“I’m feeling a good kind of exhaustion,” smiles Diamond Rowe, the lead guitarist of Atlanta nu-metal revivalists Tetrarch. “I’d rather be doing this than something I completely hate.”
Rowe joins Stereoboard’s video call from the front seat of her car, which is parked outside a rehearsal studio somewhere in her home state of Georgia. She’s there because her band are gearing up for their next tour, which will bring them to Europe and the UK for the very first time.
Considering Tetrarch have already released three studio albums, helped spearhead the new wave of the turn-of-the-millennium’s most notorious subgenre, and been endorsed by idols from Slipknot to Fear Factory, we can’t help but ask: what took them so long?
“I know, it’s crazy!” Rowe exclaims, her unwavering grin and loud voice belying her apparent tiredness. “We really wanted to come over after our last record, [2021’s] ‘Unstable’, but we put it out during the pandemic. It was kind of a weird time: bands and artists were still trying to figure out how to tour, let alone go overseas. We never got to make it on that album cycle, so it was a huge priority of ours to make it over for this album cycle.”
The new album in question, called ‘The Ugly Side of Me’, came out via monolithic metal label Napalm Records (home of Cradle Of Filth, Jinjer, Alter Bridge and others) in May. If you’ve never heard Tetrarch’s music before, it’s the best place to start. Its 10 songs embody the formula that made the band nu-generation stars: taking something as infamously guitar-solo-phobic as nu-metal and stuffing that shit with athletic lead lines and finger-snapping shredding.
Rowe calls ‘The Ugly Side of Me’ a refinement of her band’s approach. Eschewing big songwriting risks, they instead hoped to build upon the goodwill they earned with ‘Unstable’, their label debut, four years back. Rowe explains: “[Previously] there was a lot of, like, ‘Let’s really try to come into who Tetrarch is as a band, and ourselves and our sound’ – not trying to follow any trend, just becoming who we are.
“With ‘Unstable’, we did that. Now, with ‘The Ugly Side of Me’, it was like, ‘Now that I know who I am as a player, I know what kind of songs we love to write and I know what Tetrarch is about, it’s about trying to write the best songs we can with the sound we know we have.’”
It makes sense that Tetrarch don’t want to change much. In 2019, Fear Factory guitarist Dino Cazares and Hatebreed vocalist Jamey Jasta tweeted to their hundreds of thousands of followers about how much they loved the band’s 2017 debut album, ‘Freak’. Then, ‘Unstable’ didn’t just come out through a prestigious label; it opened the door for tours across the US with vaunted rockers Atreyu and Sevendust, as well as sets at basically every halfway decent metal festival in the country.
Rowe says that Tetrarch’s most ringing endorsement, though, wasn’t even in public. “I got messaged by [Slipknot guitarist] Jim Root and he was like, ‘Dude, you need to give me guitar lessons!’, I was like, ‘OK, dude, come on,’” she remembers, jokingly rolling her eyes. “I was like, ‘How about we exchange guitar lessons?’”
Alongside Loathe, King 810, Cane Hill and Tallah, Tetrarch have helped bring nu-metal into the 21st century. But they never originally planned to be at the vanguard of the genre. When Rowe and singer-guitarist Josh Fore co-founded the four-piece in middle school, his favourite band were Green Day and hers were Metallica.
“We hadn’t developed crazy chops or anything like that,” she says. “Green Day has a lot of three-chord songs that are recognisable. So, we gravitated to Green Day covers. We played American Idiot or Holiday, but we’d also do Metallica’s version of Turn the Page and Paranoid by Black Sabbath.”
The ambition to be big in one way or another was still there from the off, however. “We knew, even at that stage, that this is what we wanted to do for life,” Rowe continues. “Even when we were playing the covers, we started thinking a little seriously.”
At every show, Tetrarch pretended they were playing to tens of thousands of people, regardless of how many (or how few) attendees were actually in front of them. As a result they felt prepared when a local radio station gave them their first big booking, opening for Avenged Sevenfold in Atlanta in 2011.“We would always play shows on the weekends, film every show and watch it back,” Rowe reflects. “Even other bands would be like, ‘That’s so dumb. Why do you do that?’ We just knew we wanted to do this.”
In those days, Tetrarch were a thrash metal gaggle, with hallmarks of that sound sneaking through on ‘Freak’. But, that album’s track Spit marked a shift in their songwriting, with Rowe stumbling onto a new, heavily modulated guitar sound akin to Korn. It felt right — and things came full circle when she recently got to give Korn guitarist Brian ‘Head’ Welch a copy of her own Jackson signature model at a concert. “That experience was crazy!” she beams.
After playing across Europe for the first time, it seems like Tetrarch will have ticked off every box on the ‘metal band to-do list’. They’ve been championed by a who’s who of heavy music, supported some serious stars and inked a pretty enviable record deal. Yet, Rowe insists that the ambition which got her and her cohorts to this point is by no means fading.
“When we were just 11, we were like, ‘We want to be one of the biggest bands in our genre,’” she says. “I don’t want to sit around and celebrate our new album for too long, because there’s still a lot to do. We want to play bigger shows and bigger tours and become a household name, and do this until we can’t do this anymore.”
Tetrarch Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows
Mon June 16 2025 - LEIPZIG Moritzbastei (Germany)
Tue June 17 2025 - BERLIN Privatclub (Germany)
Wed June 18 2025 - HANNOVER Cafe Glocksee (Germany)
Thu June 19 2025 - RATINGEN Manege (Germany)
Sun June 22 2025 - UTRECHT De Helling (Netherlands)
Tue June 24 2025 - GHENT Vierde Zaal (Belgium)
Wed June 25 2025 - BIRMINGHAM Flapper
Thu June 26 2025 - LONDON Camden Assembly
Sun June 29 2025 - GENEVA Undertown (Switzerland)
Wed July 02 2025 - DUNAUJVAROS Rockmaraton (Hungary)
Thu July 03 2025 - VIENNA Flex (Austria)
Sat July 05 2025 - VELKE MEZIRICI Fajtfest (Czech Republic)
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