Chemia
‘Music has the power to break down barriers globally and is all about breaking rules’ says frontman and singer Lukasz (Luke) Drapala of the Warsaw based rock band Chemia.
The word Chemia means Chemistry explains guitarist and founding member of the band Wojtek “W” Balczun. “It is all about exploring, nurturing and discovering our musical chemistry as a band and how we interact with each other as musicians and how this also resonates with audiences too. I guess our goal is like that of the best alchemists to try to create something extremely special and unique from our music. Often with music it needs creative triggers and some “Je ne sais quoi” to help inspire the writing process”.
With our last releases “Let Me” we collaborated with the Canadian singer, drummer and producer Marc LaFrance best known for his work with Bachman Turner Overdrive and also being a great vocal arranger. Marc also brought in his good friend Mike Fraser, producer, engineer and mixer for bands like ACDC, Enter Shikari & Aerosmith who recorded and mixed and who along with Marc helped us turn our creative ideas and riffs into a finished album.
The process was a great experience for us and we managed to make an album that started to resonate not only domestically where we won huge acclaim at Rock Radio Station Antyradio whose listeners voted us as best Band in 2015 but also we made an album that allowed us to tour and play shows across Europe and even in the US.
Domestically the band was able to perform alongside amazing acts like Guns‘n Roses, Billy Talent, Deep Purple, Bring Me The Horizon, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and we even had the honour of being the only Polish act to perform at Sonisphere Festival in Warsaw which was headlined by Metallica alongside a great lineup of acts including Alice in Chains, Anthrax & Kverlertek. Following this the band was also invited to perform at Rockcomm a special UK rock music conference hosted by renowned Music Manager Seven Webster (7pm Management) who manages artists like Skindred , REEF & Michael Monroe. As a result Seven invited us to tour with Skindred in both the UK & Europe where we were able to play alongside one of the UKs best live acts.
“This was a great experience for us” says Wojtek. “Watching Skindred perform every night really inspired both myself, Luke and Adam (drummer) and made us reassess and tighten up our own performances and helped turn us into a much better live act. For us we knew we had step up our game and become a better live act if we were going to compete internationally”.
As a result of these shows we were able to license our album in mainland Europe via Record label Rodeostar/SVP which again was helpful for us as it allowed us to go back and revisit some of the cities we had played in Germany with our own special headline dates.
Since this time we have undergone a few lineup changes and added both Maciek “Papay” Papalski on guitar and virtuoso bass player Blazej Chochorowski to complete the new look Chemia sound forming what is to us the perfect band of brothers to take Chemia onwards and upwards. The band was also more recently offered a great opportunity to perform at Woodstock Ukraine Festival and as a result recorded a new version of our song Hero into Ukrainian in support of this which resulted in over 100 Radio stations playing our song in one day alone in the Ukraine. This in turn led to the band performing as special guests on a Stadium tour alongside one of the biggest rock artists in the Ukraine Antytila earlier this year which could not of worked better for the band.