THE SEED is: ? Vocals Eric Claycomb Bass Paul Cuzzupe Guitar Dan Armstrong Drums The Seed, an upcoming unsigned band based out of Tampa, puts a whole new slant on nu-metal hardcore with a sound that mixes melody with mayhem. Equal parts punk, pop, metal, and hardcore and a secret songwriting ingredient all their own, The Seed brings a whole new musical direction from a band with a big future. That future began when Eric and Dan started looking for a new guitarist for the band, which at the time still had no name. Dan met Robert at his high school in a class they were in together. Originally slated to audition for lead guitar Robert ended up auditioning for lead singer and was enlisted into the band. “I’d recorded some solo work,” Robert recalls, “but I’d never done any hardcore before. I said ‘Fuck it, we’re doing this and we’re gonna be the fuckin best”. The three now had the task of naming the band and finding a lead guitarist. Originally slated to be called Seed, the band did some research and turned out with the bad news that the name was taken by a California based band. The problem was solved by the renaming to The Seed. "The name represents all the different sounds each member brings to the band." The band says, "we put all our sounds together, plant them, and they grow into an awesome sound of our own." The band then went through a few rough patches when they had trouble bringing in a new lead guitarist. The first guitarist was taken out of the band due to drug problems, and the second guitarist had many problems including alchohol, stealing songs, and then trying to ditch The Seed and take original songs to another band. It seemed like the band was doomed to be set back. Then after a few months of searching the band found Brian Montgomery, the solution to the search for killer guitar riffs. By now the band had recorded a song before Brian came in that caught some local attention, but the band decided to let the song, "Trapped In A Memory" die and rebuild the sound of the band. At first, the hometown crowd didn’t catch on to the explosive potential of The Seed, but by the time the young band added local guitarist Brian Montgomery to the line-up they had become local contenders. It was only a matter of time. On September 25th 2004, The Seed released "Cut Myself Free" their first full-length song at a Battle of the Bands at Music Showcase of Brandon, Florida, gaining a solid fan base in the process, but for all the buzz, the band was already moving in new musical directions. “We got fuckin’ bored. Bored of everything. We asked ourselves, ‘What else is there?’” says Robert and Eric. “We were fans of melodic music, but we could never find a way to put it into what we were doing and yet still keep the aggression and emotion high. We kept hearing all these bands trying to do the same thing, screaming and singing in their songs and it just all straight up sucked calling it screamo, or hardcore, or nu-metal... it really doesn’t matter I wanted to beat my head through a wall every time I heard most of these bands. We knew we could do the nu-metal hardcore and melody thing RIGHT." The Seed quickly got down to business. The result is a collection of originals that make a rock solid connection between full-on nu-metal hardcore and fully melodic songwriting on The End of all Hope.