HATEBREED TRIVIA
Trivia
Hatebreed first came to Japan in 2002, to play the Beast Feast 2002 festival and headline shows of their own around it. The second visit followed in February 2005, for Extreme The Dojo, straight after the band had played every date of Australia's Big Day Out. The Loud Park 09 site of the promoter Creativeman describes them in those years as playing more than 200 shows a year without a break.
"Live for This", from The Rise of Brutality, was nominated for Best Metal Performance at the 47th Grammy Awards in 2005; the award went to Motörhead's "Whiplash". Hatebreed did not win, but the band's own announcements have described them as Grammy-nominated ever since.
Jamey Jasta's first band was called Dreadnaught; renamed Jasta 14, it got to open for Sick Of It All. After his sixteenth birthday, he recalls, he borrowed his grandfather's car and went to jam with Hatebreed, a band made up of friends from the local scene. During the week he worked as a prep cook, and the band rehearsed and played from Thursday to Sunday. Their 1996 EP, Under the Knife, was recorded for $150 of their own money.
Jasta wrote "I Will Be Heard" on an acoustic guitar his father had given him while in hospital; if it sounded heavy on an acoustic, he reasoned, it would be crushing once the band played it. Demos built around the song drew offers from several major labels, and Hatebreed chose Universal. They met at least ten producers before settling on Matt Hyde, whose credits included Porno for Pyros and Slayer.
The video for "I Will Be Heard" was directed by Marc Webb, who went on to make (500) Days of Summer and The Amazing Spider-Man — and MTV would not play it. Jasta has since said that being shut out was part of the reason he went after the job of hosting Headbanger's Ball when the show returned in the summer of 2003: if the channel would not air his band, he would get inside and change how it saw them. He hosted until 2007, and Metallica appeared on an episode with him in 2003.
"Everyone Bleeds Now" started as a joke. At the time, the talk around Hatebreed was that their shows left blood on club floors and in the bathrooms every night, and fans would tweet the band pictures to prove it. Jasta decided to live up to the reputation: after a drum intro he would yell the one line the whole crowd could shout back. Zeuss told him to keep it. Jasta rewrote the rest of the lyrics to give the song more meaning, and hopes listeners read them and see it is not just about violence.
"Honor Never Dies" came out of a visit Jasta paid to his grandfather in a veterans' hospital. He talked with another patient there and was told afterwards that the man had not had a visitor in more than a year — which was when it struck him that you could be a war hero and still die alone. Musically it was a first for the band: Jasta suggested the two guitars and the bass play separate lines instead of all following the same notes.
Jasta was recording the vocals for "Slaughtered in Their Dreams" on The Concrete Confessional when the news of Lemmy's death came in. He told BARKS he went into the session wanting to pay the Motörhead frontman some kind of tribute, and that there are passages where he sang with Lemmy's style in mind — listen closely, he said, and you will hear them.
Hatebreed played the second day of the very first Loud Park, Loud Park 06, on 15 October 2006. They were back for the second day of Loud Park 09 at Makuhari Messe on 18 October 2009, the month after the self-titled Hatebreed came out — though equipment trouble kept them from playing any of the new songs.
The Japanese edition of For the Lions added one more cover as a bonus track, of the New York hardcore band Sheer Terror. When BARKS asked Jasta in 2016 to describe each album in a single word, he called this one "important": without the bands it covers, he explained, Hatebreed would not exist.
Hatebreed came to Japan twice in 2010. In March they were part of The Black Procession, a tour headlined by Machine Head with Bleeding Through also on the bill, playing two nights in Tokyo and one in Osaka and changing the set list at every show. In November they came back on their own, starting at Club Quattro in Shibuya on the 8th, then The Bottom Line in Imaike, Nagoya, on the 10th and Club Quattro in Shinsaibashi, Osaka, on the 11th. Before the trip Jasta sent Japanese fans a message pointing out that last time they had been Machine Head's support act, while this time the shows were their own.
On 22 November 2015 Hatebreed played the second day of Ozzfest Japan 2015 at Makuhari Messe — after a long absence from Japan, as the BARKS interviewer noted the following year. Jasta told him the show had left him wanting to come back as soon as possible, and said he was keen to play Knotfest Japan that November as well; he had already been in touch with Slipknot's Corey Taylor about it.
The Japanese edition of The Concrete Confessional came out through Ward Records on 13 May 2016, the same day as the rest of the world, with Japanese liner notes and translated lyrics. A mail-order-only version also came with a booklet signed by the members.
On 18 August 2011, when circumstances beyond the band's control meant Hatebreed could not play Carnival of Chaos, they put on a free show that night instead, at The Intersection in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with tickets handed out free at the club's box office. Afterwards the band thanked the Michigan fans who had turned up and headed off on a European tour.
The Divinity of Purpose sold more than 17,400 copies in its first week and entered the Billboard 200 at No. 20 — at the time Hatebreed's highest US album chart position — while topping the Hard Rock Albums chart. In Europe, where Nuclear Blast released it, it reached No. 25 in Germany and No. 28 in Austria.
According to the band's site, "A.D.", the opener of The Concrete Confessional, deals with the collapse of the middle class and of the American Dream that people were promised as children, and was the opening track from the start. "Seven Enemies" is built on the seven deadly sins, and "In the Walls" comes from Jasta's own experience of night paralysis and night terrors and the fear of losing his mind. Talking to BARKS, though, Jasta declined to pin "A.D." down: many people would take it as "American Dream", he said, but he wanted fans to take the lyrics however they felt them.
Twelve of the thirteen songs on The Concrete Confessional run between two and three minutes. Jasta said the hardest part of making it was not overthinking: fans like the Hatebreed recipe — short, to-the-point songs, catchy but heavy riffs, big singalongs — and the aim was to keep it pure without simply repeating themselves. The longtime producer Zeuss produced it, and Josh Wilbur, whose credits include Lamb of God and Megadeth, mixed it.
The covers of Hatebreed's three albums since the 2010s are by well-known metal artists. Eliran Kantor, whose clients include Testament, Atheist and Sigh, painted The Divinity of Purpose; Marcelo Vasco, known for his work for Slayer, did The Concrete Confessional; and Kantor returned for Weight of the False Self. Of Vasco's painting, Jasta quoted Leonardo da Vinci on painting and poetry and said the artist had captured a feeling that would go with the band's musical and lyrical vision.
The Concrete Confessional entered Billboard's Top Current Albums chart at No. 13, reaching No. 2 on the Hard Rock Albums chart and No. 3 on Top Independent Albums. Since 2024 the band's announcements have named one of its songs, "Looking Down the Barrel of Today", as their biggest streaming track of the modern era.
"When the Blade Drops", released in February 2020 as Hatebreed's first new song in four years, was a standalone single: the announcement said from the outset that it would not be on the eighth album due later that year. It runs just under three minutes, and Jasta called it a taste of what was to come. The album, Weight of the False Self, arrived that November without it.
Weight of the False Self grew out of what Jasta describes as the age-old battle of the dual self: an angel on one shoulder offering reason, wisdom and compassion, a devil on the other ranting with passion, spite and dark desire. He doubted a truly centred mind was attainable, he said, but when he writes he lets the angel's voice come through a little louder. In the notes for the Japanese edition from Ward Records, he said he had pushed himself on this record, rewriting songs and lyrics until they felt perfect and dragging himself out of his comfort zone.
In 2025 Hatebreed revived the annual Summer Slaughter tour and headlined it themselves, with Jasta taking on the job of breathing new life into the brand and keeping its tradition of giving the best up-and-coming bands a stage. Ash Avildsen of Sumerian Records, who founded the tour, said he had wanted Hatebreed to headline it since its inception. It was the band's first summer tour of the US in years, and for 2026 they were announced as headliners of two separate legs.
Toad's Place in New Haven, Connecticut, is where Jamey Jasta went to shows as a young teenager and saw Carcass, Napalm Death and Sick Of It All. In Hatebreed's early days the venue would not book them, because of their reputation for violent shows. In November 2005 they celebrated their tenth anniversary there by playing Perseverance in full, and All Out War re-formed just for that night. In 2015 the band announced its twentieth-anniversary home-state show for the same venue, on 19 June.
The title of the second album was partly an answer to the sell-out charge. Even signing with Victory Records had drawn complaints — Victory, people said, was the McDonald's of hardcore — and signing with Universal brought them back. Jasta told Metal Hammer the band responded by making the hardest record they could and naming it Perseverance: anyone who didn't respect how hard they had worked to get there had never been a fan for the right reasons. Asked by BARKS in 2016 to sum up each album in a single word, he chose "stress" for this one, recalling the strain of the label deal at the time.
Hatebreed songs have found their way into films. "I Will Be Heard", from Perseverance, was used in the 2002 Vin Diesel film xXx, and the band contributed "Bound to Violence" to the soundtrack of The Punisher, the 2004 Marvel adaptation — a nineteen-track album that also featured Nickelback, Queens of the Stone Age and Damageplan.
The Rise of Brutality, released on 28 October 2003, was recorded at Planet Z in Massachusetts with the producer Zeuss and mixed at Armoury Studios in Vancouver by Mike Fraser, whose credits include Metallica and AC/DC. Hatebreed have worked with Zeuss ever since. Jasta told BARKS in 2016 that Zeuss is the one who will say plainly that something doesn't sound like Hatebreed, that it could be heavier, or that a riff is too close to an old song; in 2026 he added that he had known him since the days of Pushbutton Warfare and Jasta 14, and that Zeuss had been like a sixth member of the band for years.
On the Billboard 200, Perseverance (2002) debuted at No. 50; The Rise of Brutality (2003) entered at No. 30 on first-week sales of more than 32,000; Supremacy (2006) came in at No. 31 with about 27,000; the 2009 covers album For the Lions at No. 58 with about 10,000; and that year's self-titled Hatebreed at No. 37 with 15,000. By October 2003, Nielsen SoundScan put US sales of Perseverance at around 216,000 and of the debut, Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire, at 151,000.
Supremacy carries the marks of a hard few years. On 21 March 2004 Steve Richards, the band's long-time manager and a close friend of Jasta's, died, and Jasta lost interest in music, the band and the scene. Talking to Metal Hammer in 2006, he said he had made a lot of bad decisions in bad circumstances and had become an angry, negative person, and that with this album he needed to regain power over himself. Songfacts notes that around then he felt ashamed even to be singing "Live for This" on stage.
In March 2006 Hatebreed went back to being a five-piece, bringing in Frank "3 Gun" Novinec on guitar. Jasta gave two reasons: the new album had a lot of parts that called for a second guitar, and he and bassist Chris Beattie had started the band as a five-piece in the first place. Novinec, a Cleveland native, had played in Ringworm and Integrity and more recently Terror, and was one of Jasta's oldest friends.
The video for "To the Threshold", from Supremacy, was shot on 25 February 2006. In Jasta's words it tells the story of a young kid who uses Hatebreed's music to escape the abuse of a man his mother is seeing. The performance footage was filmed at Fastlane Studios in Brooklyn, and most of the narrative scenes in the apartment of Igor from Gravesend. Months before the album, the song was also announced for MTV Headbanger's Ball - The Revenge, a Roadrunner compilation due that April.
The video for "Defeatist", from Supremacy, was shot on 31 July 2006 in an abandoned factory in Naugatuck, Connecticut — the same building Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise had used for the closing sequence of War of the Worlds. It was directed by Dale "Rage" Resteghini, whose earlier clips included Trivium and Madball. The album's second video, "Destroy Everything", was filmed during the band's set at Germany's With Full Force festival, in front of a crowd Jasta put at 30,000.
Ozzfest 2006 was Hatebreed's fourth Ozzfest and their first on the main stage. Jasta said they were playing to two or three times as many people as on the three before, and that they were really the only extreme band on that stage. At Ozzfest 2007 they headlined the second stage.
Live Dominance, Hatebreed's first DVD, came out in September 2008 and entered Billboard's Top Music Videos chart at No. 1 on first-week sales of 5,000. Its centrepiece is the sold-out show at Harpo's in Detroit, filmed in March that year on the Supremacy tour with multiple cameras and entirely in high definition. Kevin Custer directed and edited it, and the audio was mixed by Josh Wilbur, known for his work with Lamb of God.
In February 2009 guitarist Sean Martin left after ten years, and Wayne Lozinak, the band's original guitarist, came back. Jasta told Gekirock that Lozinak was working as Hatebreed's guitar tech at the time and that Martin himself suggested him; Martin, by Jasta's account, wanted to put his family life and his tattoo shop first. The covers album For the Lions had been finished in 2008, but with Lozinak back the band went into the studio again and added four more covers — Slayer, Bad Brains, Black Flag and Suicidal Tendencies.
The self-titled Hatebreed (2009) was produced by Zeuss at Planet Z studios in Hadley, Massachusetts. When it was announced, Jasta called it a true crossover record, with the band's metal and hardcore roots evenly represented throughout. Looking back for Songfacts, he said this was the album where they went from two or three riffs a song to four or five, and that they had put too many songs on it trying to please the label and the retailers — so the next record was kept short and to the point.
After the first night of the November 2010 headline tour, Jasta told Gekirock the band had been able to play for about ninety minutes, twice the forty-five they had as Machine Head's opener earlier that year. The set was worked out on the spot in blocks of four songs, with requests shouted from the floor between blocks folded into the next one. That night they played five new songs, but a request for "You're Never Alone" had to go unanswered because they had not rehearsed it.
For The Divinity of Purpose in 2013, Hatebreed moved to Razor & Tie in North America and Nuclear Blast in Europe and elsewhere, and the Japanese edition came out through Nippon Columbia. Jasta told Gekirock the move followed upheaval at Roadrunner, which had released their previous album outside North America and where a lot of people had lost their jobs; he singled out the Japanese staff for having treated the band especially well. Many people from Roadrunner in the UK and Europe had since moved to Nuclear Blast, he added, so he was glad to be working with familiar faces again. In December 2015 the band signed a worldwide deal with Nuclear Blast.
The Divinity of Purpose began with riffs collected in 2011. That year's arena run with Five Finger Death Punch showed the band which songs crowds responded to most, and by the time they joined Lamb of God on tour in November 2012 they were already trying new songs on stage. The album was made at home in Connecticut, with Zeuss handling engineering and pre-production and Josh Wilbur working mainly on the vocals and arrangements. Sixteen or seventeen songs were written, and twelve made the record.
Asked by Gekirock about the title The Divinity of Purpose, Jasta said people sometimes have experiences that feel divine, and for him those are the moments when music seems to rescue him from madness. To Songfacts he left it more open: many people assume it is about a person, but it could be about music, a dog, an ex or a family member, and he wanted listeners to decide for themselves.
Matt Bachand of Shadows Fall has stepped into gaps in Hatebreed more than once. In the autumn of 2013 he toured on bass for Chris Beattie, who had broken his left wrist and right elbow when a branch falling from a tree he was cutting knocked his ladder out from under him. After Beattie left the band in November 2024, Hatebreed announced in February 2025 that Bachand would play bass for the foreseeable future; when Wayne Lozinak left the European tour in June that year for medical treatment, Bachand moved over to guitar and Carl Schwartz of First Blood and Terror took over the bass. Lozinak was back on stage by October, and the line-up announced in June 2026 lists Schwartz on bass.
The name has been misread. In August 2012, in an analysis piece on a shooting in Wisconsin, CNN included Hatebreed in a list of bands — white-power acts among them — whose names suggested hate or violence. The band demanded a correction and an apology on Twitter, and about half an hour later CNN acknowledged the mistake, removed the name, called Hatebreed a hardcore metal band and apologised. Jasta had long been explaining that, despite the name, the band's songs carry an underlying message of hope and of overcoming adversity.
In 1998 Hatebreed were thrown off the Warped Tour. Jasta later told Metal Hammer that the band were young, drunk around the clock and had serious problems at the time, and that they had never been allowed back. In 2017 they returned: the band's site announced that Hatebreed would join the Vans Warped Tour in Albuquerque on 21 June and stay for the rest of the summer, until the tour wrapped in Pomona, California, in August.