Hunting Lions are a rock & roll band that’s a product of the legendary Bay Area punk scene. Featuring vocalist Ben Coleman and guitarist Jeremy Catrambone from Roadside Bombs, former Swingin’ Utters drummer Greg McEntee, bassist Chris Nascimento, and guitarist Jesse White, this isn’t your typical supergroup. This is more of a collective consisting of seasoned musical veterans getting together to make something fresh and new. It’s evident with their debut EP, Dark, recently released via Pirates Press Records. A counteracting Light EP is planned for release later this year, and the band is also gearing up to do some touring and playing at a few festivals within the coming months.
The catalyst for this new project was conceived by Coleman right before the height of the pandemic back in 2020. Roadside Bombs was taking a bit of a hiatus and upon returning home from a music festival overseas, he got inspired by all the great bands he saw perform and thus began the vision for what eventually became Hunting Lions.
“I had just gotten back from the Rebellion Festival [in the United Kingdom] and I was sitting in the airport,” he says about how the band started. “My flight got delayed, so I was there for like 12 hours and while I was sitting there my brain was getting a bit fried. I started going over all the bands I had watched at Rebellion, the ones I loved so much like Cock Sparrer, Evil Conduct, and a bunch of others. I thought about what it was about those bands that I really loved, and I came to the conclusion that I wanted to write a more rock & roll-based set of songs, kind of more back to basics sort of stuff. I’m sitting there getting a bit delusional and I started thinking about who I would want in the band and how to keep something like that going.”
“I came up with the idea of ‘Hunting Lions Cooperative,’” he adds. “Basically, it would be me taking the guys that I knew who wanted to be able to play & write while not being in a full-time band. I knew Jeremy was available and I reached out to a few people that I knew who were career musician types that were available at the time. I then called Greg up, I called Jesse, and I reached out to the people that I knew who were of a similar mindset as far as the type of music I wanted to be playing. The sort of music that when you go see it live you just kind of lose it, sing along and just enjoy yourself in a time when things weren’t that enjoyable.”
All the songs for both the new and the upcoming EP were done during one recording session. After the session was done, Coleman and the other band members figured that they’d just put it all on Spotify and move on to something else, but a friend had a different idea.
“We hadn’t thought about whether or not we were going to shop the record out to anybody,” he mentions about the making of the EPs. “We had gotten together with Jay [Shepard] from Harrington Saints and a couple of other guys to start writing this music in the cooperative like I was talking about. We eventually came up with a solid 12 songs and we decided to record them. We had no idea what we would do with them but we wanted to put them out there so we could start performing them live and everything. Once we got down there and recorded them all, it went really well and we were all really happy with the product.”
“I then figured that we’d stick it all up on Spotify and then move on to something else to get some other projects done from a new musical perspective,” Coleman adds. “Anyway, I just happened to shoot one off to Eric ‘Skippy’ Mueller at Pirates Press Records because he and I are good friends and we have similar tastes in music. I said, ‘Hey man, I’m going to be putting this up. What do you think of this?’ I just told him my plans for it and about 12 hours went by, then he called me up and asked me ‘Are you really going to put this just straight up onto Spotify?’ I said that it was the plan and he told me that these are the best songs I’ve ever written.”
Mueller talked to Coleman about a plan he had for the recordings, and he signed the band to a record deal right then and there.
Some songs are about things going to hell while others are a celebration of life, which is why the music is being released as two EPs rather than a full-length record.
“He said that I needed to make packaging that fits the music, and I should take it a little more seriously,” Coleman explains the chat he and Mueller had. “We had just spent a bunch of time during COVID writing these songs, so we really wanted to get beyond the whole writing & playing for ourselves, put something out there and get back to making new music. He basically made an offer on the spot, he said that it’s coming out on Pirates Press and we both brainstormed on the phone while he was driving to and from somewhere. We eventually came up with the entire concept, some of the songs are kind of about life-affirming stuff that came out of the pandemic and others are kind of dark in the same way. They don’t directly correlate on both EPs in that way, but you can feel that in the different songs.”
On March 3, Hunting Lions released a music video for “KOTA,” also known as “King of the Avenue,” off of the Dark EP. The music video has a bunch of muscle cars and hot rods being driven around, which are all from a car club Coleman is involved in that was founded by a hardcore punk icon.
“I’m in a car club called Rumblers Car Club,” he says about the cars that were used for the music video. “It’s basically one of the original car clubs that was based from a hardcore, rock & roll and punk rock perspective in terms of membership. It was started by Roger Miret of Agnostic Front in New York City, and it’s spread over the world via his liaison and mentoring or whatever. All the cars in the music video are ones owned by members of Rumblers Car Club, the one that I’m driving is a ’61 Buick, which is my car, and the rest of them are an assortment of club cars. At about halfway through you can see Roger in his ’54 Chevy, which is a radical custom that one of the other guys in the club built for him.”
Looking towards the future, Coleman and the rest of the band are going to be concentrating on their live performance after taking a few weeks off. People can expect them to be all over the Western United States in various settings while bringing their new brand of music to punk rock fans.
“In the very short term, we’re taking April off because Chris had a baby who also happens to be my grandson so we’re taking some time off for that,” Coleman says about the coming months. “We’re going to be starting back up with Punk Rock Bowling in Las Vegas, we’ve been talking about doing a short tour around the Southwest in June & July and then we’ll be at Crash Fest in Portland at the end of the year. We’re also going to be gigging regionally in the meantime.”
Photo courtesy of Alan Snodgrass.
