Hot Cross bio

Billy Werner - Vocals Greg Drudy - Drums Matt Smith - Bass Casey Boland - Guitar Josh Jakubowski - Guitar

Hot Cross came to be in the winter of '00. Greg (drums), Matt (guitar) and Adam Marino (guitar; Formerly of Saetia and Errortype:11, now bassist for Instruction) got together with the intent of playing stripped-down, lighting-fast, early-Gravity records sounding hardcore. We wrote about 3 songs with this lineup then asked our friend Josh to play bass. At this point, Adam was strapped for time with other bands and wasn't able to continue rehearsing, so we again went at things as a 3-piece with a new lineup. We wrote about 5 songs at which point we asked our friend Casey to play 2nd-guitar. We had one practice as a 4-piece, Casey showed us the material he'd written and we dropped the rest of our songs at that point because they sounded so radically different to what Hot Cross was writing with our new lineup. We wrote "A New Set of Lungs" in it's entirety with Josh and Casey trading off vocal duties and sent a practice demo to Billy who was studying abroad and working on his accent. He was into the songs and all of us were into his vocals. It just made sense to add Billy. He listened to the practice CD, returned to the states on a Monday, practiced with us on Wednesday, and we played our first show with this lineup that Friday. Those songs were documented as the A New Set of Lungs 10" which was released by Robotic Empire and was gone in a matter of weeks.