Premiere: No Warning - "Resurrection of the Wolf"

Even if you know next to nothing about hardcore music, the name No Warning should have rensonance to even the most hardcore-illiterate ears. From 1998-2012, No Warning was cranking out jams that took them everywhere from the dive bars of their native Toronto, to tours with Less Than Jake, The Used, and Ghostface Killah. There's even an infamous audio clip of Fred Durst "bugging out" about how he wants to sign No Warning, because of the band's "hard, phat" sound. It's hilarious, and a bit sad. Evidently though, it's been a long, weird road for the band and this premiere is no different. "Resurrection of the Wolf" seems to have been recorded out of necessity, as the official website for the 7" states:

"During his time in No Warning our bass player Zach Amster suffered from a life-threatening skin disorder called Stevens-Johnson syndrome which left him close to death. He fully recovered physically, but the experience left him with a case of post traumatic stress disorder which in time lead to more serious mental health issues and addiction. Along this path, after the band disbanded, he made some bad decisions for which he is now awaiting sentencing in a California state prison. We love Zach and know him to be an amazing person, and we are truly blessed to have him alongside us as a friend, brother and extremely gifted musical partner. We reformed this year to record two songs as a financial benefit for Zach, his wife, and daughter."

I caught up with Ben Cook—one part of the Fucked Up super-collective, and No Warning's frontman and spokesperson—to chat about this new project. He told me that were it not for Zach's unfortunate streak of bad luck, the band would have never got back together. "This was an opportunity to get back together to help someone, and not just do it for reunion personal ego reasons. Zach was a huge part of the band, we traveled all over the world together. We kind of lost touch because all of our lives all went in weird directions but that doesnt matter. Addiction as a been a big part of my world, and his issues hits close to home."

While Ben can't get into specifics of where Zach went wrong (and it's nobody's business anyway) he had some interesting thing to say about how the creative process differs when you're making music out of necessity, rather than some other form of artistic impulse: "We made the music like we always did: very quickly, in the space of 2 hours for $40 at a recording studio at Front and Sherbourne in Toronto. This was just a weird, weird record because Matt dreamt it all happened, told me about it, then a few days later we hear about Zach and we were like: 'Let's just do that dream you had,' and help our boy. On the day of recording we saw all these old weird people that used to help us out as a band when we were around. We saw our old drummer on the highway yelling at us from a construction van after our recording session. It has all been some weird universe shit, you know? I don't know how much I buy into all that stuff—but things happened during this time that are beyond me. Spooky."

So there you have it. Go ahead and support this spooky 7", which drops today. It's for a good cause.

Stream the 7" on Soundcloud and buy it from Bad Actors.