Motorik Road Trip – V

by Mark 'Yeti' Richard · February 20, 2025

Motorik Road Trip is an Instrumental three piece band from Bristol, United Kingdom. Their music combines a variety blend of stoner, psychedelic, and doom. The band released a slew of singles in 2023 including: Orange Zilla EP, Hobo Sorcerer / Magic Fang, Arch / Future Primate, and Champa Moon / Astral GTX. They just recently released their debut album called V, on January 25th 2025. The lineup consists of Jason Tovey on bass, Ben Garner on guitar, and Nat White on drums. The album contains six tracks at thirty three minutes long.

Upon my first listen to this album, I didn’t know anything about the band and didn’t initially realize that they didn’t have a vocalist. The heavy and driving stoner grooves attracted me right away once the first track “Proteus Rising” started playing. Motorik Road Trip sounds awesome! The song has a riff rocking crunchy rhythm when it kicks in and employs twists of psychedelic leads that transition back into the riffs. The music periodically pauses with the guitars carrying on and cranks back into the heavy groove. The second song “Bipolaris” has an atmospheric intro with a droning sound and the bass playing a doomy line. The drums and guitars then appear and the music builds into a fuzzy onslaught of stoner doom. The drums are pummeling and hammers the rhythm as the heavy distorted guitars forge ahead with menacing compulsion. The track blends right in with “Carrion”, as the bass initiates a slow rhythm with background wind sounds. Everything joins together as the song has a hard lumbering but aggressive tone to it. Halfway into the song, it breaks into a low grinding and dirging bass riff that continues to crescendo with fuzzy guitar and built up percussion. The track shifts back into the main rhythm and finishes off with some ethereal sounds.

Once again, the track elegantly blends into the next one entitled, “Druggle”. Once the song settles in, it has a medieval metal vibe embedded with doomy and heavy riffalicious tones. It expands into a barometrical sound of airy music with heavy bass guitar and hard bombastic drumming. The warm and fuzzy tones are joined with a jazz-like battering of drums and a blanket of atmospheric bliss. Another flawless transition takes place as the song evaporates into “Excommunicator”. Motorik Road Trip has a unique combination of sounds that falls somewhere in between the riff rocking fury of Karma To Burn and the psychedelic meandering of Monkey 3. V is a mesmerizing experience that marries both spectrums of instrumental rock, as “Excommunicator” achieves.

The final piece of entrancing music is called “Witch Elder”. The almost seven and a half minute song reminds me of 35007 when it begins. The song travels into a cosmic dimension integrating the sonic space traveling reverberations of Ben Garner’s guitar and Jason Tovey’s low end pulsing bass. The ship is all held together tightly by the incredible gymnastic drumming of Nat White. “Witch Elder” is the masterful finisher to an already incredible story book of spectacular songs. Motorik Road Trip has really impressed me with this album. V contains all of the essential ingredients for a mind blowing experience of musical magnificence. This would be my choice record for a long road trip and beyond. I have revisited this album numerous times already and I am still intrigued with the brilliance that it provides.