No Warning Biography
Suffer, Survive, the debut release on Machine Shop Recordings from the fast-rising Toronto band No Warning, puts a whole new slant on hardcore with a sound that mixes melody with mayhem.
Equal parts punk and hardcore, with a secret songwriting ingredient all their own, Suffer, Survive features a whole new musical direction from a band with a big future.
That future began in the late '90's when a 15-year-old guitarist named Matt DeLong started trolling his neighborhood for a singer to join his quest for straight up, pissed off hardcore, the way it should be played. He found this in junior high school buddy, Ben Cook. "I'd been in some punk bands," Cook recalls, "but I'd never done any hardcore before. I said 'Fuck it, Delong, we're doing this and we're gonna be the fuckin best'."
At first, the hometown crowd didn't catch on to the explosive potential of No Warning, but by the time the young band added local guitarist Jordan Posner to the line-up they had become local contenders. It was only a matter of time before they recorded their first 7" EP for a NY based independent label on a five hundred dollar budget. They later recruited Zach Amster on bass and Junkyard Jesse on drums. The record attracted attention and No Warning hit the road, touring with such hardcore staples as Bane, Reach The Sky, Sick Of It All and The Cro-Mags.
In 2002, No Warning released Ill Blood, their first full-length album, and backed it up with some touring, gaining a solid fan base in the process. But for all the buzz, the band was already moving in new musical directions.
"We got fuckin' bored. Bored of everything. We asked ourselves, 'What else is there?'" says Cook. "We were fans of melodic music, but we could never find a way to put it into what we were doing and yet still keep the aggression and emotion high. We kept hearing all these bands tying to do the same thing, screaming and singing in their songs and it just all straight up sucked. Calling it screamo, or hardcore - it really doesn't matter. I wanted to beat my head through a wall every time I heard most of these bands. We knew we could do the hardcore and melody thing right."
It wasn't until the group took a year off the road to focus on forging their new sound that they were finally able to capture the music they were hearing in their heads.
A four song demo brought the group to the new L.A-based independent, Machine Shop Recordings and they quickly got down to business with a studio schedule that took them from Los Angeles to Toronto and back again over the next year. The result is Suffer, Survive, a collection of No Warning originals that make a rock solid connection between full-on hardcore and fully melodic songwriting. With a new recording under their belt and summer treks on both the Vans Warped Tour '04 and The Projekt Revolution Tour, No Warning is ready to rewrite the musical rules. "It does feel a little like we're starting from scratch in a way," admits Cook. "But we've never really changed the way we make music. That's not negotiable."
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