INTERVIEW: Nonpoint, now touring with Mudvayne, turn up the energy ‘A Million Watts’
Photo: Nonpoint are currently on tour with Mudvayne. Photo courtesy of Francesca Ludikar / Provided by O’Donnell Media Group with permission.
Nonpoint, the increasingly popular rock/metal band from Florida, are currently finishing up an expansive tour with Mudvayne, Coal Chamber, Gwar and Butcher Babies. Their remaining dates include Salt Lake City (Aug. 25) and Englewood, Colorado (Aug. 26). But the fun won’t stop for Nonpoint — which features Elias Soriano on lead vocals, Robb Rivera on drums, Rasheed Thomas on guitar and backing vocals, Adam Woloszyn on bass, and Jason Zeilstra on lead guitar — because this November the hard-rockers will release their latest EP, Heartless, featuring the new single “A Million Watts.”
For Nonpoint, this current tour and the new recorded songs are just another day in the life of being a hard-working rock band, and each new concert they play brings more and more new fans into the fold.
“A lot of Nonpoint T-shirts, a lot of Emerald Cities tour merch,” said Soriano about the fans he sees from the stage every night. “It really jumps out at you, so we’re definitely getting a mix of both [old and new fans]. The merch numbers have been great, so I know that we’re getting new fans for sure.”
On this current tour, which is headlined by Mudvayne, Nonpoint have been playing 30-minute sets, which means they keep the musical energy high and tight. They get in, get out and leave the crowd wanting more. And there’s so much success for this band that squeezing everything into a 30-minute set can be difficult. There are many acclaimed tunes, including “Bullet With a Name,” “Ruthless,” “Alive and Kicking” and “Chaos and Earthquakes.”
“It’s another year of our lives doing what we love,” Soriano said. “It’s exciting to be able to play this caliber show for as long as we’re going to be playing it. This one is a six-week run, so the bands are all friends. The fans are all hungry. It’s a perfect formula for just a good time. As long as we’re happy at the end, everything else kind of fixes it.”
“A Million Watts” plays up the humorous side of Nonpoint, with Soriano calling the tune a “fun song” that they were just throwing around one day. In the beginning stages of the writing process, the song was more serious and heavier, but then they decided to break from the seriousness and have a “good time” with the arrangement and lyrics. What they ended up with was a party song.
“I think our fans see that on our Instagram and with our TikToks,” Soriano said of the humor amongst the band members. “The band doesn’t fall short of having a sense of humor, so for us to put it into our videos or for us to put it into our music doesn’t seem far-fetched for a Nonpoint fan. … Actually the songs that are coming up for Heartless right now, they’re some powerful songs, so I’m excited to see the fans’ reactions to that. We definitely went back to basics for the ones that are coming following ‘A Million Watts.’”
Nonpoint, who have been going strong for 25-plus years, have lately been on an EP kick. They like releasing these smaller bodies of work, but Soriano promised that full albums are still coming in the future. Whatever the band decides to do in the studio, whether an EP or full album, the project will be of their own choosing because Nonpoint is 100 percent independent.
“It definitely leaves room for us to be nimble and for us to move quickly with decisions and making last-minute changes,” Soriano said of their independent label, 361 Degrees Records. “It’s definitely easier to move the independent machine as opposed to moving a bigger label machine, so we enjoy being able to change up things. Or when we see something that might not land in the risk factor that we like, we can change an audible and change it up.”
Soriano added this about the DIY aesthetic to the band: “We just found ourselves doing a lot of the work, and we really don’t feel any difference from going from a major label to going into independence. We were smart enough to build a team around us, and our team is ever-growing and ever-changing just like label teams are. We just try to put people that we trust and that care about the project as a whole in positions that we know they are going to do well.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Nonpoint are currently on tour and will release their new EP, Heartless, this November. Click here for more information.
