Los Angeles, California – March 24, 2014 – POWERMAN 5000 returns with their first collection of all new material in nearly five years. BUILDERS OF THE FUTURE is set to arrive May 27 via T-Boy Records/UMe. The album is available for CD and digital preorder beginning today.
Powerman 5000 has carved out a corner of the galaxy where their devoted supporters created a culture that’s bigger than music, drawing upon a tapestry of comic books, horror films and fantasy cobbled together years before “geek” became a hip buzzword.
New tracks like “How To Be A Human,” “Invade, Destroy, Repeat,” “Live It Up Before You’re Dead” and “Modern World” are turbocharged with the same futuristic, b-movie bite of enduring, electro-tinged Powerman 5000 anthems like “When Worlds Collide” and “Nobody’s Real.”
“I never would have imagined that after all the albums, the band members, the ups-and-downs of the always changing music business, I’d still be here doing this, which is thanks to our most diehard fans,” marvels band leader, visionary and sole remaining original member Spider One, who founded Powerman 5000 with a 4-track and a drum machine.
Armed with giant hooks and crowd-empowering choruses, Spider and his merry band of musical superheroes have made a record vibrantly reminiscent of their commercial breakthrough Tonight the Stars Revolt! (which gave DreamWorks Records their first platinum plaque). Builders Of The Future delivers on the promise of 2009’s return-to-form Somewhere on the Other Side of Nowhere. Powerman 5000 has retrofitted their songwriting prowess even further, sounding hungry yet sophisticated, as if smiling amid a dystopian landscape, flipping middle fingers in the air and dancing till doomsday.
“At the end of the day, we are the ones who will go out and play these songs in every city in America and everywhere else around the world we can,” Spider points out. “You have to live and breathe it. If you don’t believe in it, it’s easy for people to smell a rat. We can sit around and cry all day long about how the music business isn’t what it used to be, but none of that really matters. What matters is to have a blast being in a band.”
Like The Ramones, AC/DC and Motörhead, Powerman 5000 has arrived at a tried-and-true sound upon which listeners can depend. A Powerman 5000 record is ultimately the musical equivalent of The Shogun Warriors, Blackula and Mohammad Ali throwing down with each other across Saturn’s moons in the most epic comic book crossover ever.
Spider One and the band’s early lineups melded together a love of sci-fi, horror, comic books and b-movie culture two decades before teen soap operas starred vampires and werewolves or “Marvel’s The Avengers” made over 1.5 billion dollars. The band’s mainstream success just happened to coincide with the chart dominance of so-called “nü-metal” acts like Korn. “Those bands are great,” says Spider. “But I remember going into …Stars Revolt! and being like, ‘Let’s make a heavy Devo record! Clearly we were always going to be the misfit kid in whatever scene we got lumped into.”
Despite passing trends and shifting business models, Powerman 5000 remained relevant thanks to tracks like the Top 10 Rock radio hit “Free” and the MTV2 staple “Wild World,” and because they have created an entire culture around their music and image.
“We’ve replanted our flag as the weird, sci-fi, electronic band,” proclaims Spider. “This is what we are. This is what we do best. This is clearly what people like from us the most, too. So I’m going to love it like they love it. We’re back. The fanbase has really rallied around us again. The enthusiasm feels like it’s picked right up from the year 2000. The electronic-metal-dance thing, we’ve locked it down once and for all with this one.”
Builders Of The Future is the first release through Powerman 5000’s partnership with T-Boy Records, a co-venture with Universal Music Enterprises founded by veteran rock manager Andy Gould. T-Boy releases include Rob Zombie’s Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor, Megadeth’s Super Collider and the self-titled debut album from Kobra and the Lotus.
