POWER TRIP’s Blake Ibanez Has Confirmed New Music Is Coming

Power Trip guitarist Blake Ibanez has confirmed the group are planning to release new music and plans to continue honouring former vocalist Riley Gale after their tragic passing five years ago.

Power Trip has confirmed that they will be releasing new music for the first time since 2017’s Nightmare Logic. 

The thrash group would enter a brief hiatus following the tragic passing of vocalist Riley Gale in 2020. It wasn’t until 2023 that the band would return to the stage with Fugitive’s Seth Gilmore taking on vocal responsibilities. Now, amidst a busy tour schedule, are Power Trip confirming that they’ve been working on new music with Gilmore as well. 

Guitarist Blake Ibanez would confirm the update in a new interview with Altars of Metal, where he’d reveal that it was only recently that Gilmore felt comfortable taking on the mantle as frontman for the group. 

“I think I had mentioned to him, after Riley passed away, I had talked about, ‘Would you wanna mess around with some of this Power Trip stuff?’ And I think at that point it was so fresh and so new, it was just kind of, like, ‘I don’t know. Maybe down the road.’ And I was, like, ‘Yeah, I get it.’ He’s in a band called Skourge, which is a hardcore band that has some crossover influences, some death metal influences.

“So I’d heard the evolution of his voice and everything in that band. And I think around this time they had done a new EP or something, and his voice – he started to showcase what he could do, his depth to his voice, his range. And I was, like, ‘Whoa. Oh, I didn’t know you could do all that stuff.’ And not just that, but me and him having such a good relationship and him being such a nice guy that’s easy to work with, I was, like, ‘Well, why don’t we just try to write some songs and see what happens?’”

Ibanez would go on to share that working with Gilmore in Fugitive helped ease the vocalist into joining Power Trip and taking on frontman duties. 

“I’ve always been pretty involved when it comes to Power Trip in the studio. I didn’t write anything for Riley, but just me and him having to write songs together, we had to be on the same page and understand how to… He knew what I wanted him to do in terms of where I wanted things to be, and I know the formula and I know how I like to write songs and how we’ve always written songs. And I have some of those instincts as well.

Of course, the question on everyone’s mind is how the band’s sound will change with the inclusion of Gilmore’s voice and writing. Ibanez acknowledges that it’s a delicate balance, but promises that fans won’t be disappointed. 

“We’ll always honour him when we can. We are moving forward, we have to focus on the future, but that doesn’t mean that we’ll forget him or not honour him. Of course, that’s always gonna be a thing that we’ll do, and we’ll try to make sure of. But when it comes to moving forward, we’re gonna write music how we wanna write it.” 

The guitarist would also acknowledge that while they want to sound like Power Trip, they also want to make sure Gilmore feels comfortable with the material he’s producing. “I would never tell him to write about this or that. Riley, he was always thinking and changing, and I don’t know what he would be writing about in this day and age either. I don’t know what he would wanna talk about. I can’t really speculate on that. He’s not with us anymore, sadly,” Ibanez shared. 

“Seth, he’s his own guy. He can handle his own thoughts and ideas. I don’t think we would do anything that would, for any reason, go in opposition to anything that he wrote about. But he’s not gonna try to write the same songs or anything like that, so it’ll be something different. But I can’t imagine it’d be anything that people who like us wouldn’t be interested in or be stoked on. But [it’s] not really my call.”

Power Trip is currently on tour, which is set to conclude in November at the UNO Lakefront Arena in New Orleans.