So we formed in the summer of 2002. All of us had been in bands for a while; Kevin and Mario had just ended 7+ years in New Bedford metal titans Gaskill, and Tanya and Daniel's band The Medea Connection, which James had been playing in for a year or so, had been around almost as long. Medea and Gaskill had both been writing longer and longer songs with ten zillion parts, etc., and the general idea was to form a band that could bang out stuff really quickly and write really concise songs. Well, we definitely did that. The band came together super fast: we finished our first song, "Before The Wave", at our first rehearsal, and within a few months we had all the songs done that would eventually make up our first record, The Hymnal EP.

Our first shows were in Cambridge (The Middle East) and New Bedford (The New Wave), the latter of which was the final show of N.B. legends Holy Cow. Soon after the recording of The Hymnal, we hooked up with an incredibly super awesome dude who's real name is indeed Jonah J. Jenkins, and his label Traktor 7. Jonah used to sing for the amazingly awesome Milligram, and he continues to blow minds, literally blow minds, in Raw Radar War, who should have, if you ask us, kept their original name, Septic Youth Command. Anyway, we put out The Hymnal EP in October 2003, and had an awesome CD release with Black Helicopter and Blacktail, who also put out two records on Traktor 7 that definitely rank with the finest rock albums ever to come out of Boston. It was an honor and a privilege to be in such esteemed company. Back in N.B., we also played a number of really hot shows with our good pals in Beyond The Embrace.

At this point, we were still trying to figure out what kind of music we wanted to do. We knew we wanted things to be concise, but from there, our influences were pretty varied. In general, we got a lot of influence from the economy of bands like Wire while still wanting a sort of Black Flag punk craziness. But, of course, we didn't sound like any of our idols at all, and instead our sound starting mutating in really strange ways. At around this time, Kevin really hit his stride with his insanely articulate battery of vocal insanity, and instrumentally the band started getting into odd panning and rhythmic timing. All of this was probably totally innoticeable to anyone who was listening, and "in the pit" it probably just sounded like a band starting to sound weird. The result of this eventually became the Smash To Ashes LP.

After we recorded S.T.A., it was a really long time until we released it. We played a bunch of shows, some of which ruled, but an unfortunate dalliance with a "label" that wound up being kind of a con killed a lot of our momentum. To get things going again in late 2004, we decided to let every member of the band pick a cover that the band would be forced to learn: the result of which was the Church & War EP, which we wound up releasing simultaneously with Smash To Ashes at the end of 2005. Oh right, almost forgot that for a while in 2004 Daniel played a number of shows with a broken leg, including one memorable (to us) (for how pathetic it was) show with the Midnight Creeps in Providence where Kevin also had his arm in a sling. We were fucking cripples. Also in 2005 we were in the BCN Rumble and rolled our way into the semis and made more dough than we deserved. Apparently some of our fans boo'ed the winner that night, to our embarrassment.

The week after our S.T.A. cd release, we got in the van and went to record what would be our swan song, Winged Wolves. We didn't end up releasing it until later in 2006, by which time Tanya had temporarily left us to go to grad school at Cornell in Ithaca, NY. This at least yielded what was definitely our funniest gig ever, when we played Cornell's Barton Hall at a school-sponsored benefit show, where we were given 7 minutes of stage time immediately following a gospel group. Kevin assaulted the audience of well-meaning college students and it was a pretty entertaining 7 minutes, maybe the most bizarre and interesting 7 minutes of our band's existence. Thank you Barton Hall and thank you Cornell Student Union or whatever.

With Tanya away, we did a number of shows with Daniel on drums as a 4-piece, until we eventually broke down and got a temporary replacement drummer, Jay Presto, who aside from having been a student of Daniel's when he was a high school teacher and Jay was a high school student, was/is also a mind-melting metal drummer in Reverend Grundarr and the Unholy Trinity. We did a whole bunch of shows with Jay, and he totally and completely ruled.

In early 2007 Mike at Black Roserian Records put out a 7-inch single of "Electroplated"/"Into The Woods". Black Roserian is out of Virginia Beach, Virginia, and it was an awesome excuse for The Hidden to finally go south of the Mason-Dixon. Soon after those shows, however, we kind of came to the decision to hang it up: Mario and Kevin both had burgeoning families, and by that point all 5 of us lived really far from each other, geographically. We had our final shows in late August 2007, and it worked the same way it started: with a show at the New Wave and a show in Cambridge (this time at the Abbey Lounge).



All told, we did The Hidden for 4 records and a single, 5 years, a hundred-some-odd shows, and had a total blast while doing it. We assume that if you are at this website and have read this far in this story, you probably saw us or heard us when we were a band, in which case we'd like to thank you profusely for paying attention.

All hail,

Kevin, Tanya, Daniel, James & Mario
The Hidden