MUSIC

Enjoy a night full of live music at Rocketown with Shai Hulud, Foundation, Endwell, Lions Lions, Venia, All Teeth, and Hardside

“We never broke up,” exclaims Shai Hulud guitarist and founding member Matt Fox. “[Bassist] Matt Fletcher and I never said we were hanging this up.” Instead of making new Shai Hulud music 24/7, Fox and Fletcher were working on the Zombie Apocalypse side project, touring overseas, parting ways with vocalist Geert Van Der Velde, and searching for members to fill out vacant slots; all while writing and demoing Misanthropy Pure, their Metal Blade Records debut.

So, don’t call it a comeback. It’s not a reunion. It’s an emergence from a hibernation that included plenty of activity. Shai Hulud have returned to the forefront of a scene they helped create. While the current “metalcore” climate has a blueprint that was co-authored by Shai Hulud, the band isn’t content to rest on past triumphs, namely the definitive A Profound Hatred Of Man EP, released in 1997, and the equally as influential Hearts Once Nourished With Hope And Compassion record, also released in 1997. Shai Hulud are pushing their sound and the scene forward.

“This album is the same album that would have come out in 2005 had we not parted ways with Geert,” says Fox. “We are still good friends with him. When he heard the songs, he’d say, ‘Are you are going to use that riff? Cool.’ So he was even in the mix of this album.”