Louisville, KY garage-punk / power-pop rockers White Reaper are set to release their 5th LP and second for Elektra Records titled "Asking For A Ride" on January 27, 2023. The album will feature 10 new blistering garage punk meets power-pop anthems, filled with trademark guitar melodies and riffs, emotive vocals and monster singalong hooks. The band has shared 3 singles from the forthcoming LP, all which can be streamed below, and if they're any indication of what's to come, this is shaping up to be White Reaper's best album yet.

Recorded and largely self-produced in Nashville with the help of close friend and engineer Jeremy Ferguson, Asking for a Ride finds the Louisville band taking a more direct and in-your-face approach, prioritizing the collection’s raw energy and its ability to translate live through ripping and nervy compositions. It’s White Reaper at their most exciting - dialing up the chrome-plated riffs and monster hooks – a welcome reminder of just how much fun rock music can be.

“We ask ourselves: ‘Does it sound good when we play it in the room together?’ And if it does, those are the songs we want to pursue,” Esposito noted.

Throughout the course of recording Asking for a Ride, the band ventured to Seattle, scrapped most of the sessions recorded there, and then ended up re-writing and self-producing in Nashville with the help of their close friend and engineer, Jeremy Ferguson. As Hater admits, “we were feeling a lot of pressure to come back strong.” The band’s 2019 album You Deserve Love marked a career peak for the five-piece outfit and was highlighted by the number one alternative radio hit, “Might Be Right.” “We now have a clear idea moving forward of what we need to foster our creative process,” Hater continues. “Work smarter, not harder. It’s all just a part of growing up. We’re realizing what we want as humans. It’s definitely been a journey.”

And White Reaper’s new songs off their forthcoming LP reflect their growth: opening track “Asking for a Ride” is a pure thrash, “different than anything we’ve put out before,” offers Hater and, as multiple band members corroborate, was principally inspired by the band going through an intense Metallica phase. The twin-guitar heater that is “Fog Machine,” Esposito explains, “was a buzzer beater” in that it had been in the works for a while with little progress but ultimately came in just under the wire. “In that sense, it was kind of a miracle,” Esposito notes, adding that the song — all chrome plated riffs and swaggering drums, and described by Hater as “Mötley Crüe-meets-Poison-meets Seventies-rock vibes” — is without a doubt one of the band’s favorites at the moment. Closing track “Pages,” by contrast, is a more delicate offering: an opening acoustic guitar paves the way for a soaring chorus with Esposito musing on sustaining love despite all its weird and winding ways.

“There’s a bit of a chaos to our music taste, but we want it to be immediate albeit mixed with our sense of humor,” Thompson says. This goes a long way in explaining the evolution of Asking for a Ride. Whereas You Deserve Love was heavy on production and admittedly not the easiest to translate to the stage, White Reaper’s latest offering is more direct and in-your-face.

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