It’s really not their fault.

No parent wants their children to grow up and be musicians. No loving parent would wish that on any child. Music. I shudder. Awful way to make a living. I was hoping I would have a child that would maybe be a factory worker, or gutter cleaner. You know, honest livings.

Not wading through the sewage of the music business.

When you hold your newborn boy, did you look in his eyes and yearn for the day when he would do his first go-jump?

Of course not. You aren’t weird.

But I guess when your earliest memory is your car seat bumping up against a full stack on the way to your daddy’s show with the Bouncing Souls, you really kinda have a path assigned to you. A destiny, so to speak. A sad precursor to destruction. And it’s not a straight path to a Chemical Engineering degree at the University of Delaware.

So there is this band, The May 4th Massacre. They are from Newark, De. They play a type of music that can best be described as “post-metal-hardcore” I guess. Maybe post-hardcore-metal? That’s what old guys like me call it, you know, guys that don’t know any cooler way of describing it.

They say the world is cyclical, or whatever.

Years ago Nathan and I started BoySetsFire. We played some shows, put out some records, had a good time. We had kids around the same time, they were best friends, we used to joke that someday they would have a band together.

Well guess what? They did. Or they do.

Oddly enough, musically it is a mix of brutality and beauty. I don’t know where they got that. Lyrically, they run the gamut from tender-hearted to politically savvy. Hmmmmmm…

Great drumming, technical guitars and throaty screaming mix with tender heart on your sleeve vocals and create songs that are both catchy and mosh-inducing. These kids know their way around a breakdown.

They have been in my basement for a couple years now and I would really like them to get out of it. So if you have a second check em out. They rock.

They were raised that way.

-Joshua Latshaw

The video for The May 4th Massacre's song "Traitors" ran on MTV europe, MTV South America, Fuse, Much Music in Canada. The video was also FUSE's video of the day on 5/19/11. After touring w/ bands like Defeater, Dr Acula, BoySetsFire and playing a sold out show at The Studio@Webster Hall in New York City direct support for the major label band DOPE. The May 4th Massacre went on infinite hiatus in the fall of 2013