ᴛʜᴇ ʜᴜʀᴛ ᴩʀᴏᴄᴇꜱꜱ | UNAPPRECIATED BAND AWARENESS BLOG

You know a band didn't get any long-term love when a Google image search mostly brings up broken links. To compound on this, it seems the entirety of their photo history was destroyed by the great MySpace data massacre of 2019. But, as much as it seems the internet would like us to forget The Hurt Process, I shall do no such thing.

I find myself going back to THP on a yearly basis. Right around the time Summer is winding down and the winds of Fall (Autumn for you educated types) have just begun rustling the trees. The type of weather where it's still too warm for a sweater but too chilly for a tee-shirt. This is prime weather to dive down the 2 album discography of The Hurt Process.

It's hard to put a single genre on The Hurt Process. They jump between Emo, Post-Hardcore, and Metalcore so quickly I just don't think it's possible. They definitely started as an Emo / Post-Hardcore outfit with Metalcore influences on Drive By Monologue, but left as a Metalcore band with Emo / Post-Hardcore influences on A Heartbeat Behind. Whether these changes occurred organically or were forced by Victory Records is anybody's guess (knowing Victory Record's history - I'm leaning towards the latter). Because of this, you have to be careful when recommending their music to others. If you tell someone to listen to My Scandinavian Ride they'll think you've just shown them a decent metalcore band, but if you suggest White Butterflies they'll get more Hawthorne Heights vibes. These changes don't even need to be compared across both albums. On Drive By Monologue you get the aforementioned White Butterflies track with all the mid-west emo/post-hardcore influences that entails, but then there's the grittier and faster paced This Piece.

All that being said, The Hurt Process are great at what they do, but they may not be everyone's flavor. I think they were very hard to market because of these aforementioned issues in defining their genre, which seems to be a problem many bands had in the early-to-mid-00's. If you took all their emo and post-hardcore tracks and put them on one album, then put all their metalcore tracks on another album, you'd have two very solid albums for those genres. But you get everything they have to offer on both albums all intertwined together. Personally, I enjoy this change of pace as I'm going through an album, but I understand a lot of people's hesitation to it. One thing is for sure though, you will not run in to monotony when listening to The Hurt Process.

They never made the cut on Headbanger's Ball, you never saw them on Warped Tour, and all their tours were relegated to supporting slots. Their biggest track was My Scandinavian Ride which sounded very close to many Atreyu tracks (another Victory Records band), right down to their music video which featured a female vampire who looked very similar to the model on Atreyu's The Curse - which came out almost one year before. I'm not saying they "ripped off" Atreyu, but they definitely got a lot of influences from them with that track.

Despite all this I always recommend The Hurt Process to anyone who enjoys mid-00's emo and metalcore, but I never recommend it if they only like one or the other. They're a band who had a lot of talent but little push and no scene as a result. Despite that they did make their way on to the Victory Records sampler MOSH, which is where my 14 year old self found them. I watched every music video on there and the track My Scandinavian Ride stood out to me. It was catchy, memorable, and the music video had boobies in it! (I was 14 after-all). All boobies aside, the music did catch my interest. I got both of their albums and loved everything that I listened to. Those albums bring back a lot of good and bad memories for me of simpiler times, but I like to think that if I found them today I'd still enjoy it just the same. When it comes to recommending this band, here is what I think is the best way to go about it: Listen to A Heartbeat Behind twice before you pass judgment. I know that is a lot to ask for in the digital age of 3-minute-or-less tracks, but you may need that time to really sink your teeth in to the album. You may be offput by their style changes on your first listen, but once you get past that you may just find a band you enjoy who simply had a lot to offer.

Their breakup in 2005 lead to the formation of The Casino Brawl, who, in many ways, was a much more focused and direct iteration of The Hurt Process. The good news is that as of 2020 both The Hurt Process and The Casino Brawl have been showing signs of becoming active again on their respective Facebook pages. I'm excited about the new material The Casino Brawl have come out with and I hope to see more out of The Hurt Process in the future.