Please tell us about the history of your band and its members.
Jay (guitars) formed Hydraform under the name Eiron when he and Tyler, the band's original drummer, met in college in 2011. The two of them jammed together and wrote the bones of most of our early catalogue, and we eventually recruited Carter (vocals) after hearing him sing at a local heavy metal open mic night. John was brought into the fold on the bass a little while later; he and Jay had known each other for a little while and he was finally persuaded to join the band after seeing the original trio live sometime around 2014. We've been playing around Colorado and on a couple of West Coast tours ever since. Tyler left the band at the end of 2019 in order to focus on his family and building his business, at which point Matt was recruited to take his place, right before we headed out on the road for our first professionally organized tour, supporting Overkill and Exhorder on a two week trip across the USA.
How would you describe your style? Which bands influenced your music?
We joked on the Overkill tour that we play "diet metal" because the other two bands on the bill played so much faster than us! But if we were going to put a more categorical label on our sound we'd probably call it something like progressive metal or groove metal. We have songs that have heavy riffs and odd time signatures, and others that are much more drawn out and dynamic. Everyone in the band comes from really varied musical backgrounds but some of our shared influences that come out in are sound are bands like Tool, Lamb of God, and System of a Down.
Why should a metalhead buy your demos/albums?
Buy our music if you want to hear heavy riffs that make you think. We think we have a really unique and organic sound that strikes a balance between tipping our cap to our major influences without trying too hard to sound like anybody else. We also think we put on a whale of a live show. The four of us love playing music live more than anything and we always try to bring the same amount of energy to a crowd of ten as we would to a crowd of 1,000.
What have you released so far and how were your releases received by the public/media?
We have a full length album, "Dark Adder", that we self-released on 2016. Until very recently we've been flying under the radar in a sense, trying to make things work and get attention from a very DIY perspective, and we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of people we met when we were on our most recent tour who came up to us and told us they had checked the record out and liked it. A lot of people even bought the physical CDs on our tour dates and asked us to sign them, which was an amazing feeling and definitely a bit of an ego boost for the four of us.
Do you play live as well? How's your live activity so far?
We love to play live; it's probably all of our favorite parts about being in this band, and like we said before, we definitely think we bring the same passion and intensity to every show regardless of the size of the crowd.
What should labels/zines/promoters know about your band? Why should they be interested in it?
Well, we have that unique sound that I mentioned before, but more than that, we're all just super driven people who are going to do whatever it takes to make it in this industry. We're writing more music now under the COVID quarantine than we ever have, we're working on getting our own recording studio set up, and finalizing plans to have a steady stream of new music and content throughout the summer, and none of that even has anything to do with the thing we're the very best at, which is performing live.
What plans do you have for the near future as a band?
We have big plans for this summer. Our new self titled EP is dropping soon, which has some of our strongest songwriting to date featured on it, and it was recorded and produced by the legendary Sylvia Massy, who produced records by Tool and System of a Down, two of our favorite bands. We've also got an awesome music video for our new single, "Chained" dropping soon, and we're looking into doing some live streamed concerts, lessons/playthroughs, studio tour videos, and a whole slew of other social media content to keep us afloat until we can play live again.
Where can we listen to your band and where can we buy your stuff?
Our music is available on all streaming services, and we're putting the final touches on our webstore so we can get merch sales up and running to coincide with our EP release!
June 2020