Black Smoke Trigger might come from a small city in New Zealand, Napier, but their outlook is vast. Everything about them screams ‘ambition’. They work with A-listers. They trained for cold exposure and breath-holding, freediver-style, for their 2020 breakout video Caught In The Undertow. And their music is refreshingly fearless, marrying muscular hard rock with rich, grungy grit on soaring debut album Horizons.
“The idea with this band is to push it as far as we possibly can,” says guitarist Charlie Wallace, having just wrapped up a UK support tour with Bruce Dickinson. “We are all extremely passionate about music, we want to play as many shows as we possibly can, write as many songs as we possibly can, and record as many albums as we possibly can.”
A hard worker by nature, Wallace grew up playing basketball and working in his stepfather’s Chinese restaurant. After school he’d shoot hoops in the alleyway, wash dishes and wait tables. “My mum and my dad always instilled the necessity of hard work,” he says, “and as much as I was provided for, we had to kind of earn everything that we got.”
In school he befriended future BST frontman Josh ‘Baldrick’ Rasmussen (so named by a teacher for his class-clown personality), a budding guitarist yet to discover the thunderous, Layne Staley-meets-James Hetfield voice you hear on Horizons. But it was Black Sabbath’s Paranoid riff that really steered Wallace into music: “It was one of those things that, instantly, I just liked the way it made me feel.”
At 15 he quit school to work in a music shop, teaching guitar and playing in bands by night. Still in his early 20s, he developed the highly successful online training platform Guitar Mastery Method. It was via this that he found himself in Nashville in 2018, just as Black Smoke Trigger were forming, where he met rock production big cheese Michael Wagener (Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica, Alice Cooper…). Impressed by early demos, Wagener produced their EP Set It Off.
From there it all grew quickly. Back home they toured with national metal stars Devilskin. Mid-pandemic they teamed up with Nick Raskulinecz to record Horizons in Nashville and New Zealand. It was a tough album to make, beset by visa issues and family illness, including Wallace’s mother’s cancer diagnosis – the latter captured in cathartic album closer The Promise. She passed away in late 2023.
Talking to Wallace now, there’s a sense that her support and work-hard legacy has stayed with him. That calm, quietly fierce ambition that emanates through Black Smoke Trigger’s music. “I just think I may as well just reach for the biggest and best,” he shrugs, “in everything in life. I don’t want to settle for anything.”
