Massachusetts newcomers At Fault are still in their earliest stages, but they already have a pretty clear idea of what they want the band to be: heavy hardcore with plenty of death metal in the mix.
Drummer Joe Dwyer and guitarist/bassist Joey Cinz have spent more than a decade playing together in death metal band Inhalement. Vocalist Tim Ledin joined after unexpectedly running into Dwyer at his workplace. “I remember walking into Joe's work, and we talked about the Watch Me Bleed record from Missing Link,” Ledin recalls. “I had reviewed it for Ghost Cult Magazine, and Joe was just reading the review earlier that morning. Hours later, I am standing in front of him. Kinda feels like fate, no? [laughs]”
With Dwyer and Cinz bringing their death metal background and Ledin coming from the hardcore side, At Fault quickly settled into a sound Ledin jokingly—but pretty accurately—calls “slamming beatdown.”
Missing Link, Pain of Truth, Sunami, XweaponX, Fear of Loss, and Incendiary are among the hardcore influences Dwyer cites, while Ledin points to bands such as Frozen Soul, Final Resting Place, and Voracious Contempt as examples of the increasingly blurry line between hardcore and death metal. “Instrumentally, death metal and hardcore just work so well together to enable the ‘unga bunga’ part of my brain,” Ledin says.
The band's first release, Basement Demo ’26, is exactly what the title suggests. At Fault recorded everything themselves in Cinz's basement, with Dwyer handling the mixing. “We weren’t trying to make some overly polished studio record,” Dwyer explains. “It’s a basement demo, and we wanted it to sound heavy, raw, and like us.”
For now, Cinz wants to switch to bass full-time, and the band is looking for a guitarist from Eastern Massachusetts to round out their group.
At Fault are also set to play at the Middle East Upstairs in Cambridge on October 22 with Hatch, Low Tide, Unhinged, and Zinc. Money from the show will go to Hope For the Day, a mental health and suicide prevention nonprofit that Ledin has helped raise almost $9,000 for through his Twitch community since 2021.
“Personally, I deal with depression every day in my own way, and At Fault/hardcore in general has been an amazing outlet for me,” Ledin says. “So this, in a sense, is a way for me to give back.”
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At Fault on social media: Instagram
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