Juggernaut: The Making of Cave In’s ‘Until Your Heart Stops’

Photo by Jason Hellmann

On Saturday, December 11, Cave In will perform their seminal metallic hardcore classic, Until Your Heart Stops, in its entirety for the first time ever at Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer Fest: Los Angles. Tickets for the exclusive performance are still available, but are moving fast.

In between acquiring tickets and waiting for your chance to down bitters and then some during the New England legends’ landmark set, get further hyped by digging into the full Until Your Heart Stops Hall of Fame from Decibel’s long sold-out July 2007 issue. Previously unavailable anywhere for over a decade, the following story features lengthy interviews conducted in early 2007 with every member of Cave In who performed on the record including late bassist Caleb Scofield.

Juggernaut: The Making of Cave In’s ‘Until Your Heart Stops’

Cave In have had many musical identities since their inception in Methuen, MA, in 1995, but the one that first established them as underground heroes was the dizzying, face-ripping metal blowout now known the world over as Until Your Heart Stops. After releasing a steady stream of 7-inches (many songs from which were collected on Beyond Hypothermia), by early 1998 Cave In was in a state of flux. Mere months before recording their first proper full-length, the band’s core trio of guitarist Steve Brodsky, drummer J.R. Conners and guitarist Adam McGrath brought in former Strike 3 vocalist Caleb Scofield on bass, kicked vocalist Dave Scrod to the curb, and decided that Brodsky would take over at the mic. Laid to tape at the first incarnation of Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou’s God City studio (then in Allston, MA), the result was and continues to be awe-inspiring. The vertiginous riffery, delirious time changes and mercurial atmospherics of Until Your Heart Stops would quickly become benchmarks for what was then known as “metallic hardcore”—no easy feat in a circuit that was lorded over by the likes of highly-skilled sonic acrobats like Coalesce, the Dillinger Escape Plan and Converge (whom Brodsky was also playing bass for at the time). Incredibly, all four members of Cave In were just 19 years old when the album was recorded. Even more shocking: Within two-and-a-half years, the band would excise Until Your Heart Stops material from their sets altogether. In what might still be one of the most dramatic about-faces in music history, Cave In turned their backs on metal and followed up Until Your Heart Stops with 2000’s Jupiter, a mind-blowing space-rock opus that eventually landed them on a major label and prompted yet another chameleonic musical shift. With the benefit of nearly ten years of hindsight since its release, the members of Cave In agreed to give Decibel the inside story behind this month’s Hall of Fame inductee…

What do you remember about the writing process for Until Your Heart Stops?
McGrath: Well, when we started writing the record, we were five of us and we had a singer. When we finished writing it, we were a four-piece and Steve was doing all the vocals. [Laughs] The singer we had, Dave, not to discredit him, but he wasn’t delivering. I also remember having to memorize tons and tons of riffs. Steve definitely wrote the majority of them. This was right at the time Caleb joined, and I remember him being overwhelmed by all the riffs as well. It was definitely a challenge.

Brodsky: At the time, I was playing bass in Converge and I was part of the writing process for When Forever Comes Crashing. That was really exciting for me, because here I was in the rehearsal space with the band that had blown my mind musically with Halo In aA Haystack. I’d never heard a record like that before, and it was very inspirational watching Kurt putting together songs—not to mention being part of the band dynamic to glue the whole thing together. That was the first time I had been under the wing of another songwriter who was calling the shots and piecing together the puzzle, so to speak. So I took what I was observing and just ran with it.

Conners: I remember we did a lot of the writing in Steve’s parents’ basement in Methuen. We got together after school and just belted it out. We would go through the songs over and over again. It was really tough because I had always felt like a rock drummer instead of a metal drummer, and the hardcore songs we had written before Until Your Heart Stops were more like playing rock songs. But we all started getting into death metal when we started writing for this album, and I wasn’t used to being that technical, that fast, and that metal, I guess.

Scofield: That was right when I joined the band, so I wasn’t involved in writing those songs at all, but I had to learn them very quickly. It was like, “Welcome to our band. Now learn these fucking ridiculous songs.” [Laughs] I’d never played like that before. I’d played in hardcore bands—real minimal stuff. But I was obsessed with learning them. Those songs ruled my life for a while. After work, I’d drive down from New Hampshire, where I was living at the time, to Steve’s in Methuen, which was like an hour away, learn two or three songs, drive home listening to them so I didn’t forget how they went, get home and just practice again until midnight or one in the morning.

Conners: I kinda started to go a little bit nuts when we were putting those songs together. Some of them have like ten different parts. I remember once we were rehearsing at Adam’s mom’s house and I got so pissed off because I couldn’t play a part and I took off in a hissy-fit and almost ran Steve and Adam down. [Laughs] I listened to the album yesterday when I was getting ready to do this interview, and I couldn’t even remember half the riffs I was hearing. There are so many—it’s fucking crazy.

Caleb Scofield, circa 1998. Photo by Jason Hellmann

How did Caleb end up joining Cave In?
Scofield: Cave In and my first band, Strike 3, did a little East Coast tour together in the summer of ‘97. They lost the guy who was playing bass for them—Andy Kyte [who went on to play keyboards in black metalcore outfit The Year of Our Lord]. I think Travis Shettel from Piebald actually played bass for them for a while, and then I officially joined. But I had to pass tryouts first. I remember being told, “We have a few different people that we’re trying out, so if you wanna come down and try out, cool.” [Laughs] Which was a shot to my ego, you know? I think Aaron Turner actually tried out to play bass for Cave In, but then was like, “Fuck this.” So when I finally joined and started practicing with the whole band, they started throwing these Until Your Heart Stops songs at me. I’d go home shitting my pants, like, “How the fuck am I gonna pull this off?”

What happened with Dave Scrod?
Conners: His real name was Dave Gatinella, but he didn’t like his father or some shit, so he changed it to Scrod. I don’t know why he named himself after a fish, but he was in a hardcore band called Alert, which was a band we all looked up to. We thought he had a sick voice. When we parted ways with [original Cave In vocalist] Jay [Frechette], we decided to ask Dave to join. He agreed, but it turned out to be not such a cool thing for the band. Me, Steve and Adam have been friends since sixth or seventh grade, so we knew what we wanted as far as the music goes. Dave was really into grind and shit like that, so he was bringing in some cool new influences, but not exactly what we felt was needed in the band. He actually came up with the name and the idea of Until Your Heart Stops. I think he actually wrote initial lyrics for three of the songs—“Until Your Heart Stops,” “Ebola,” and maybe one other one. He’d come to practice and we’d ask him to sing, but he really wouldn’t do much. Ultimately, I don’t think our personalities or musical tastes really matched. I mean, he went on to play guitar in Buzzov-en. So there were some differences of musical opinion there.

Brodsky: I think we only played two shows with both Caleb and Dave in the band. Dave’s deal was that it seemed like he would write all the time in his notebooks, but he wasn’t able to construct lyrics quickly enough from his writings. We had a deadline for the record, and he wasn’t able to keep up with the pace that we were working at. When we became a four-piece, we were able to move at the optimum speed creatively.

What do you remember about the recording sessions?
Scofield: At that point, God City was just a house in Lower Allston. Kurt lived there, the Piebald guys lived there, and they had this quote-unquote recording studio in the basement. Just to give you an idea of how young and ridiculously clueless I was, I definitely showed up to the recording with no equipment. I just drove to Boston with nothing—I didn’t bring a bass, an amp, anything. [Laughs] I don’t remember what was going through my head, man. I was a New Hampshire boy in the big city. Maybe it was because in Strike 3 I was just a vocalist so I wasn’t used to bringing gear anywhere. I’m not sure. So I roll up to this crazy house in Allston and they’re like, “Where’s your amp?” It’s like, “Who brought the new guy?”

Brodsky: Kurt had designed the whole place himself—I think his dad helped him put up the walls or something. He had a 24-track tape machine, I believe. I was really big on guitar overdubs at that point—I wanted each riff to have four guitars playing it. But we had rehearsed so much that I feel like we knew what we were doing when we were in there. There wasn’t too much messing around in terms of getting solid takes. Kurt was big on this orange Boss overdrive distortion pedal, so we used that all over the record because that’s what Slayer used to do. When we were mixing the record, I remember going out to Kurt’s old Volvo and A/B-ing it with Pantera’s Vulgar Display Of Power—which is why the bass drum is so goddamn clicky. It’s a little obnoxious in hindsight.

McGrath: There were all these people who lived at the house, so it was kinda limited as to when we could play. It was not a professional situation by any means—it was punk rock. I remember J.R. trying to get the hang of playing so much double-bass. A lot of that stuff he came up with on the spot.

Conners: All I really wanted to do as far as drumming was to try and do some of the cool shit that some of the drummers I was listening to were doing. We had always listened to Metallica and Megadeth, but we started getting into stuff like Entombed and At The Gates, even Deicide. So I wanted to do the sickest shit possible. But I didn’t realize that that was the most difficult stuff you could possibly do in terms of drumming, with maybe the exception of jazz.

Steve found himself in the position of being Cave In’s sole vocalist and lyricist right before you went into the studio—how did that affect the recording?
McGrath: It’s pretty amazing to think about now, especially because I don’t think Steve ever planned on becoming the singer he became for that record. He basically figured out how to do all that screaming shit right there in front of the microphone. He didn’t practice any of it. He basically became a metal/hardcore singer overnight.

Brodsky: I was ingesting entire jars of honey in the vocal booth to help my throat. Then I started drinking strawberry Yoo-Hoo, because that’s what Jake Bannon did. [Laughs] While we were recording, I was still re-writing and finalizing lyrics for whatever songs I had to record the next day. I was fortunate, because at the time I was in a creative writing class, so that—combined with my normal output of just writing in a journal or my notebooks—gave me a lot of material to work with. So I ended up just fishing through my notebooks and papers I was turning in, latching onto lines and just fitting them in wherever they would work best in terms of syncopation. It was pretty haphazard.

Scofield: His lyrics on Until Your Heart Stops are still some of my favorite Steve lyrics ever. I was used to, you know, “hardcore pride” type stuff, but Steve’s lyrics were so different. I think that creative writing class was really inspiring for him because he was learning how to tap into his mutant head and put it on paper.

A lot of the lyrics are fairly abstract. What were you thinking about when you were writing them?
Brodsky: Well, I was pretty fresh to city living at the time. I had just moved to Boston and was in school part-time. I was living on my own for the first time. It was kind of a headfuck for me—in a really good way. I was out of the suburbs and a little closer to some real culture. That had a huge effect on me. So I think there’s a little of that in there. And seeing homeless people for the first time—I didn’t really see too much of that in Methuen. And living in a dirty, nasty place with no backyard in the slums of Allston, going to shows a few blocks from my apartment at the Allston Co-Op and watching bands like Coleman, which was this woman beating herself in the head with a cast while a giant dude playing guitar pissed himself. It was a combination of things that I was being exposed to for the first time.

Adam McGrath, circa 1998. Photo by Jason Hellmann

There are a ton of people doing backups on the album—Kurt, Jake Bannon, Jay Randall, Travis Shettel, Matt Lacasse… How’d that happen?
Brodsky: Kurt’s house was a pretty popular place to hang out at the time. It was a gathering point for slumming Allston rockers, and there was a lot of traffic. Jay Randall, who had actually funded the first Cave In release, the Cave In/Gambit split—apparently by selling fake acid at a Phish show—he was just this wandering musical spirit that we were kind of enamored by. Travis obviously lived there, and Piebald and Cave In had toured together, so it was only a matter of time before one of those guys turned up on our record. I think we literally pulled him downstairs when he got home from school and put a mic in front of him. Jake was directly involved in Cave In records by doing the design for Beyond Hypothermia and Until Your Heart Stops—we’re all pretty big fans of his work—so it was just putting a voice to the visual aesthetic, I guess.

Conners: At that time, we just wanted to have fun and hang out, so if someone was around, we’d just ask them to be on the record. Matt Lacasse was just a kid we went to school with. He went to all the early hardcore shows. We were just trying to enjoy our time with everyone around us.

Scofield: I wasn’t around for all that. I just recorded my bass and took off, which is funny, because now I hate not being at the studio for the whole thing. I don’t know why I left, but it probably had to do with work. And I didn’t really wanna stick around and watch a bunch of dudes I didn’t really know scream into a microphone. [Laughs] That was pretty much the first time I’d met all those guys. I mean, I was familiar with Converge—I was a fan, and still am—but I didn’t really know them personally yet. But that list is funny—it was ten years ago, but if you look at any records from our circle of friends’ bands now, there’s the same list of dudes that seem to make it onto everyone’s record.

Steve wrote the three numbered “Segue” pieces on the album—how were they made?
Brodsky: I remember I had just bought a delay pedal, and it had this layering effect you could do, so I just set it up and mutated out for a while. On one of them, I’m using this toy Star Wars light saber, just waving it around in the stereo field—I think it was my ex-girlfriend’s. That was pretty fun. And the squiggly noises are four-track tapes of guitar feedback I made in 1995. That was the backdrop behind the light-saber noises—on “Segue 3,” I think.

How did Jay Randall’s noise pieces—“Informing the Octopus” and “Electropede”—end up on the album?
Brodsky: I think one was on the vinyl version and one was on the CD. He was into doing these power-violence type remix deals, and I think there are elements of the songs that he mashed up and put through a noisecore vacuum cleaner. We were all so blown away by it that we had to find some kind of home for it. One of them was originally supposed to be the intro track, the first thing you heard when you put the CD on. I remember I told him to do his best to come up with the musical equivalent of the Critter Ball from Critters 2.

Conners: It sounds like space noises from under the sea or something. [Laughs] Jay Randall was always a weird dude. He was so into the noise stuff he was doing that I think he blew out something like 60% of his hearing in one ear or some shit. He was good fun, but he was nuts.

McGrath: Jay Randall and his friends were the first people to really introduce us to noise. He did some vocals on “Controlled Mayhem Then Erupts,” too. I wish we could listen to it together so I could point them out to you—they’re hilarious.

Do any songs from the album bring back any specific memories?
Brodsky: The slide guitar part in “Bottom Feeder” was sort of a tip of the hat to Ministry. From time to time, you could catch Adam singing “Jesus Built My Hotrod,” which had that awesome slide guitar part. So that’s where we got that from. Adam also did a pretty bad-ass Sean Ingram impression on the song “Until Your Heart Stops.” He’s got Sean’s voice down to a tee.

Conners: On the beginning of “Ebola”—the part with the kick drum—I actually ripped it off from one of my favorite songs back in those days. Of course, I’m drawing a blank on the band’s name. They were German, and one of the dudes always wanted to see Steve’s dick. I can picture him, but I can’t remember his name. Anyway, they were a sick three-piece, and they never really made a name for themselves, but they were known by a few people. They had a song that opened like “Ebola,” and I ripped it off because it was fun to play.

The album really set a new standard for what was then termed “metallic hardcore.” Did you have any sense of that at the time? Was that even what you were trying to accomplish?
McGrath: Not at all. Our influences back then were Threadbare, Cable, Converge, Rorschach…Converge was especially inspiring—they were kind of the benchmark at the time. It’s cliché to talk about “metal/hardcore bands” or “metalcore” now, but back then, it was different. There weren’t as many bands doing it as there are now, that’s for sure. It was an interesting time. We started realizing that Hydra Head was having influence—we’d get to cities and people would know about us. It was becoming national, but it was kind of like this up-and-coming thing between you and your friends. When we’d be playing with Botch and Dillinger and Converge, it was like the heyday of something. There was this music vibe that doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s funny, too, because Cave In and Botch played so many empty rooms together. After Until Your Heart Stops came out—I remember this clearly—we played with Botch, Dillinger and Drowningman in Vermont and there was no one there. It’s funny how things change, but I guess that’s what makes life so interesting. Let me tell you, though, it’s weird playing a song like “Juggernaut” to an empty room.

Brodsky: There was a lot of stuff happening right around us. Converge were stepping up their game: Petitioning The Empty Sky was light-years ahead of Halo In A Haystack in terms of speed and changes and guitar riffs. And then Dillinger Escape Plan put out Under The Running Board. I’d never heard heavy metal played like that before. Coalesce were bowling people over—Functioning On Impatience was pretty devastating. So there were a lot of people doing it well.

Scofield: I don’t think I really had my head wrapped around the idea of those songs. I wasn’t connected to them in any way other than making sure I hit the right note at the right time. Obviously, Steve was off on some kind of insane trip, and I was light years behind him while he was blazing this riff path. I mean, I can’t play like that now. There was a very short period of time when I could play that stuff.

McGrath: If you held a gun to my head and asked me to play those songs, you’d have to shoot me, because I probably couldn’t play half of them anymore. No fucking way. If I had a couple of weeks practice, maybe, but not now. It would be laughable.

It seems like cramming all those riffs in there wasn’t done just for the sake of it, though. And you were clearly bringing something to the table that those other bands weren’t.
Scofield: I would agree. It definitely wasn’t being done to be flashy at all. Steve is a songwriter, and he’s always been a songwriter. And these are songs, you know? They might be a little too long or a little too overindulgent, but all the shit led somewhere eventually.

Brodsky: Well, we definitely weren’t ashamed of being into Failure or alternative rock or being nurtured by the grunge music explosion of the early ’90s. We were all in late middle school/early high school when that was happening, and to me, that was the first musical revolution that I connected with. And I don’t think any of us were really inhibited by being a part of that. We weren’t afraid to throw in a part here or there that might’ve tipped the hat to tattered flannel.

Conners: We tried to put all our influences into what we were doing, so it was inevitable that Until Your Heart Stops is complicated—we were probably putting five or six different influences into each song. But we weren’t really thinking about it. It just happened.

McGrath: The way I think of it, the stuff on Beyond Hypothermia is suburban seven-inch hardcore. Until Your Heart Stops was a real record. It was us coming together as band—the songwriting, the guitar playing, the lyrics, everything. But we just wanted to take our non-metal influences into a metal environment—bands like Giant’s Chair and Failure of course—we wanted to blend that stuff into something that was as brutal as we could make it.

At what point did you realize it was an album that people spoke about with a degree of reverence?
Scofield: It’s tough to say. At the time, I was pretty removed from all that. I was still living up north, and wasn’t really in touch with anybody or anything that would make me realize that this was supposed “cool record” or whatever. But I do remember when we went on our first full U.S. tour with Ire right around the time Until Your Heart Stops came out, and it seemed like people came out of the woodwork to see us. When you’re 19 years old and drive across the country to play in some dude’s basement in Denver and 300 kids are there for a show that wasn’t even planned, it makes you think.

McGrath: Aaron Turner made some cassette copies of the album to sell at Krazy Fest before it actually came out. I remember he called me and told me he sold all of them. I couldn’t believe it. That’s when things started to happen for us—we started playing with awesome bands, got asked to do all kinds of shows. There was definitely a heavier scene of people around, too—a lot of steakheads, dudes in basketball shorts, shit like that. I don’t wanna judge people, but when the steakhead movement came in, our shows started to get way more violent—which I don’t think any of us were comfortable with. We’re all for having fun, but we’re not macho dudes by any means. But you know, those songs in that environment… people just went crazy. Steve would get the mic bashed in his face all the time. But we curbed that when we stopped playing those songs, and we quickly became homos in those people’s eyes.

Conners: It became apparent to me when we stopped playing the songs, because people would call out for them at every show. I think people were really bummed that we didn’t make Until Your Heart Stops 2. We probably didn’t think about it, but we probably kind of knew that we weren’t gonna get rid of this record no matter how hard we tried. And we did try for a while. When we were in the major label world, there were people around who weren’t even familiar with this album—they just knew we used to be a hardcore metal band. To them, it was like an angle or something.

Why did you eventually decide to stop playing songs from Until Your Heart Stops?
Brodsky: I wanted to react against being called a metal/hardcore band—I didn’t want my music placed under a moniker. I also remember feeling like we weren’t totally inspired by some of the shows we were playing, and I think that kind of fed the idea that a band doesn’t have to play a certain way all the time. At the time, I was the main writing force in the band, so I thought the only way to change our music was to change our music. [Laughs] So I did. Creative Eclipses was recorded less than a year later.

Scofield: That whole situation was fucking typical for us. I feel like through the whole progression of our band, we were almost schizophrenic. We’d get so bent on one idea and we’d have to make whatever was us not be there anymore because there was a “new us” now. But I don’t think any of us wanted to write another Until Your Heart Stops—or learn another Until Your Heart Stops. [Laughs] The fact that some of the Jupiter songs had, like, three riffs, was pretty appealing. And Steve was definitely having a hard time screaming on the old songs and then trying to sing the Jupiter songs. I think we did one or two tours where we actually did play a mix of songs from both records, and it was pretty grueling on him. Plus, I think he really wanted to prove to himself that he could be a good singer—which is hard to do when you’re screaming for ten minutes through one song and then you have to try to sing the next.

Conners: We got fed up with people yelling out “Crossbearer” and “Juggernaut”—even though that stuff followed us for years afterward. [Laughs] It was kinda like us saying, “Fuck you. We think that stuff is cool, but it’s not us anymore.” I’d say it was 90% fuck you. The other 10% was Steve’s voice, but that was mostly just an excuse, I guess, because we had Caleb and he could obviously do that stuff.

So the audience was a factor?
McGrath: All of a sudden, it seemed like we were on the metal fest circuit, and that was just… stale. It sounds pretentious to say this, but I don’t think we were comfortable being lumped in with metal bands. There was more to what we were doing, and we knew there were more challenges on the horizon.

Brodsky: I’ve always had this love/hate relationship with hardcore. I never connected with the more macho aspects of it—especially violence for what seemed like no reason. So when I saw that happening at shows we were a part of, I didn’t feel good about it. I couldn’t see myself in that audience. Once we shifted gears and played more songs off of Jupiter live, you could really see a difference in our audience. The gender balance was more equal, and it didn’t seem like people were any less into it. But there were always those 15 or 20 kids who would try to mosh and it would become really awkward, because they were outnumbered by a couple hundred kids who just wanted to zone out after all the pot they had just smoked around the corner.

J.R. Conners, circa 1998. Photo by Jason Hellmann

In retrospect, do you regret that you stopped playing those songs for over three years?
Scofield: In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the best idea. But it helped us to learn how to play differently, that’s for sure. And when our direction started changing, it became hard to blend these songs into a set. We didn’t want our set to be all over the fucking map, so that had something to do with it, too.

McGrath: In hindsight, I think it was stupid that we stopped playing some of those songs—I wish we would’ve gone about it a different way. I can only speak for myself, but I think I was being stubborn for no reason. If people like the songs, play them, and find a way to do your other material at the same time. The best bands can do all kinds of things, you know? I always loved that the Bad Brains played hardcore and reggae in the same show, and I wish we could’ve figured out our own version of that.

Brodsky: I think it was just part of our learning process. To say I regretted it would taint the significance of relearning those songs and enjoying them all over again. We did what we felt at the time, and we figured if the whole thing shit the bed, well, at least we had fun trying. I will say that if we had continued playing those songs live, I don’t know that we would’ve written some of the things we wrote afterwards—for better or worse.

You first reintroduced “Juggernaut” and “Moral Eclipse” into your set when you were playing on Lollapalooza in 2003. What made you decide to start playing those songs again?
Conners: We were getting really bored playing the Antenna songs over and over and over again at that point. We were on the road, so we couldn’t really write anything new, but we wanted to keep it interesting. We talked a lot with [former Cave In tour manager and ex-Goatsnake vocalist] Pete Stahl, and he suggested that we include something older. So we went back and listened to Until Your Heart Stops, and we were actually blown away a little bit, because ever since we’d decided to stop playing those songs, we’d never listened to them again.

Brodsky: For the three or so years when Cave In was on tour for most of the year, we didn’t really vary our set very much. We had a total of 15, maybe 20 songs that we’d just kind of rotate, and I think the boredom of doing that kinda caught up to us. So we tried to spice it up a little bit. And after not playing those songs for so long, it was kind of a challenge for us to dust off the old heavy metal cobwebs and shake our wrists a bit more, you know? It was a blast, actually. I pawned the vocals off on Caleb, though—and rightfully so. He’s got the throat of a motherfucker. There’s no way I could compete with that. So it worked out perfectly.

Do you think of Until Your Heart Stops differently now than you did when you recorded it?
Scofield: I think I appreciate it more now, for sure. It’s a very good documentation of that time in Cave In, which is all you can really ask for from a record in general. We were just playing in a band—there wasn’t really anything else to it.

McGrath: When we recorded it, I was a freshman in college with my eyes to the horizon. Now, my light bulb is a little bit dimmer. [Laughs] But, you know, I’ve become very separated from Cave In because we don’t do much anymore, and when I hear those songs I become nostalgic. I think it’s awesome that we all played on this blazing metal record that people seem to like. When I was on tour with Clouds, people would ask me, “Did you play on Until Your Heart Stops?” And I’m always like, “Yeah, I did. But I don’t remember much about it.” It seems like another lifetime, but I’m definitely proud of it and I’m happy that I’m friends with all those dudes to this day.

Conners: When it came out, it was just cool to have a record. I’m not one of those people who thinks it’s stupid to listen to your own records. Whenever we did one, I’d sit and listen to it over and over again because I thought it was so cool that I was playing drums on a record. At this point, I’ve played music for so long and played on so many different records that that’s not my main focus anymore. Now I want to make something memorable. I don’t think I’ve made my best yet, but then again, every musician would probably say that.

Brodsky: When the record was finally done, I remember it felt a little surreal. We’d made a complete piece of music from beginning to end, and it was something I enjoyed listening to. It was kind of an edifying moment because it was the first successful endeavor I had playing music. I’d been trying for years to put together something significant at that point, something that was regarded as an achievement. And Until Your Heart Stops kinda sealed the deal. We came up with something that couldn’t be fucked with—at least for a little while.

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Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer Fest: Los Angeles on December 10-11, 2021—featuring special classic album-sets from Converge (Jane Doe) and Cave In, (Until Your Heart Stops) as well as appearances from DeadguySacred ReichRepulsionGhoul and tons more—takes place at the Belasco in Los Angeles, CA. Full daily lineups and ticket options including “Metal & Beer VIP Sampling Experience/Early Entry,” “Metal & Beer” ticket and the “Just Metal” ticket, which starts at just $40, are below!

Purchase Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer Fest: Los Angeles Two-Day tickets
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FRIDAY, DECEMBER 10
Converge (performing Jane Doe in its entirety)
Sacred Reich
Repulsion
Early Graves (final show)
Night Demon
Ripped to Shreds
Saber

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11
Cave In (performing Until Your Heart Stops in its entirety)
Deadguy
Gatecreeper
Ghoul
Crypt Sermon
ACxDC
Spiritworld