Interview

Their sound is a grungy angst laden montage that is driven with brooding guitars, throbbing rhythms and hard beats accompanied with gritty, emotional vocals and deep thought provoking lyrics that is very reminicent to the 90's Grunge era. "We kinda honed our style around that Seattle thing when they were doing it." Explains singer/songwriter, Scooter Ward, "That was the kind of music that we played down in Jacksonville and everybody was digging the shit and it was awesome." The Jacksonville, Florida based Cold took the long road to success working their asses off for nearly 15 years before they landed their big break. They played the local Jacksonville circuit for years and worked their way to Atlanta playing small clubs and barely scraping by with gas money. The boys would ultimately go back to Jacksonville determined to make their mark on the music industry and at the same time focused on staying true to themselves and to their music. "We've always written the same kind of music. We never really did covers or anything, we never changed our style to fit what was going on in the music industry." Ward states, "We've always written the same kind of music and it's definitely elevated through the years because we've grown and my vocals changed and stuff like that, but we've always had the same basic style." Cold, who also includes guitarists Kelley Hayes and Terry Balsamo, bassist Jeremy Marshall and drummer Sam McCandless, landed a deal with Flip/ A&M Records in 1998 with some help from Jacksonville native, Fred Durst. Durst was a big fan of the local band back when they called themselves 'Grundig' and wanted to do a cover of their song 'I Was Drunk Then.' "They were gonna put it on the record. So, Fred called me up and we staretd talking. He wanted to know what I was writing and I went over his house and played a couple of songs for him and he freaked out and called Ross Robinson (Korn, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot). Ross heard it the next day and gave us a record deal." Remembers Ward, "When we got signed we all said, 'damn, man, all this time and all it took was 2 acoustic songs.' It's crazy."

Their self-entitled debut album dropped in 1998 to critical aclaim and put them on the map as a hot future prospect. Songs such as "Ugly," "Everyone Dies" and "Make Her Sick" help to label the band as self loathing, agony striken Florida grunge. "We've established ourselves and we've done what we're supposed to do. Our kind of metal is kinda different from everybody elses, so we made our own little niche in there." Explians Ward, "Perfect Circle and the Deftones definitely helped us out because before that it was Kid Rock and stuff. Then, all of a sudden Perfect Circle comes out and changes everything and the kids realize that there's other music beside rap/rock." Cold's latest effort "13 Ways To Bleed On Stage" has become a huge success. With the success of their single, "No One" and the highly anticpitaed "Bleed" the band is expected to blow up and become huge. "I don't think we'll ever be on TRL or anything like that because of the way that we are and we don't really wanna be on that." Says Ward, "I admire bands like Slipknot that don't need MTV, if they put us on there then good. I'm not really gonna worry about it, I just wanna keep playing music and have a good life."