While he acknowledges his earlier tenure as both a tin whistle and flute player in primary school, Tristan Carroll feels that his path to becoming a musician began when he was ten.

“I started watching wrestling, and the music in wrestling blew my mind,” Tristan tells Post-Burnout. “All the heavy, guitar-y stuff just blew my mind. If you listen to the Cell Games stuff, and especially our demos, you can kind of see I have taken the template from that.

“But I got into other bands that were out at the same time. I got into Nickelback, because they were a rock band that was on the telly, in front of me, and I was like, ‘What is this?’ And I showed a vague interest in guitar, but not enough to really pursue it. My dad, he can and can’t play guitar; he knows three chords, but he would need to look up what they are called. [Laughs]

“And he was like, ‘Look, you’ve probably got some sort of interest in this. Here are the three chords I know, here’s how you read the diagrams. I think one of them was F, which for anyone who plays guitar, they’re like, ‘Why would you start someone on F? That’s mad!’”

From there, Tristan left wrestling behind to give music a go, as, in his words, “It would’ve still been WWF when I started watching and I was still watching when it changed to WWE, but, shortly afterwards, I sort of dropped off, and I think it was because, when I was eleven or twelve, I couldn’t have two big interests. I had to either be full-on into wrestling or full-on into music, and I was like, ‘I’m a bit more into music. We can cancel Sky Sports, it’s fine!’”

In the summer between his Fifth and Sixth Class of primary school, Tristan took up guitar and, by secondary school, he began playing in bands.  “When I was in First Year, I made some friends with some lads who were in Second Year, and we just started doing bits,” he says.

“I think we just played a lot of Blink[-182] covers because they’re easy to play, and jamming out stuff, where we didn’t really know how to jam, but we just had a riff that we’d play for four minutes and that kind of thing.

“[…] It was one of those things where you’re in the start of secondary school and you’re in a band, and you take it so seriously, even though it’s a cover band, and you’re not getting paid, and you can’t get into pubs, and the band is just covers and not in pubs, and occasionally playing in school.”

For the rest of his time at secondary school, Tristan dropped in and out of different cover bands and eventually started incorporating some of his original music into their sets. “I think concurrently with that, or a little bit after that, I tried doing my own kind of acoustic-y stuff,” Tristan explains.

“And I got really into doing that, and I was like, ‘Oh, well, if I’m going to be doing this, there has to be songs.’  And I did that for a few years – I think I might have even done that into college – and I realised, ‘I don’t even like this!’ [Laughs]

“‘I’m just doing it because I like the idea.’ And then I got to the end of college, and I was like, ‘This isn’t fun. No one’s into this. I’m not into this. I don’t want to be a singer; it’s stressful. I don’t want to be up there, making myself vulnerable, singing about stuff. I just wanna play stuff!’”

Tristan resumed playing in cover bands but soon tired of that, too. He began making demos of music. “They were kind of written in the format of music from wrestling,” Tristan says of these demos. “Which is, there’s a short bit at the start to let you know who it is, then there is the big bit where whoever it is that’s coming out, they announce who they are, where they’re from, what they weigh, and there’s a bit of commentary over that.

“Then there’s a bit of waffle when that happens, then there’s the bigger bit where they do the four corners, and then there’s a bit they can do, and that’s kind of how I would write the songs. So, I would have all these demos.”

With these new tracks inspired by wrestling walkout music and nu metal, Tristan invited his friend Colin Foy to listen to them with the notion of doing something more with them. “I started the band with him,” Tristan says of forming what would become Cell Games with Colin (who goes by the moniker Maximillion, or simply Max, in the band, but Tristan assures me that it’s probably OK to use his real name in this article).

Tristan continues, “We were trying to do something, pre-pandemic, and I think I brought to him the idea of, ‘Colin, we should start a nu metal band,’ because, prior to that, we had done these charity gigs for Chester Bennington’s anniversaries, and we learnt [the Linkin Park album] Hybrid Theory all the way through for the first year, and at the end of that gig, I was like, ‘Colin, I love this album! I love nu metal! Like, all these demos I have, they just are nu metal, kind of!’

“Because that’s what comes out when I play, is all kind of metal-ly stuff and I guess there’s not big lead sections, and, gradually, I’ve started putting the more electronic stuff in. Initially, I was very resistant to the electronic stuff because I was like, ‘I have to be able to do it live,’ so it was all guitars and, pre-pandemic, I had keyboards on the demos and I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll rewrite that, so it’s a guitar part!’”

Tristan and Colin’s desires to expand the project into a full unit were hindered due to the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. For a while, they remotely created demos as a two-piece, but once lockdowns ceased, people were free to congregate once more, and, most importantly, gigs could resume, bassist Deb and drummer Tonči were soon added to the fold.

With the inspiration of nu metal and professional wrestling, in addition to the Colin-pushed incorporation of anime influence on the material (the band’s name is a reference to a tournament from the Dragon Ball manga series, which was later featured in the Dragon Ball Z anime series), we asked Tristan if he felt that the band could be seen as a throwback to 2000s culture.

“It is the things we like, coming out the way it is, now,” Tristan responds. “By calling it ‘nu metal,’ there is sort of a connotation of, like, ‘Oh, it’s nu metal…like from before!’ Because that’s when nu metal was new, so it’s a bit like that, but we’re not deliberately being a throwback sort of thing. We’re not going out and getting huge jeans and doing it as a novelty thing.

“It just so happens that that’s the name for what we’re doing. And there is a small amount of, it has to be a little throwback-y just because it’s what it is. Like, we’re playing stuff that sounds like the stuff we liked, and, occasionally, I will play a gig in a Korn t-shirt or whatever, but we’re not deliberately going up and doing Limp Bizkit cosplay or anything. We are genuinely doing it, but we’re not doing it to take the piss, even though we do it and, separately, we take the piss while we’re doing it!

“We haven’t just been in a vacuum since nu metal stopped, the first time. So, there are always going to be elements of other things that we like, and there’s other stuff that we listen to, outside of nu metal, so it all makes its way in; especially the electronic stuff. Like, there’s kind of electronic stuff that didn’t really exist when nu metal was doing it. Like, there were no trap hats in nu metal, the first time! [Laughs]”

Every song that Cell Games releases has a sense of consistency with its predecessor but, according to Tristan, consideration for what came before is not something they are tethered to when crafting a song.

In May, Cell Games released their most recent track at the time of publication, “The Optical World.” For Tristan, the song is a good example of their willingness to go off the beaten track.

“I’ve been calling it a ballad, even though it’s not a ballad!” laughs Tristan when discussing the song. “It has clean guitars at the start and in the middle, and it’s got a nice three-part harmony in the chorus. So, I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s a ballad.’ It’s not a ballad! There’s swearing in it!”

Going into further depth, Tristan continues, “It’s definitely different to the other stuff. It’s not as full-on heavy in parts of it. Saying that, the verse is this sort of big, Deftones-y riff. […] I think I called the demo ‘Shite Pony,’ so Colin was like, ‘Ah! It’s a Deftones song, now!’, and I was like, ‘Yeah, kind of,’ because it’s got the big, Deftones-y chords and then the big, chunky riff.

“For us, just internally, it’s got the most complicated three-part in the bridge and at the end, and it’s not even that it’s made complicated, it’s just, [Laughs] it’s me writing it out and programming it and then being like, ‘Oh! No! I don’t know how to do this!’ I think this was the first time bringing it into a practice, and jamming out a new song, and being like, ‘Right, how do we do this? Where’s one? How do we do this?’

“And I’m sure if you listened to it, you’d be like, ‘That’s not complicated; that’s 4/4.’ I’d be like, ‘Ah! But I put an extra one in…I think.’ [Laughs] Like, I’m still occasionally…live, I have to count to six in my head, and, occasionally, out loud, and I think that’s probably wrong, in terms of the material. It’s not in 6; it’s in 4 because I programmed it that way. [Laughs] But it’s kind of the closest we have to a complex thing in a song. But it’s the closest thing to a grunge song, I think we have.”

With a sizeable discography of material already, we wrapped up the interview by asking Tristan if the band had any plans for an EP or their debut album. “With the releases, we’re looking, at the moment, to be sort of singles-heavy,” he responds.

“We do have an idea for an EP, that’s not just as straightforward as ‘Here’s a bunch of new songs.’ I don’t want to spoil the idea because I thought of really good artwork for it that my girlfriend, Jade, who does all our artwork… – anything on socials that looks good, Jade did that! And anything in our music that sounds good, Josh Robinson did that! – and I just show up in a t-shirt and do the gigs!

“We have an EP idea thing, a connection of songs sort of idea, coming up. Other than that, it’s sort of largely single-oriented. We had this whole thing, at the end of last year, where we were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re going to put out this EP with the two singles that are on it, and we’re going to do this,’ and we got to, say about February, and we were like, ‘Let’s just do singles. Like, the singles are great!’”

Cell Games’ latest single, “The Optical World,” is out now on all streaming platforms. You can keep up to date with the band’s music, live dates and social media accounts on their Linktree. Cell Games will perform with Raining in December, Grey Stag, and Horrenda as part of “The Gathering: A Night of Music in Aid of Enable Ireland,” this Saturday at Sin É, Dublin. Tickets are available from Eventbrite.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews…, tonight at 20:00 to hear this interview in full, where we go into further detail about everything discussed in this article, as well as the latest single’s inspiration from the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, the resurgence of nu metal, the importance of silliness in the band’s performances, the Irish music scene and Cell Games’ place in it, and much more. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.

Aaron Kavanagh

Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.