Tourniquet
Tourniquet is an American heavy metal band that Ted Kirkpatrick, Guy Ritter, and Gary Lenaire formed in Los Angeles in 1987. Tourniquet played a mix of thrash and progressive metal, and was influenced by classical and world music. The band earned six GMA Dove Award nominations and won multiple recognitions from the readers of HM Magazine, including "Favorite Band of the 1990s" and "Favorite Album of the 1990s" for Pathogenic Ocular Dissonance (1992). They released ten studio albums, two live albums, four compilation albums, one EP, and several video releases. The last Tourniquet lineup consisted of Ted Kirkpatrick (drums) and Aaron Guerra (guitar, vocals, bass). The band disbanded after Kirkpatrick's death in 2022. Lenaire reformed the band in 2025 with Ritter, former vocalist Luke Easter, and bassist Anna Sentina. Ritter left the following year.
Tourniquet has sold more than 300,000 albums. In addition to classical music, the band is known for using medical terminology in their album and song titles and lyrics. The band's 2003 release, Where Moth and Rust Destroy, features special guests Marty Friedman (formerly of Megadeth) and Bruce Franklin (of Trouble) on lead guitar. Tourniquet's members protested animal abuse and appeared in The Vegetarian Times, United Animal Nations, and Animal Agenda.
The band is named after the tourniquet, "a surgical device for arresting hemorrhage by compression of a blood vessel." According to the band, a tourniquet is a metaphor for "a lifelong spiritual process by which a personal God, through the atoning blood, death, and resurrection of His only Son—Jesus Christ—can begin to stop the flow of going through life without knowing and serving our Creator. He is our Tourniquet."
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