HELL CAN WAIT

An Interview with Luke from HELL CAN WAIT

Q1. For readers who might not be familiar with you, would you please provide some background on the band—where you’re from, when you formed, etc.?

A1. Hey, I’m Luke Hell Can Wait’s vocalist, graphic designer, booking agent, videographer extraordinaire… We’re a melodic hardcore band from the UK, based somewhere between London and Brighton. We formed during the COVID pandemic, playing our first show in September 2021. Most of us have been in bands on and off for the last 15 years - a few of us took some years out to start families and felt we now had something worth writing about.

Q2. Who are some of the band’s primary influences?

A2. Our influences are very varied, musically we take inspiration from everything we listen to - Comeback Kid, Stick To Your Guns, Killswitch Engage (Alive or Just Breathing era) to Defeater, More Than Life, Landscapes etc. Our drummer Jordan has a guilty pleasure for classical music. In terms of themes and why we do this band we all struggle with various mental health issues and find music such a positive outlet and a release you can’t quite get anywhere else, we write a lot about these aspects in our songs and hope someone’s finds some common ground and something relatable so they can know they’re not alone feeling the way they do.

Q3. What got you into hardcore?

A3. I fell in love with the early 2000s era of melodic hardcore - Verse, Killing The Dream, The Carrier, Modern Life Is War, American Nightmare, The Hope Conspiracy, Carpathian etc. I’d been in a few metalcore band over the years but Hell Can Wait was the first time I’d found a group of musicians wanting to pursue the melodic hardcore genre.

Q4. Melodic hardcore was emerging as one of the dominant types of hardcore when I first was getting into it in the mid- to late-2000s, but it does appear to have been overshadowed by some other styles in the last fifteen years or so. In your experience, is Hell Can Wait more of an outlier in playing this kind of hardcore?

A4. 100%. We wanted to play the music we loved, that nobody seemed to really be doing anymore, the UK scene lost More Than Life, Landscapes and Dead Swans. We wanted to honour that 2000s melodic hardcore scene, pulling on the heartstrings of nostalgia while breathing a modern breath of air into it. We find a lot of people come up to us at shows saying they’ve been waiting years for a band to bring melodic hardcore back into the spotlight and the revival of melodic hardcore has been our mission statement from the beginning.

Q5. What are some of your touring highlights and/or most memorable shows you’ve been a part of?

A5. For a young band we’re incredibly grateful to have had so many cool opportunities to support bands we love in our short career including playing our second ever show supporting Devil Sold His Soul and Landscapes, a couple dates supporting Your Demise, we had the absolute pleasure of playing Leperfest 2022 in Belgium alongside Stick To Your Guns, Knocked Loose, One Step Closer, supporting Atreyu and The Hurt Process in Brighton, Polar and most recently Don’t Try (CAN) and Ignite (US) in London. All in all we’ve played 50+ other shows across the UK since the end of 2021 - we like to keep busy!

Q6. Is there one song you would point to that would be “quintessential Hell Can Wait”?

A6. I’d say it would be a song off our yet to be released debut full length as we’ve really found and settled into our own sound writing the new record but if I had to pick one song that people could check out now that would sum up Hell Can Wait - I’d pick Drowning In You, it’s an absolute freight train from start to finish and really captures the relentlessness we strive to portray in our music.

Q7. What’s been the most gratifying and/or exciting part of being in a band?

A7. We love touring, travelling to new places every day, meeting new people, experiencing new things and playing great shows. If we could do this every single day, we would. Everything we do is done in house, we book our own shows and tours currently, we design all our own merch, manage our own socials, film our own videos etc so it’s hugely gratifying when someone comes up to us and shows some recognition for the hard work we put in behind the scenes.

Q8. What does the band have for plans on the horizon—touring, new music, etc.?

A8. So we’re out on a run with DOWNPOUR (ex Lock & Key, We Struck Gold) in a few weeks, they’re a great new band for fans of Stick To Your Guns and The Ghost Inside if we’re playing local to you, come down!

10.04 - The Bread Shed, Manchester

11.04 - Corporation, Sheffield

12.04 - Subside, Birmingham

13.04 - The Fighting Cocks, Kingston

14.04 - Daltons, Brighton

We’ve also recently finished working on our debut full length, the masters are back in and we have a couple videos filmed already - more news on the release soon!

Thanks so much for having me in for a chat - remember hardcore is a community and our community is a safe space - we welcome everyone who shares that ethos and hopefully we can all grow together. If you, like us miss early 2000s melodic hardcore let’s all work together to put it back on the map in the UK scene!