Queensryche

Saturday, September 7, 2024 • 8:00pm

Live at The Club

In April 2022, QUEENSRŸCHE finished a five-week North American tour supporting metal gods Judas Priest. That tour wasn’t merely a fiery return to the stage for QUEENSRŸCHE after a two-year pandemic: it was a rejuvenation. The sound of a band locked-in and firing on all cylinders. “The Priest tour was a great springboard for us to get back onstage in what’sessentially a new world,” says founding guitarist Michael Wilton. “We had so much momentum going off of our last record [2019’s The Verdict] and then, the world, our business, came to a grinding halt. We had to survive, pick ourselves up and get back to being QUEENSRŸCHE.”  Now, their legacy has coalesced into another career milestone for the Bellevue, Washington borne band with the release of their 16thstudio album,Digital Noise Alliance.

Overcoming obstacles and defying expectations has always been at the heart of QUEENSRŸCHE. With 20 million albums sold worldwide, innumerable accolades and a career that has charted the course of multiple genres, QUEENSRŸCHE remains bloodied but unbowed.Teamed again with producer and mixer, Zeuss (Rob Zombie, Hatebreed), Digital Noise Allianceembraces and refracts QUEENSRŸCHE’s history from the classic drive of opener, “In Extremis” through “Behind The Walls” to epic album closer, “Tormentum”. Digital Noise Alliance is that elusive career-embodying album that echoes the most classic elements of the QUEENSRŸCHE’s sound. It pulses with the sort of sonic ambitions that changed the hard rock and metal landscape on albums like their multi-platinum Empire or their magnum-opus concept album, Operation: Mindcrime.

It was the isolation of Covid-19 that fueled the first creative stirrings for QUEENSRŸCHE. “Being left to your inner abandons brought up a lot of feelings,” Wilton admits. “It was a weird, strange time and not knowing if you were going to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It sucked, but it did ignite some of the creative elements for the new record.” Those ideas started to come together in early 2021 when Wilton met up with vocalist Todd LaTorre and began assembling the bare-boned riffs for Digital Noise Alliance at the singer’s home studio in Tampa, Florida. “It was a chaotic, uncertain time,” says bassist Eddie Jackson. “But the bottom line for us was to do what we always have done, which is to continue to create music, even in the face of adversity.”