Chris Turner | The inhuman metal drumming machine
Chris Turner of Oceans Ate Alaska plays metal with terrifying accuracy and no triggers. His story, his DW and Sabian setup, and the latest Chris Turner news.
Chris Turner is a professional drummer known for insane accuracy and power at the kit. He makes complex metal drumming look simple, which is the hardest trick there is.
Since we first wrote this page he has finished the solo album he was funding, collected a couple of significant awards, and become the face of DW’s hybrid kit in the UK.
We keep this page updated with the latest Chris Turner news.
Who is Chris Turner?
Chris Turner is a drummer from Birmingham, UK, born on 26 September 1993. He found the drums at four, at the first concert he ever went to. The drummer that night was his dad. That was that.
His dad tutored him for the first few years, which is fine at the start but tends to lack structure. To fix that he took proper lessons for three years at a Birmingham drum centre, stopping at ten.
Nearly everyone in the family played something, so he grew up understanding music rather than just drums — and got to jam with other players years before most drummers ever do. They were also, unsurprisingly, very supportive.
More than just a metal drummer
He grew up on groove-focused music, because that is what his dad played: Dave Matthews Band, Sting, The Police.
Heavier music came later, with Linkin Park as the way in. Then he found Between The Buried And Me — progressive metal, technical, full of drumming he had never heard before. He was not sold on the vocals at first, but the drumming was worth pushing through for. Blast beats, breakdowns, double kick patterns.
Each one became a thing to master before finding the next, harder band.
He does not consider himself only a metal drummer, though. His listed influences are Chris Coleman and Jojo Mayer, and at home he mostly listens to jazz or chill-out music rather than metal.
Oceans Ate Alaska
Chris is a founding member of Oceans Ate Alaska, formed with friends in Birmingham. The band dates to roughly 2007 on the local scene under a different name, becoming Oceans Ate Alaska in 2010 once the lineup settled and they got serious.
Two early singles, “Taming Lions” and “Clocks”, took off almost overnight, and the band turned that into the EPs Taming Lions (2011) and Into The Deep (2012).
That got them signed to Fearless Records in 2014, and the debut album Lost Isles followed on 24 February 2015, with US and European touring behind it.
Hikari arrived on 28 July 2017. Heavily inspired by Japanese culture, it took the band somewhere unexpected — and gave Chris the chance to use brushes and jazz playing in places, which is not something you hear on many metal records.
Disparity, their third album, came out on 1 September 2022. Since then the band have parted ways with Fearless and moved on with a new vocalist, Joel Heywood, who joined in 2024.
Chris is more than the drummer in that band. He handles the pre-production and engineering on their releases, and since the music is so drum-driven he writes most of the rhythms. The process is collaborative, but he calls himself the primary composer.
Steezy: the solo album
The big open question when we first wrote this page was his solo record, Steezy — funded on Indiegogo in December 2020, where it raised £28,615 against a £17,000 goal.
It arrived as planned: an instrumental edition, with a vocal version alongside it.
The two tracks that trailed it were “40 Roll” and “Triggered”, the latter featuring Thomas Lang.
Both racked up hundreds of thousands of plays and became staples of the drummer-reaction video circuit. Chris helped that along by giving selected YouTubers early access so their reactions dropped alongside the release — a genuinely smart move that cost him almost nothing.
Awards and other projects
He was the 2017 Modern Drummer Up & Coming winner, the first UK drummer to take that category, and picked up the 2022 Drumeo Louie Bellson Award for double bass drumming.
He has recorded with other bands too, most notably I Am Abomination, and does engineering work for other artists when he is off the road.
What is unique about Chris Turner’s drumming?
Watch him for thirty seconds and you will notice the style before anything else. It is a bit like watching a robot — total concentration, a death stare pointed at whatever he is about to hit, slightly stiff, head tilted. You have to see it.
Get past that and you notice the accuracy. The notes are almost perfectly placed; you would have to slow the footage down to find any error in them.
Then the dynamics, which are so consistent that he spends half his life defending himself against accusations of triggering and sample replacement. He is not a fan of triggers and prefers the natural sound of the drums — the irony being that his playing is clean enough that people assume a machine is involved.
The power is visible too, especially on the kick. In the fast sections you can watch him pushing himself up off the throne from the downward force.
Notably, when he practises on a pad he uses no pedals at all — just his feet. Nothing about the power or accuracy is borrowed from the hardware. If you want to work on the same thing, our heel-toe technique lesson is a good place to start.
Chris Turner’s drum kit
The drum setup is minimal: one rack tom, one floor tom, one snare, one kick. The cymbals are where it gets elaborate, and they vary by project.
Two things stand out when you see it. Everything is very low, and Chris sits very high — he likes the height because it makes the kick easier, letting him focus on downward motion instead of lifting his leg for every note.
Because he is up so high, some cymbals are angled away from him. That way he still strikes them with the shoulder of the stick rather than clipping them with the tip.
- Drums — DW, including a Performance Series kit.
- Cymbals — Sabian. He runs an AAX Thin Ride rather than the pingy ride most metal drummers reach for — he prefers something drier — alongside a Holy China.
- Hardware — DW, including the 9000 hi-hat stand.
- Sticks — Vic Firth.
- Heads — Remo.
- Hybrid — he was the first drummer to publicly play DW’s DWe convertible acoustic/electronic kit in the UK.
See Chris Turner’s full rig, era by era, in the Rig Vault →
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Final thoughts
Chris Turner is an extremely impressive drummer. You know you are doing something special when people refuse to believe what you are doing is real — and he gets that reaction without a single trigger.
Steezy answered the question this page used to end on, and the awards and clinic work have followed. The Drumeo appearances are the interesting turn: the accuracy made his name, but it is the musicianship underneath that will keep it.
If you like drummers with that kind of control, try Thomas Lang or George Kollias next.