Hatebreed infamously played Cleveland so much in the late ’90s that the band was once nominated for Best Hardcore/Metal Band at another local weekly’s music awards. Frontman Jamey Jasta discovered the city through the first Ringworm LP, went on as a roadie for Integrity, and has continued to send the city shout-outs as host of MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball. In 10 years, the New England band has become the metalcore generation’s standard-bearer, rising from an underground sensation to the genre’s token representative on Universal Records, the world’s largest label. This misleadingly named band took the tradition of positive punk to a new level, in addition to taking lessons from Cleveland crossover.
“Cleveland has such deep roots in the hardcore and metal scenes,” says Jasta, calling Scene during a break in recording his decade-in-the-making Icepick project. “And because there are a lot of open-minded people, you wind up drawing from the punk, metal, and nü-metal scenes. I always thought that it was killer that a band like Ringworm or Integrity would play with a band like Mushroomhead. You don’t see that kind of unity in a lot of places. It’s cool that people are genuinely into the music.”
Cleveland is one of the few major markets that Hatebreed’s playing on its 10th-anniversary tour. The band is guaranteed to pack Peabody’s for an old-school set composed of the entire Under the Knife EP, most of the Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire album, choice cuts from the last two discs, and a pair of songs from the band’s next album, which should arrive in 2006.
“It’ll be cool to give the diehards a taste of new music,” says Jasta. “Because of the snowstorm that happened last time we were in town, a lot of kids didn’t make it out to the House of Blues, and there were a lot of rumors that we canceled. So it’s going to be good to get back and play to a small club.”
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2005.