WATCH: Montreal rockers Vinyl Hero release Peter Gabriel cover

Today marks the 35th anniversary of Peter Gabriel’s classic track “Sledgehammer.” In celebration of the song’s vintage, Montreal rock trio Vinyl Hero have dropped a cover, alongside a music video:

Vinyl Hero cover a classic Peter Gabriel track.

We spoke to Vinyl Hero guitarist and lead vocalist Ray Howard about the cover and why “Sledgehammer” means to him:

“It was always a song that had somewhat of a challenge [to it]. Being very, very aggressive in the sense of how much I love guitars — I’m very much an aggressive guitar player, but on the other hand, you listen to ‘Sledgehammer’ and you’ve got to go through like 16 layers of everything else with keyboard to get to [the guitars]. There’s a couple of guitar tracks and they sound really good!

“It is predominantly dominated by keyboards. There’s always been a level of heaviness that feels like I’ve always heard a stack of Martians or like, a wall of 5150s behind, and I get to [cover] it! So that’s pretty cool.”

In terms of forthcoming music from the band, Howard describes their current sound as “aggressively beautiful.”

“It’s a lot of chords, a lot of melodies in there. There’s a lot of chunky riffs. It’s definitely going to be a hard rock record…It sounds really, really good.”

For more information on Vinyl Hero, visit their website.

For more Montreal music coverage, please visit the Music section.