You may not be familiar with the band Otherwise now, but by the end of this year they are sure to make a splash in the hard rock genre. 

            This year, the band signed with Century Media Records in early January after the hit single Soldiers off their anticipated album True Love Never Dies was put into Sirius XM Octane’s rotation and shot to the top of the channel’s “Big Uns Top 15 Countdown”.

            When the band found out that the song was the most popular song on the channel’s rotation that week they were shocked. “It was unbelievable,” said Adrian Patrick, the bands lead sing, “We recorded the version played on Octane in our drummer’s garage. The song just exploded on Octane, it was a very powerful moment for us.”

‘Working hard’

            Before striking it big Otherwise started off small in Las Vegas. “We had been working hard,” Patrick said. “We had to play a lot of band battles to get where we are right now.”

            The band’s first real chance of exposure was when Patrick worked on a track featured on the band In This Moment’s album “A Star-Crossed Wasteland” where Patrick was asked to perform scratch vocals so that the producer for the song could try to get a better known singer, but his performance mixed so well that they kept his vocals featured version.

            That year, In This Moment was featured as part of the Mayhem festival and offered to have Patrick to go on tour with them.

 “It was a do or die situation for us,” Patrick said. “My brother Ryan and I followed them in our mom’s decade old minivan, we crammed a bed in the back so that one of us could sleep while the other drove. We brought a bucket full of CDs with us and when I wasn’t on stage we were out taking donations. Sometimes we would get 20 dollars for a CD other times we would get a quarter. We put 17,000 miles on that minivan.”

Headed to Ohio

            Later in 2011, the band was offered a spot on the 48-Hour Festival as an opener for Five Finger Death Punch and Avenged Sevenfold in their hometown Las Vegas.

“It was awesome to be featured,” Patrick stated. “It was a redeeming moment for us getting to play nationally in our own back yard. It was probably one of our most satisfying moments as a band, and it was one of our last shows with our late cousin, who was our drum-tech at the time.”

            After their set, Otherwise was approached by Jose Mangin, a DJ for Sirius XM Octane.

“We met Jose backstage and he asked for a CD and the next Monday he had added Soldiers onto the Sirius XM Octane rotation.

            Not long after their appearance at the 48 Hour festival, Adrian and Ryan’s cousin Ivan Patrick passed away. “He was my brother, he was my family, I never imagined living without him. I was at my day job one day and I walked outside and looked to the sky and said ‘please just make this better,’ and that night I got a phone call from Century Media with a record deal. When I tell people that they always ask me how I explain that and I just don’t know.”

True Love Never Dies, Otherwise’s first album with Century Media is a tribute to Ivan.

“The title comes from a tattoo on his neck. He directed all the songs that we put on this album. Losing him was the worst thing that could have happened; he is intertwined throughout the album,” Patrick said. “Pretty much all of the songs that we chose to put on the album were under that motif.”

Their first album is expected to drop sometime this spring, and at the beginning of the summer Otherwise will be playing as part of the Rock on the Range festival in Columbus Ohio from May 18^th-20^th.

Otherwise is definitely a band worth keeping an eye on this year because they seem ready for their name to be known.