Self-described garage rock upstarts Powder Chutes look to be carving a track towards Shihad’s just-vacated crown as the nation’s leading hard rock exponents. A band of their youthful calibre coming out of Wānaka may be a surprise. That their self-funded debut album is as strong as it is probably shouldn’t be, given the praise they’ve been accumulating from local acts like Alien Weaponry and Shapeshifter, and international sources including Classic Rock magazine. Richard Thorne talked with the band about their ‘Powder Chutes’ album.

Although three of the four musicians still fit the bill, Powder Chutes can no longer be branded as a teenage band. Guitarist Clarke West isn’t at all pleased about being the first to turn 20, but it must have been a serious compensation to share that ‘celebration’ with the more satisfying milestone of the release of his band’s eponymous debut album.

‘Powder Chutes’ features 12 very grown up rock tracks traversing groove-fueled grunge to pounding hard rock. Five of them had previously been released in early 2022 as an EP titled ‘Sweet Noise Pollution’, their recording debut that’s since been taken offline.

Descriptions of the Wānaka group’s sound flit around, they’ve drawn high praise comparisons to huge acts including Soundgarden, Tool, Highly Suspect, Silverchair and the Stooges. That variety isn’t in any way a pointer to a new band still trying to find its own sound, despite their (mostly) teenage youth Powder Chutes have been together and writing original songs for years. West, drummer Archie Orbell and singer Henry McConnell started performing together back in primary school, continuing right through to their secondary schooling at Mt Aspiring College. A few years younger than the others, bassist Otis Murphy joined them in 2019, just ahead the Covid lockdowns when they started writing some of the songs that have come to define the band’s sound. 

Growing up a long way away from the main musical centres has meant they’ve been able to develop their own sound without being influenced by any local scene. McConnell credits the school as playing one of the biggest roles in Powder Chutes’ development to date.

“We had a very incredible music teacher, Matt Doyle, and he has been incredibly influential in helping us get to where we are. He runs the whole music department, and we’ve all been in this music class probably since about year seven or eight. So we’ve known him for a really long time, and he’s just like, next level supporting. Like, you know, anything we need he’s there to give us. It’s hard to explain how much he has done for us, it’s immeasurable.”

“Even now that we’ve left school he’s still helping us,” West takes over. “They’ve got a new building at the school, and all this real good music equipment. For the album release party we did we literally went in and borrowed a big mixing desk and all these speakers, and he was just happy to help us out with all that!”

The bi-annual YAMI Sounz music industry training event staged in Wanaka has also played a vital role in their music education, in particular by exposing the young band to a lot of people in the local music industry they wouldn’t otherwise get to meet.

“The opportunity to play with other New Zealand artists as well,” adds Orbell. “Like this coming one [May 2025] we’re playing with Tom Scott from Home Brew, and we’ve played with like, Anika Moa and Troy Kingi and others! It’s cool to be on a professional stage with someone who does that for a living, and just being in their presence to kind of learn off them.”

As with their earlier EP, the 12 tracks on ‘Powder Chutes’ were recorded at Sublime Studios in the rural Waitaki Valley (maybe 150km east, but closer to twice that distance by road), with producer Steve Harrop, and Tom Havard looking after the engineering. Things didn’t quite go as hoped however, with a vocal scare for McConnell during the early stages of recording.

“The original plan was to do it in blocks,” explains West. “Go in for like three days at a time and maybe smash out two full songs, and then come back later. But then Henry’s voice just shat out, and he couldn’t sing for probably a couple of months. So it ended up that we did five or maybe six sessions in total, and recorded about eight of the songs before vocals were added.”

Wānaka is blessed with a good selection of professional singing teachers according to McConnell.

“I’ve had vocal lessons since I was about seven, and only stopped going at about 15-16 when I decided I could figure it out on my own. I was a probably a bit lazy for a while, and then I needed to go and see The Voice Lab in Dunedin. They do lots of like, science behind singing, and know how to manage a voice so that you can continue to sing long term. They were really good and helped me recover and get back into the studio.” 

Not only longtime bandmates, the four now share a flat, complete with a basic rehearsal space in the garage. They are tight knit, democratic in their decision-making, and display a confident maturity without evidence of misplaced egos. While talking positively about their debut long player there’s no sense of unrealistic expectations, rather acknowledgement that there’s room to improve, which they see as a future positive. 

Among the album’s many stand out tracks they agree to being stoked with how Vendetta turned out, the song’s huge close out in particular.

“The funny thing with Vendetta is it wasn’t even fully finished,” says McConnell. “We were sort of writing it on the go, and it was super cool seeing where we were taking it… because we didn’t know, and there was input from everybody on it.”

“Yeah, that acoustic intro wasn’t there when we went into the studio,” West takes up. “Henry was doing vocals or something, and I was just noodling on guitar, and they were like, ‘Put that in at the start!’ That was definitely some studio magic,” he laughs.

“Live, the one that definitely goes off the most is Merchants, and I’m very proud of that because it has a lot of little things that are not standard. Like we’ve got almost like a rock-reggae section in there and other different parts that you wouldn’t have thought would fit together. Actually it was a different song at the start, there were two parts that we nicked from an old song, and the main riff was completely new. People seem to love singing along to that one, even if they haven’t heard it before!”

Exploding out of the speakers, their six-minute version of the anthemic Dutchies by legendary Kiwi live drum and bass act Shapeshifter, is a popular cover for Powder Chutes, done full heavy rock justice in the studio. McConnell’s voice successfully battles some massive drumming, stabbing guitar and Otis Murphy’s Music Man Stingray 5-string bass. Their rendition has drawn honest praise from P.Digsss (a local identity), and has a wondrous mid-winter Wanaka visualiser, courtesy of Nat Warburton of Redpoint Productions, to accompany it.

“I used about five different electric guitars throughout the album,” recalls West. “And on Dutchies I think it was like 14 guitar tracks or something! There’s all these little different atmospheric things and stuff on that track. The studio had like an awesome ‘65 (or something) Gibson 335 that you wouldn’t expect to sound like it does! Mostly the album was tracked with my old Schecter and that 335, as the left and right guitars.” 

Their earlier five-song release was knocked out in just a few days, which, as Orbell explains, is why they pulled the EP from the cloud and re-recorded the tracks for inclusion on ‘Powder Chutes’.

“Yeah, because that was pretty much our first experience with recording, and we only spent like four days in the studio. I think we felt that we could just do them better. We could see from recording what we’ve written for the album compared to that older stuff that we can definitely do those songs a lot better with some more time spent on them.”

Just at the start of promoting what is an impressively convincing and coherent debut album Powder Chutes are already well into writing the next, planning to have the sophomore recorded by the end of the year. West points out they haven’t played any major festivals yet and they hope this release will open some new doors locally.

“Then hopefully with the next album we can really jump off, get onto the festival circuit and do things like an Australian tour and stuff.” 

As McConnell sings in the almost acoustic album closer The Other, having acknowledged how far they’ve gotten, the band realise how far they have to go. 

Supplied photo by Mark Orbell