BIO

Rob: Vocals
Brian: Guitar
Matt: Drums
Dave: Guitar
Cook: Bass

Music publicists, being the spin architects charged with word-smithing sales pitches for bands, love to vomit neverending streams of adjectives meant to make the bands they work for sound interesting, inventive, original, and fresh. They disgorge lists of accomplishments like used car salesmen under a quota, with hopes of impressing gullible fans, journalists, and industry professionals. Despite their gift for written language, they’re little more than low-rent makeup artists, applying lipstick to bulldogs. This bulldog doesn’t want any lipstick.

The truth is, all music is impersonation. The music industry is disingenuous in attempting to trick the consumer into thinking it can hawk the same old product to sheep-like consumers who gluttonously ingest all the fads that the industry feeds them. Hell To Pay wants no part in that.

Hell To Pay is a hardcore band. We’re not talking about a metal band that has traded their tight jeans for baggy ones. We’re not talking about an indie band with moptop haircuts and white belts singing about how much they love their girlfriends. We’re talking about the kind of good old-fashioned hardcore forged almost two decades ago by bands like Sheer Terror, Slapshopt, SSD, Agnostic Front and Cro-Mags. We’re talking about continuing a tradition where the urgency and gravity of the message is more important than some pretentious quest to impress.

Since 1999, Baltimore’s Hell To Pay has carried the torch of hardcore to all who’d welcome it. In shows from Virginia to Vermont, on the web, and in the hearts of others who like their punk & hardcore music without pretense, vocalist Rob Chandler delivers a sermon of disdain and alienation, backed by the tube-amp fueled assault of Dave Beatdown (Murder One, Days Lost), Aaron Martinek (Next Step Up, Mobtown Hooligans) and John Cook (First Offense, Mobtown Hooligans). Kept in time by drummer Matt Maben (Darkest Hour, Fighting Chance, Wake Up Cold), the band has never been afraid to be themselves – true to their roots in the east coast hardcore scene, the punk and hardcore music they grew up on, and their values as individuals.

After spontaneously combusting after a show in spring of 2001, it looked like the band was gone forever. After dozens of great shows playing alongside the bands they grew up listening to, the band seemed ready to take a rocketship to the next level, but one fateful afternoon in May 2001 changed everything. Members went their separate ways, sold equipment, and all seemed lost. Then, in the summer of 2004, the band re-joined to continue what they had started. Almost like they’d never skipped a beat, the band is poised to release slew of new material, including a new EP record this winter and a full-length LP CD in 2006 on Workers United Records.