Celebrity Spotify Playlist: Kings Destroy’s Carl Porcaro Takes Us to Hardcore School

Kings Destroy release their debut album A Time of Hunting today. Though the band’s lineup features two members of legendary hardcore outfit Killing Time, the band’s sound is an amalgamation of all of their myriad influences from 2+ decades in the heavy music scene: doom, sludge and stoner grooves all work their way into Kings Destroy’s varied sound. Since the bandmembers’ roots lie in hardcore, we asked guitarist Carl Porcaro to put together a Spotify playlist of his favorite hardcore and hardcore-inspired bands… Porcaro took it to the next level and delivered a killer, varied playlist that reflects well on what Kings Destroy are all about.

Watch Kings Destroy’s first video for the track “Stormbreak” and stream Porcaro’s Spotify playlist below. A brief interview with Porcaro follows in which the NYHC vet discusses growing up in the New York City scene and getting into music.

When and how did you first get into hardcore?

I got into hardcore in ’84 or ’85. I got my first records and cassettes ordering directly from bands from the classifieds of Maximum Rocknroll or from a record store in Yonkers called Mad Platters that stocked all the punk, hardcore, & metal records that weren’t easy to find back then. They also stocked a magazine call Guillotine which reviewed pretty much every Sunday matinee at CBGB, and as soon as we got down with that we were basically at the CB’s hardcore matinee every Sunday. Friday nights and Saturday nights we’d either be at the Anthrax club up in CT, unless there was a big Rock Hotel show at the Ritz. We would pretty much drive anywhere within a two hour radius just to be able to get to a hardcore show. It simply wasn’t that easy to get into hardcore back then, and if you were a newjack you didn’t start talking a lot of shit and pretending like you were some old school hard guy. My, how the internet has changed things. It was around this time that we started the band Breakdown and a year later Killing Time.

Which bands and styles of music most directly inform your work with Kings Destroy?

Kings Destroy is built on a base of classic hard rock and metal, with elements of doom, stoner, sludge, and a splash of psych, held together by a dominant musical outlook forged in the NYHC scene.  We don’t find it that interesting to fit neatly into any genre or sub genre so we put all our years of musical influence into it and let the music go where it wants to, which just happens to usually be quite slow, heavy and riffy.

Hardcore and metal kids used to be at odds, but it seems these days that a lot of the time the styles are virtually indistinguishable. What do you think of this newfound scene unity?

Different styles standing in strong opposition to other styles is what makes the magic in music and other arts. I am all about unity, and I’m not talking about violence, mind you. Sameness kills music. With that said you asked me to do a HC oriented playlist but I decided to twist it a bit.

What’s on the docket for Kings Destroy in 2013?

Kings Destroy’s second album A Time Of Hunting comes out on May 14th here in the USA and June 3rd in Europe on War Crime Recordings. We play our record release show on June 7th at Saint Vitus Bar in Brooklyn with Windhand. We are touring the Midwest in late June culminating in a spot at the Day of the Doomed festival, and will be touring Europe in July.

More on Kings Destroy:

www.facebook.com/KingsDestroy
www.kingsdestroy.com
@kingsdestroynyc