Dallas Toler-Wade left acclaimed death metal band Nile almost 10 years ago, but Nile seemingly never left him. Even if just a small amount, he still finds Nile’s iconic technical sound bleeding into his new band, Narcotic Wasteland. “A little bit. And that’s just because I wrote songs for Nile, and I write like 95% of the music for Narcotic Wasteland. I’m the main guy. This is my band.”
On Narcotic Wasteland’s recent Annihilation of Europe Tour, they’ve combined both past and present—Nile’s Egyptian style death metal with Narcotic Wastelands sweeping guitar riffs. Started in 2014, Narcotic Wasteland grew far beyond a simple side project. Their self-titled debut—released only a year after Wade’s split from Nile—sees Wade channel the deepest parts of Nile and fires them off with immense force. Pounding double-bass kicks pierce through Wade’s electric screams. Guitars wail with the similar violence Nile fans are accustomed to.
There is a distinct separation between Nile and Narcotic Wasteland. Narcotic Wasteland excel in their unique ability to record intricate and melodic guitar sweeps with pure, unfiltered aggression, something that Wade casually explains on his YouTube channel. Switching between guitar tutorials, product reviews, and exclusive tour vlogs, Wade has found a new home within our emerging online ecosystem. It has taken on a life of its own, slowly being Wade’s favorite way to creatively express himself while regularly keeping in touch with fans online. This isn’t to say he’s without criticisms, in fact, he’ll be the first to preface any discussion surrounding social media with some skepticism. “There is a lot of garbage on the internet. And there’s a lot of, let’s just say, neurologically challenged people on there that really just need to shut the fuck up,” he says on a Zoom call as he’s walking through his home. “Hell, your life might even be better if you’re not on there.”
Still, he manages to release videos that serve as both promotional material and an additional avenue for creative expression. His playthrough of Nile’s “Lashed To The Slave Stick” showcases his technical prowess that’s usually reserved for live performances. His tablatures give direct insight into the structure of some of Nile’s impressive catalogue. And with the release of Narcotic Wasteland’s newest single “Barbarian” earlier this year, fans are definitely experiencing a surplus of material to parse through. As Narcotic Wasteland embarks on a new European tour, the band are expanding their reach beyond what they previously imagined. Wade in particular is looking to embrace a new medium that old-school metal heads rarely tap into. For him, it’s new, refreshing, and exciting.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
I saw on Narcotic Wasteland’s website that you guys are going on tour again.
Yes, yes. We are going to Europe. I fly out, I think on the 9th, and it’s a six week tour. Europe and U.K. dates. Very excited for that. It’s our first time over there. I went to Europe and the U.K. several times with Nile. But this is the first time I’ve been able to bring this band over, and we’re very excited about that.
How do you think the band is going to be received over there?
I think it’s going to be pretty good. A lot of the people that are going to be going to the concerts are already familiar with my 18 years with Nile. We’re going to be playing a couple of my songs that I wrote for that band and really celebrating 20 years of Annihilation of the Wicked. I think I’m going to see a lot of old friends and meet a lot of new friends.
How does a tour like that, where you’re playing music from essentially two different bands, impact Narcotic Wasteland?
It really doesn’t impact it that much. On the technical side of things, the thing that I had to figure out was the different tunings. But now that I have that figured out, I can pretty much play whatever I want, in whatever tunings I want. And that was the thing that was keeping the songs as authentic to the original as possible. And since I performed most of the instruments on those songs in the studio, as far as, you know, guitar and bass and even solos, it was just about making those as authentic as possible. We’re doing a really good job with that.
I’m really happy with the way the Nile songs are sounding on the Narcotic set, and it blends pretty seamlessly over because even though Narcotic Wasteland is musically different from Nile, it’s still me, and you can tell it’s still me. So it works.
One thing I did want to ask is, considering how well it blends with the band and how long Nile has been a part of your life, does Nile’s sound essentially bleed into the sound of Narcotic Wasteland? Have you found that happening?
Yeah a little bit. And that’s just because I wrote songs for Nile, and I write, like, 95% of the music for Narcotic Wasteland. I’m the main guy. This is my band.
Typically when I talk to musicians, it’s more of like a collaborative effort where songs are created in a jam secession. So it’s interesting to hear that.
Being in jam sessions and writing that way has its charm. And I’m sure a lot of cool things have been written that way, but at the same time, as a compositionist, when I have musical ideas, it’s not just guitar riffs. In my brain, I’m hearing the drums. I’m hearing what the vocals are probably doing. Sometimes I have specific drum beats or specific bass lines in my brain that’ll go along with the guitar. So the stuff I hear in my head is usually fairly complete.
That doesn’t mean that I’m not open to suggestions. If somebody had a whole idea they wanted to present, I’m definitely up to that. And sometimes that works out, but a lot of times it’s just like, here’s the demo. Learn the song.
That is so fascinating that you basically have the song already in your head. Do you ever find it difficult to put that onto a demo?
Sometimes, but the most effective thing for me is to do the old-school thing at first and just lay down a bunch of ideas. Whether I’m just recording it on my phone or back in the day, they called them riff tapes. You would just record stuff onto tape, but now with a phone, I can just set that and turn the camera on.
And if I get an idea that I want to capture, I capture it now. I grab a bunch of these ideas, whether it be a single riff or an entire section that I’ve put together with key changes and transitions, and I just record that. I compile a bunch of it, and then I start actually tracking it into a session. That’s usually how it starts. But sometimes it’ll start with a simple drum beat. Sometimes it might start with a simple burst line or a chorus line. Sometimes it might start with a really cool guitar part that I either heard in my head or I was experimenting messing around and stumbled upon it.
So who are you listening to right now?
I haven’t been doing a whole lot of listening lately. I’ve just been doing a whole lot of guitar playing. I’ve been working on getting more tablature up on my website. I intend on having everything I’ve ever written—pretty much anything that has seen the light of day on an album or whatever—I’m going to end up doing the guitar tablature for. So that’s a pretty savage undertaking because there’s a lot of stuff, and it’s very time-consuming. Remembering some of the stuff too. They are over 20 years old, so I might need to just refresh myself a little bit on what the hell is going on.
I honestly really love that because when I was first starting to learn how to play guitar, I would listen to my favorite bands and my favorite songs and I always wanted them to release official tabs. Because when you’re a big fan of someone, you just want to know how they play it in the way they’re playing it.
The whole thing with how things are done nowadays, you know, it used to be that the artist would put out a couple singles, put out an album, maybe release a couple of videos, and then go on tour. And then you’ve got some magazine interviews with Guitar World or something like that, but nowadays, the whole thing is kind of changed up a bit. On the one hand, you have people saying ‘Oh, it’s too much! You’ve gotta be on social media all the time, and you’re expected to do this, that, and the other thing.’ But on the other hand, I say a more positive side to that is now we’re just getting more content from the artists. Getting the songs, the album, the concerts, but we’re also getting tablature, guitar playthroughs, stuff like that for people to check out.
So it’s actually getting more mileage out of the same amount of content just by presenting it in different ways. You have the song on the album, you have the single, you have the video, you have the playthrough, you have the tablature, and then you have a short explanation of what the song is about. There’s just a lot more to it. And I think that’s really cool. Some Gen Xers like me might be like, “Oh, it’s a bunch of shit. I remember back in the day all I ever had to do was play guitar and be brilliant and drink beer.” Those days are over. You’ve got to hustle and I’m very much a firm believer of live, adapt, or die, and I want to live, damn it!
I feel like now in the digital age, artists have to work even harder to be noticed because the internet has made it easy for people to share their own music. There’s a lot of people to compete with. And I’ve spoken with a lot of smaller artists that don’t like the fact that they also have to market themselves on social media. What’s your opinion on that?
I totally sympathize and relate to the resistance of that sort of thing. It does feel like we happen to work extra hard for minimal results, but for me personally, the way I was able to sort of survive that is to realize that, it is what it is. To anybody who might be discouraged by the extra steps that we have to take nowadays, it does end up being fun. Like what I’ve been doing on the Dallas Toler-Wade YouTube channel. I’ve got like three more product reviews that I’m going to be putting up. I’m going to be putting play-throughs of the stuff that I wrote. And it does seem like a lot of work, and it can be a lot of work, but the important thing is that it’s fun.
I was resistant towards it at first because I was like, I ain’t got time for that. But what it really ended up being is excuses, excuses, excuses. And once I really jive into that and start working on it, I’m like, man, this is fun. Why would I want to do anything else? What was the problem?
Yeah, that’s one thing I did want to touch on because I was watching some of your videos, and you seem very comfortable in front of a camera. And I can tell you’re having a lot of fun with that.
Yeah, man that’s what it’s all about. The moment that this is no longer fun will be the moment that I find other things to do with my time. But it’s fun. It’s producing results as well. Even if I was just doing it for fun, the amazing thing is all the killer comments, responses, and likes that I’ve been getting. Almost zero negativity at all. It’s all been really positive, and that just that really drives me. If I’m having fun doing that and people are having fun watching me do that, then let’s do it.
So how did your YouTube channel come about?
I’ll be honest, I’m probably a little bit inspired by other YouTubers. I was using YouTube mostly just to watch music videos or watch video game footage or something like that. And then one day, this guy popped up, and he was restoring a third gen Camaro. The engine froze up, and he went through all of it and got that thing running and drove up 500 miles. It was a show called Vice Grip Garage, and I never really used YouTube in that particular way. I never even knew about these shows until about three years ago. They just opened up a whole realm to me and I just thought to myself, it’ll be pretty fun.
I’m definitely not trying to ultra monetize it. Really just for fun, but also just to generate a little bit more interest in the band. It’s just another way to do that. And, you know, I have fun while doing it, and that’s kind of how I have started doing my own show.
Do you have any future ambitions with the channel? Or is it strictly a thing you do for fun, like to interact with people as well?
A bit of both. I’ve got a few ideas that I want to do on the channel. But I’m actually backlogged. I have three different product reviews that I’m going to be filming for this weekend. There’s vocals for a song for the next album that I need to lay down. And stuff with the agency I need to do.
So you said you’re working on a new album, right?
Mhm. Long story short, COVID happened. We really didn’t get a chance to get out on the road and solicit the band like it needed to be. 2021 rolls around, we start getting show offers in. So I’m like, yeah, let’s put this band on the road. Let’s get out there and do it cause there’s still people that don’t even know about this. So we just kept doing that, and that’s how we’ve been able to release five singles into the whole pandemic. Since then, tour offers just keep coming in, so I’ve just been keeping us busy on the live front.
We’ve released five singles since the last album. There is another set of five songs that are ready to go that are mostly recorded and ready just for mixing. So it’s been sitting for a while. I’ve decided to make the executive decision to put the band out on the road and solicit us a little bit more before we pull the trigger. But now, it’s definitely time. I’m going to be able to actively do both. I’m going to be able to release this thing while keeping the band on the road.
Your last record was in 2017, with Delirium Tremens. What was the timeline from the release of your 2017 record to beginning of your next one?
Not much of a timeline. By the time the first album finally got released, it had already been completed. All demos with vocals and everything. It just needed to be properly recorded. That album was completed for almost three years, and when we were able to release it in 2014, I think about two or three songs were already skeleton tapes going into Delirium. And then the rest of that album just kind of flew together pretty quickly. By the time 2019 came around, there were already at least three songs ready to go for the next album.
I just kept chipping away at that during 2020, and everything pretty much got finished up in that 2021-22 time frame. We still haven’t released the album, but I already have three more songs ready to go for the next one.
So given how you essentially didn’t stop writing since the release of Delirium Tremens, should people expect a new sound or should they expect something similar to what they’ve already heard?
I would say it’s going to be a more refined version of what we’re already kind of doing, but I’m always looking to expand on things musically and not get totally pigeonholed. I think for this album cycle, it’s been a little bit more on the thrashy side of things. But there’s the exception to the rule and a couple of the songs that I’ve written are just all over the place and fast as hell. Also, I have some more slow doomy, melancholic stuff that I like to do too. I don’t feel like I’ve ever written the same song twice. You know what I mean? That’s very important. There may be some similar stylistic things going on here as a whole, but I don’t feel that I’ve really repeated myself too much. I try not to. But, you know, that’s one of the conundrums that we all deal with at some point.
So can you talk to me about your writing process, specifically with your lyrics? Because I’ve noticed that a lot of faster metal bands, like they either put their lyrics at the front or it’s either like supplementary to the music itself. What’s, like, what is your process like?
The process has been pretty much a lot of both. When I was working with Nile, Karl would have lyrics ready to go, so I could just write music to a couple of the lyrics sets. And that was a real fun way to work because you can kind of mentally picture in your mind what’s going on in the song. And it felt like it gave me somewhat of a musical direction to take. But on the other hand, I’ve also put together stuff that started with music, and then I was able to work lyric ideas in later. Either way works and either way can inspire something.
In the case of the song “Barbarian” that we released, that whole song started from a verse that I had written down. And within that same day, I started putting the song together. It was just kind of one of those lightning in a bottle days where I had a bunch of cool ideas coming into my brain that I wrote down, and then I picked up the guitar, and it was just fire coming out of it.
Then there’s been songs that take really long to finish, and I end up second guessing and rewriting the lyrics like five or six times before I’m happy with it. Or I end up coming up with an idea that I feel is even better than the one I had before. That’s what happened with “The Best Times Have Passed.” I’d had that song written for a long time and as soon as I went to go start singing it, I wrote down an entire notebook sheet full of stuff. And that happens very often. I’ll start working on it and then I’ll get more ideas as I’m working on it. That happens quite often, especially lately, but it usually ends up being for the better and at the end of the day, we’re just trying to get whatever is in us out of us in some kind of way. All these ways are just ways to pull it out of you, you know? Sometimes it can start with a simple three note riff or it could start with a paragraph, you know? All of them have been applicable and they all work.
The lyrics for Barbarian are very interesting to me. You wrote on a Narcotic Wasteland’s website that the lyrics are essentially your own philosophy and observations on life. And I find that fascinating because when I was listening to it, what was being said was kind of like a universal language. It was like something that most everyone can relate to considering the time that we’re living in. Because the song talks about war and surveillance technology and the mundanity of everyday living. Is this something you think about often?
It’s kind of hard not to think about it because it’s the life we live. It’s disgusting what’s going on with everything. I never directly bring politics into my art or anything like that. From my point of view, I usually just leave it there. But I was driving through town earlier and there were a lot of people out with signs today. I think they were protesting our president. But good for them. As long as they’re keeping it peaceful, and it comes from a place that’s not a place of greed and instead a place of community, then yeah, put your flag up there. Put your signs up there. You know? That would be part of what’s supposed to be our rights. We can do that.
“Barbarian” kind of touches on the fact that I don’t like being told what to do about anything. Just the way religion and politics are used to control people and how so many of them are seemingly blind to it. Or maybe the struggle is so real, they just feel helpless in fighting against it. The way that I’ve always been able to deal with my own mental struggles, with the mundane round of existence that we are sort of forced into, is the enjoyment of music and art and games and literature and all those things. It is a form of education and a form of self expression all at the same time.
There’s so many good people in the world, and it’s really a shame that those good people don’t ever seem to make it into a place of power. In the song (“Barbarian”), it’s talking about how we can rise up against these people, and we can change things without one violent act even. My philosophy has always been, if you really want to win the war, you got to stop giving rich assholes your money. Take the power back. We all have to participate in order for that to work.
The song “Barbarian” ends with the two lyrics, “it’s time to protect our world from ourselves, to end the plague of ignorance once and for all.” For you, what does this call to action mean and what would you like to see being done about it?
I would like to see our youth get all the chances of education that they deserve without charging exorbitant amounts of money for it. I think that education and healthcare are a right. And there’s a line in the song that says, “The most oblivious of fools follow the loudest, most ignorant voice.” And with your own imagination, you can think of exactly who I’m pointing my finger at when I say that.
But being able to get out on the road and hang out with fans of music and like-minded people that are respectful towards each other, I’m in my family. These are my people, and we embrace and love each other and have a good time. All this other stuff doesn’t mean anything anymore.
So we’ll see more songs like “Barbarian” be like that on your next record?
I’m sure that I’ll be touching on some of that kind of stuff. Even the very first song that was ever written for the band, “Widespread Narcotic Wasteland,” was from my observations of what’s going on around me with people and culture and all that stuff. I’m always going to be sort of an observationist, and I think it’s a positive thing to bring awareness to that style of thinking. We don’t have to participate in things that are counterproductive, counterintuitive, negative, what have you. All of that, all those words apply to that.
Check out their tour dates here.
Photo Courtesy of Adrian Fortunits
