If listening to their new album Thunder Pit inspires you to seek and destroy, then local groove-metal meisters Waster have done their job.

“Put it on and break your parents’ furniture,” says guitarist Michael Fardoe. “Make bad decisions and break your parents’ shit. That’s what I want this record to do.”

Fardoe and his bandmates – vocalist Nick Wiebe, guitarist Nic Herzog, bassist Tim Halbert and drummer Casey Fiorante – will release the 10-song disc with a show at the Death Trap this Saturday, Oct. 8.

The band formerly known as Fame released an EP of Pantera-inspired metal in 2009 titled Can’t Get Right.

They say that with Thunder Pit, they wanted to lose the breakdowns and keep their punk, rock and blues-infused metal sounding dirty.

“Breakdowns are dead. Don’t need those,” Fardoe says. “We thought we should probably play faster all the time. Or way slower. And just make it crushing. Just really loud – like, way too loud. Obnoxiously loud.”

“Half the time when you play the album through a CD player, it sounds like your speakers are dying,” Herzog adds.

“ Half the time when you play the album through a CD player, it sounds like your speakers are dying.

Nic Herzog, Waster

Waster tracked Thunder Pit last October at Rain City Recorders in Burnaby, B.C. with Stu McKillop (Living With Lions, A Textbook Tragedy). The disc was recorded, mixed and mastered in 12 days, during which the band slept in the studio.

“Me and Tim would sleep in the sound room on a futon, so we really didn’t leave the studio,” Wiebe says. “There’d be bands and producers coming in and we’d be there in our underwear, scratching our balls and playing Super Mario World.”

It’s taken a year to get the record out because the band wanted to find the right label to release it. They eventually settled on Vancouver-based Gold Stock Records, home to bands such as Carpenter and Lowtalker.

Wiebe says the group decided to change its name from Fame this past summer because the new record sounds different from Can’t Get Right and they feel like a brand new band.

They went with “Waster” because it sounds gross.

“The definition of the word ‘waster’ is someone who does something that other, normal people would consider a waste of time,” Fardoe says. “Which is perfect, because we play in a metal band and I’m pretty sure everyone thinks it’s a waste of time.”

“And it probably is,” Wiebe adds with a laugh, “but we don’t know any better.”

Published in Volume 66, Number 6 of The Uniter (October 5, 2011)