Cave In are...

• Stephen Brodsky - vocals, guitar
• Adam McGrath - guitar
• Caleb Scofield - bass
• John-Robert Conners - drums

Cave In are not your average major label rock band. You won't find rappers spouting off about 'bitches' and 'hos' in their music. You won't find cheesy holler-a-long hooks and pogo- friendly song structures. Their mission is one of musical progression, with spiralling guitar flourishes, avant garde atmospherics and soaring vocal melodies welded to a water-tight post-hardcore base. And having now signed up to RCA, they've finally found a suitably prominent soapbox from which to spread their word.

But it wasn't so much a musical progression as a complete, unrelenting u-turn that created the Cave In we hear today. Having formed in 1995 when they were all 15 years old and living in the small town of Methuen near Boston, they originally set out to make the noisiest, ugliest brand of hardcore metal they could, in order to fit into the local scene alongside such underground luminaries as Piebald and Converge. Two razor-gargling, ultra-angry lead vocalists came and went as they released their first few EPs, now available on the Beyond Hypothermia compilation, leaving guitarist Stephen Brodsky to take on the role of singer for the making of their first album proper - Until Your Heart Stops. And then came the sudden realisation that no-one in the band wanted to sound like a lorryload of car parts crashing into a fireworks factory anymore. Brodsky was in physical pain through screaming his lungs out night after night, and the band felt that there were much more emotions they could reproduce in music than just anger and indignance.

Cave In are one of those rare beasts - a band whose motivations come from their deep love of music, not through any desire to hang out at MTV parties and fly around in private jets. A band who are desperate for more and more people to hear them, but only because they think - no, they know - their songs are in a different league to the sickly sweet teen-pop and immaculately styled fake metal bands they hear on the radio.