new take on what we do,” Cleary explained. “And, the result was really cool. We’re really excited about the album.”

Cleary said the end result was not too crazy or a far stretch from Striker’s sound.

“I think that’s probably a sign that (Schroeder’s) a good producer that can sort of bring the best out of the bands he’s working with, regardless of their style,” Cleary added. “I think when we went in, we were thinking, ‘Oh, maybe it’ll be like really crazy and we’ll do some really off the wall stuff.’ But in the end, he just worked with us to sort of bring out the best in us. And I think, we’ll probably go back to him if we can, and maybe the next one will be the one where we start putting the Lorna Shore type stuff into our music too.”

Cleary describes the song “Live to Fight Another Day” on the “Ultrapower” album as a studio experiment.

“This song was originally a regular rock song with drums and guitar, and then our guitar player was like, ‘What if we did sort of a synth wave type thing with this? Like, different types of drums and electronic drums, stuff like that?’ And you know, we’re a band on our seventh album. We’ve already done the regular rock song stuff. So we were like, ‘Yeah, let’s try it.’ And it turned out really cool.”

Cleary said the band has been trying to write a metal movie soundtrack during the entire time it has been a band.

“We think this one really fits in,” he said of “Live to Fight Another Day.” “This would be a great song on an ’80s action movie soundtrack.”

Striker’s music has a noticeable influence from the ’80s and ’90s genres.

“We’ve always kind of been like a retro style band,” Cleary explained. “We’ve been kind of in the genre of the new wave of traditional heavy metal, which is a lot of stuff that it takes inspiration from like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, that kind of thing. But, lately we’re sort of being more influenced by the later ’80s, early ’90s new wave. And then there’s also the AOR (album-oriented rock) stuff, which is like Journey and Toto and stuff like that. We’ve always been super interested in mixing some of those sounds into what we’re doing, along with some good riffs.”

Cleary said on the last two albums, the band has been experimenting with its music.

“We’re putting synth and keyboard and layers into our music,” he explained. “It just adds a lot, actually, and it sounds great. It’s sort of just like a perfect match.”