Introducing Ritual Cross

For the past year and change, I've been working on writing music instead of writing newsletters. You've probably noticed the latter, as updates here have been irregular, due in part to my own shifting focus and putting the rest of my free time toward other pursuits. Now, it's time to bring this musical project to the broader world.

My band's name is Ritual Cross. It's made up of myself and four others, all of whom came together to make a sort-of hardcore punk band. It's not the kind of big-tent hardcore you've been inundated with for the past four years—no diss to any of that. It's reaching back to the weirdo punk stuff that we love. Sometimes it's fast and sometimes it's slow. Sometimes we're talking about how a song should sound more anarcho and other times we're talking about Feel The Darkness-era Poison Idea. To the detriment of everyone else in the band, I've written metal riffs and then tried to play them like I was in Lip Cream. We played our first show back in January under a different name but, now, we're called Ritual Cross. If we ever change the band's name again, please kill me.

In November of last year, we spent two days in the studio with our friend Dylan Piskula and recorded ten songs, five of which you hear right now via Bandcamp or cassette tape. The other five will be coming out later this year, and we've already got six more new, unrecorded songs on top of that. We've been working hard to make something that we can all be proud of, and I hope you dig it. If not, that's also completely fine.

Listen to Ritual Cross here:

This is a pretty functional newsletter so, to make up for that, I've got another one coming for you next week. When it rains it pours, it seems.