Biography
In January 2012, Matt Skiba released an EP along with former Angels and Airwaves and The Offspring drummer Atom Willard under the moniker TheHELL.
The band’s first EP Sauve Les Requins took a lot of folks by surprise, not because the songs were necessarily bad (they weren’t) but because of how similar they were to a lot of Alkaline Trio’s earlier, rougher work, both sonically and musically. Matt Skiba has never shied away from diverse side projects–the moonlit goth of Heavens, the anthemic rock of Matt Skiba and the Sekrets, his own gaunt solo work–so TheHELL’s debut, laced with hype, ended up feeling more like a superfluous exercise or a fun diversion than a game changer.
Skiba and Atom Willard’s second foray as theHELL, Southern Medicine, isn’t terribly different from Sauve Les Requins; it has the rugged sound of a demo hastily blasted out in an afternoon, but Skiba’s perpetually strong voice sands out a lot of the edges. His voice, intentionally and impressively raw, echos over fuzzy guitars and Willard’s personality-driven percussion, which is also carried by delightfully dirty bass work by Pat Smear.
Members