Intentional Trainwreck

Intentional Trainwreck is a two-piece from the Baltimore-DC area. Pete Lesko plays guitar and sings, Patrick Gaffney plays drums. They play progressive metal that sits right on the edge of mathcore without quite settling there, and the name covers the rest. Controlled chaos. They write parts that are almost too hard to play, then play them anyway, Gaffney's odd-meter drumming running under Lesko's crushing rhythms and leads.

The band grew out of Turbomatic and Cerebus Effect and got weirder from there. Jazz, fusion, classical, and Afro-Indian rhythms all show up in the metal. That pulls the sound closer to Rush's musicianship and the whiplash of Car Bomb and Dillinger Escape Plan than to straight blast-beat brutality. It's technical, but it breathes. There's a lot of rage in it, and real catharsis, but it stays melodic enough that you can actually follow along. The vocals are more shout than growl. A friend heard an early mix and just asked, "how do you even write music like this?"

"Light the Way Up" comes out September 4, 2026. It's their first new music since 2021, a protest anthem against any unjust oppression, left open to your own reading. For fans of Dillinger Escape Plan, Mastodon, and Car Bomb.

Lesko also plays guitar in folk-metal band Isenmor and sings in power-metal band Burning Shadows. Gaffney drums in the long-running prog band Deluge Grander.