The Bad Penny (beta)

When The Bad Penny caught up with Aurorawave frontman Nathan Aurora on Wednesday, ahead of the metal-reggae band’s gig at The Shredder tonight, he was in the zone. The previous week, he achieved a lifelong dream by playing Louder Than Life Festival, now the biggest rock event in the States, and that was just a month after his band released their second full-length, Monument. Featuring members of Underoath and Emmure, the record is doing well on the charts and providing Aurorawave with plenty of wind in their sails as they tour behind it.

We caught up with Aurora as his L.A.-based band was cruising into Denver, and what turned into a short Q+A a about Aurorawave’s show tonight in Boise swelled into a larger conversation about the birth of the band, its personality and mission, and even what drives Aurora as a musician and human being. So here we go …

Have you played Boise before?

I played Boise many times with my last band [The Seventh Plague]. Aurorawave played last year at the Knitting Factory. It was a support show [for Long Beach Dub Allstars]. But this is our first time actually doing our own show in the city of Boise.

Do you feel like the people who went to your previous shows here are aware of your new project and that you’re going to get a good turnout, or is it a roll of the dice?

We got a lot of old friends and fam that have been supporters of me and my music for a long time in that city. So I think we’e going to do pretty well, man.

What are you most excited about in terms of this tour? 

The production. I worked really hard on lighting and videos, and on the musical direction for the set list too. All the new transitions. We are playing three or four songs that we’ve never played live before on this new record. We’ve been releasing singles for the last six or seven months, and we’ve been on the road for a lot of it. Every time a new single comes out, we’re pretty much on the road to start playing it. But this will be the first performance since the full album came out, and we’re playing most of the entire album.

It’s unconventional to release songs piecemeal and tour all along, and then have the album come out. Why did you take that approach?

It hasn’t been like massive touring around the singles, more like festival appearances or short runs. We’ve been releasing a song a month. We’ve pretty much been debuting these songs live for the first time without ever rehearsing them together. We just run them in soundcheck. My band is really talented, man. I get them all their assets and what they need to learn the songs and the live versions of the songs too. Then we just cross our fingers. But every time we plan, we’re good, and they sound great.

What a cool way to make each show not only distinct and special for you guys, but for the crowd.

I always let them know that it’s the first time we ever played that song, it just came out last week, or whatever.

Do you also do it to gauge the crowd reaction to the songs and see if they’re worth putting on the album or leave it for a B-side or future release. 

We’ve yet to do that, being so young in our career, but maybe in the future. Everything’s been pretty lockstep. We’ve been a band for a year and a half, two years, and we just released the second record. So the music is just pouring out, and we’re just running out there and performing it live.

It sounds like you guys are all pretty organized. 

I think so, man. If there’s one personality trait that me and my band share, it’s probably maturity. We’ve been blessed with a lot of really great opportunities to achieve this thing that we all want to do with our lives. No one’s out here to party or meet chicks. We are all kind of coming at it with a certain level of responsibility and maturity.

Can you expand on that a little bit? Are younger bans like yourselves more serious or focus because we’re in a post-COVID world? Or is it learning from past mistakes? 

I’m not sure about like the state of the music industry or the world in general post-COVID. But that’s gotta be a factor, just like the over-saturation of bands. God bless it, you know, because there’s more music out there than ever. But it’s very over-saturated, man. So you really gotta work hard in order to position yourself to be successful in this industry. In terms of me personally, it’s absolutely learning from past mistakes with bands. I used to love getting out there and having a good time partying, because when you’re in your 20s, that’s probably what you should be doing, especially if you’re a musician. You should be out there making memories and enjoying it. 

There’s this drive and ambition that this band has where we’re always going to have a good time. And we truly enjoy each other’s company. But there’s nothing that comes before the mission that is taking this thing higher. That’s always like at the forefront of everyone’s mind. How do we show up to venues and leave them better than we found them? We’re trying to leave the green rooms cleaner than when we got there. We treat the staff with respect and dignity and leave a good impression. And we do our job, which is to play an awesome show.

When I established this band, I built it off what I call the five core pillars of Aurorawave. I’m not going to share them, because they are personal, but they have a lot to do with clarity, respect, grit, hard work and things like that. And we’ve really been embodying those things.

How does that translate into your music then? Is it with more meticulousness songwriting and making sure you’re doing your best with each song?

Yeah, I think that’s fair. I never really thought of it that way, but it definitely does translate into the music in terms of how I am meticulous with how I make the records. The process is really locked in, and it all comes from the clarity and the hard work. Lyrically, it definitely comes through in songs like “Inferno” [featuring Brandon Saller and Dan Jacobs of Atreyu].

There’s this overarching theme in our music, because I’m writing from my heart and about my experiences. A lot of the stuff on my mind is the drive to make something out of nothing. In this day and age, it’s kind of the only message you really can have. Things have gotten so bad, nobody wants to go to a show and hear about how shitty things are. They go there to escape from that.

Do you feel like your earlier projects were more about airing grievances?

No, man, my last band for 10 years was a lot of hippy-dippy escapism. A lot of the songs that I wrote over those 10 years are really real to me. That’s where I was at in my life. I’m really leaning into a lot of the spiritual, positive aspects of things that I was, as a kid in his 20s, trying to figure out. When I started this band, a lot of it could be deemed as more negative than that because it’s dealing directly with real-life situations. It’s much more on the nose lyrically, and it’s dealing with confrontations and triumphs and tribulations. However, I do feel that I’ve heard a lot of grievances on the first two records, and I’m excited to see where it goes with like album three, because I’ve gotten a lot of anger and rage out with the first two records.

I also like feel like I’ve accomplished a lot of really great things with these first two records. Now it’s like kind of a blank canvas, and I’m excited to begin the writing process for album three and beyond and see really where I want to take it. 

The sensibility you talked about with your previous projects, was that influenced by your appreciation for reggae music?

Totally, man. I fell in love with reggae when I was probably 18, 19, and spent all my 20s chasing reggae and like learning it and appreciating the music and the culture. And so much of it has to do with positivity, one love, spiritual stuff. I dove right in, man. I still love a lot of aspects of that. But I’ve also seen like the negative sides of that, certain sides which I would consider slightly delusional and a little bit like less realistic than what life is really about. I think a lot of people do use [reggae] to escape. You should be able to shut out the world every now, and then and enjoy and relax. That’s a vital part of human existence. But also, [you shouldn’t] not run away your problems. Try and deal with things head-on and become a better person and try and better the world, which isn’t always pretty.

What do you feel is maybe a character flaw that you previously had that you’ve that you’ve worked out now?

One of them, for sure, is avoidance. I used to love to avoid issues and not deal with them and just run away. My wife really taught me about leaning into uncomfortable scenarios and just dealing with things. It’s always going to have a better outcome.

That’s great. How long you been married? 

We got married in 2021, been together almost 10 years.

Congratulations.

She’s the best. Thank you, brother.

Have you found that, because of the shift in your in your message and attitude, the crowd behaves and respondes differently? 

For sure. When we show up in the same spaces that I have frequented for the last 10 years, there’s always going to be people that go, “This isn’t for me. I like his old stuff better.” But I think that a lot of people are really open-minded and enjoy it. The coolest thing about this project is that now we’re we’re invited into new spaces. We just got done playing Louder than Life Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, North America’s largest rock and metal festival, which is something that was off the table for my past projects and things like that. So we showed up to that space and there was no history behind it, no sentimental attachment. It was people showing up to something with no expectations and really appreciating the music for what it is.

Can you share an anecdote or two from that experience? 

It was just fantastic. It’s been on my vision board since we started this band, to play at these kind of festivals. It was like watching a dream turn into reality in front of all of our eyes.

What bands inspired you to combine metal and reggae?

Most notably Skindred. They kind of put it on the map in the early 2000s. They’re the absolute GOATs. But then a lot of bands dabbled into it, like P.O.D., Nonpoint. But in my opinion, those bands were much more nu metal, and they kind of would just dabble into like reggae themes or sounds or terminology.

What I think we’re bringing to the table that’s different is we’re coming from a different generation. It’s more modern metalcore and modern reggae, which to those who aren’t as familiar with the American reggae scene, have really blossomed and become something beautiful. It’s far different than the reggae that Bob Marley brought to America in the ‘70s, which obviously is amazing. America has created its own brand of reggae music, and that’s the world where I come from.

Would you chock up Sublime as a big reason that happened?

The American version, totally. When Bob passed, things kind of died down. And when Sublime came around, it revitalized the entire thing in an entirely new way in the ‘90s. That’s also when you saw bands like 311 do this reggae-rock kind of sound. Sublime is one of the reasons that California and America in general latched so hard onto reggae and created this amazing scene from.

Have you toured overseas much yet? 

Yeah. With our last project, we did a run in France and Switzerland. [With Aurorawave,] we actually just went international for the first time. We were invited over to go to the world’s largest reggae fest. It’s called Rototom Sunsplash, [and it’s] in Spain. Eight days of music. Just insane. They were celebrating their 30th anniversary this year. It was just last month. A phenomenal time. And just in this last week or so, we’ve gotten some exciting news for 2026 … but that I can’t share it yet. All I can say it, if you’re overseas and you’re looking for us, keep an eye out.

So the crowds over there get it.

It’s hard to say, man. But Rototom is a purist reggae festival, and it was fucking unbelievable. We were the only band that [integrated] rock. It’s a lot of traditional and foundational reggae styles that perform there. We were the only band, I would say, that’s really pushing the limits in the way that we are. From the jump, Mosh pits erupted. And I’m like, “All right.” I think a lot of that is that Europe music lovers are passionate about music. I think they were excited to hear something different and something exciting. They just got straight to it. And we had a great set. We played for 75 minutes, and the crowd was just amazing

What do you recall about the times you played Boise in the past? 

I really like Idaho, man. I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada. So I didn’t really know much about anywhere. And I also come from a pretty poor family. So I never traveled until I started touring. I had a lot of preconceived notions about a lot of different places, from not having been there. And I thought Idaho would be boring and, like, why would anyone live there? [But] when I started driving through Idaho, even for the first time … Boise alone a really gorgeous place. But Idaho as a whole is a really gorgeous place. And no one really talks about it. As a kid growing up in Las Vegas, there’s no one out there spreading the gospel of how cool Idaho is.

Boise’s a college town, so there’s a lot happening. Great food, great music, great restaurants, things like that. But just the natural beauty of it is really nice, too, man. You get 20, 30 minutes outside of town, and you’re in this beautiful rural place. The older that I get, the more I like rural states. So I’m a fan of Idaho.

Are you going to be here for enough time that you can take a hike or do some recreational activities, or are you going to be bouncing after you play? 

It’s the last in a string of five shows, so we’ll probably stay the night there, and then we’ve got a couple of days off. But I don’t think we have to drive too far. So we might be able to get out. We’ll see.

Do you have any distinct memories of playing here? 

Back in the day, we used to play at a venue called the Reef. It was a tiny club upstairs. So I remember the loading was absolute garbage, because you’d show up and you’d have to carry amps and all this stuff up two stories of stairs, first thing in the afternoon.

And then, after the show’s over, I remember people getting really wild. The crowds were amazing and high-energy, but people were getting hammered. I remember a couple of our early shows. Police getting called, and a dude getting tased. There was a couple of shows that got a little bit too turned up. A couple of individuals couldn’t behave right. I just remember it being wild.

Will you be playing mostly new material?

We’re pretty much playing it all, man. We got two records out, so to do a headline set, 75, 90 minutes, we’re pretty much playing it all. If you like our music, you’re going to hear most of it.

Anything else that’s been interesting so far as you’ve embarked on this tour? 

We’re really starting to achieve the vision that we set out with: a reggae-metal band coming from primarily a reggae world. We’re finally starting to find our way into some badass rock and metal places. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do: Coexist in both spaces. We’re hitting a pretty awesome stride right now. Something’s smiling down on us and giving us some really amazing opportunities, man, so we’re trying hard to be present and enjoy all of it, and seize every opportunity with everything we got. We’re out here performing to the best of our abilities, for sure.

What would be your dream band to tour with?

That’s such a hard question, man. I would probably go with Limp Bizkit.

Really?

Yeah. I think so, man. I think so. It’s an OG that’s still crushing it for so many decades. They found a way to break through, ae’re doing something crazy, too. I think it would be a cool package. Yeah

And you’ve have the bonus perk of being able to climb out of a big toilet or whatever the hell they had onstage recently.

Yeah, brother. They’re always pushing boundaries, man. 

I suppose so.

Pick up tickets for Aurorawave’s show tonight at the Shredder here. Doors are at 6 p.m., with the show starting an hour later. Native Leaves and Brace Yourself are handling opening duties. Go to Aurorawave’s Bandcamp page and Brace Yourself’s Facebook page to learn more about those respective bands.

This entry was posted on 09/28/2025 at 6:57 am and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.