Hawthorne Heights prepares for national tour


After what Hawthorne Heights has been through, it’s understandable the band has been harboring some hate.

In recent years, the guys of Hawthorne Heights — vocalist JT Woodruff, guitarist Micah Carli, drummer Eron Bucciarelli and bassist Matt Ridenour — have fought with record labels, faced incessant criticism and dealt with the loss of their guitarist and childhood friend, Casey Calvert.

New sentiments · Hawthorne Heights has had a tumultuous year, harboring harsh criticism and coping with the loss of guitarist and childhood friend, Casey Calvert. Hoping to revamp its image, Hawthorne Heights is issuing a trilogy of new, thematically connected EPs and is currently headlining a national tour that ends this October. - Photo courtesy of Earshot Media

The band’s claim to fame was its 2004 anthem of angst for edgy teens everywhere, “Ohio Is For Lovers.” After the band’s sophomore album and the death of Calvert, Hawthorne Heights released two solid, but unfulfilling records that underwhelmed fans and critics.

The nine roaring tracks on the band’s latest release, Hate, bring the members back to their roots with heavier instrumentation, plenty of screams and lyrics laced with despair.

“We needed to be honest with ourselves and our fans about how we felt and what was going on,” Bucciarelli said. “The internal conversations we were having weren’t really being reflected in the music we were making in the last couple albums.”

Hate is the first in a trilogy of extended plays that will be tied together thematically, a concept being kept under wraps for the time being. The band already has a few songs ready for the second EP and is looking forward to the flexibility the plan will provide.

“It enables us to continue to grow as musicians and not have to spend all of our time on one album with only 13 or 14 songs,” Bucciarelli said.

Hawthorne Heights is especially proud of recording, producing and releasing Hate independently. As a self-managed band under its own record label, the band has free reign to do exactly what it thinks is best. It founded the label, Cardboard Empire, out of necessity when its troubles with Wind-Up records became too much to bear.

The name of the label, thought up by Ridenour, does not exist without reason.

“It’s a reference to the state of the current music industry as a whole and how weak their foundation is,” Bucciarelli said.

The group is looking to help strengthen that foundation with an unusual approach. It will release an official music video for every song from Hate in hopes of exposing the album to a wider audience.

“When you make a video for a song people tend to only focus on that one song,” Bucciarelli said. “They disregard the rest of the album that you spend so much time working on. We figured this could be one way to prevent that from happening.”

To promote the album, the band is headlining a national tour that will last until the end of October. In an effort to keep ticket prices low and help out fellow musicians, a different set of local bands will open for Hawthorne Heights in each unique city.

“Local music scenes are suffering lately,” Bucciarelli said. “We wanted to show people that there is good music from their areas and they should come out to support that as well.”

As the title suggests, Hate tackles subjects such as politics and relationships with anger and hostility.

“We felt that this record needed to sound heavier and more aggressive,” Bucciarelli said. “We’ve been going through a lot of drama over the years and we needed to get some things off our chest.”

As Woodruff repeatedly growls the lyric, sometimes life really isn’t fair on the track “Oceans,” it’s clear this album is not just another release for the band. It’s a long overdue therapy session.

Hawthorne Heights will perform at the Key Club tonight at 6:40 p.m.

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