Silverstein Biography

Neil Boshart - guitar | Bill Hamilton - bass | Shane Told - vocals | Paul Koehler - drums | Josh Bradford - guitar

With the release of A Shipwreck in the Sand, their fourth and finest album yet, SILVERSTEIN honours their near decade long, magnanimous rule as an empire with 750,000 albums sold and over 1200 shows played. All the while, the benevolent conquerors have shown nothing short of loyalty to their audience and honest devotion to their cause. An unrelenting tour schedule and a sense of artistic accountability suffice to explain how an obscure band with a relevant sound could foster their earliest fanfare into a laudable career: the decade-long allegiance of an audience and the ability to still smack relevant and intelligible with tender aged, new recruits. A Shipwreck in the Sand, for all of its creative maturation, possesses a thematic and aesthetic familiarity that rightly crowns their story.

In 2000, the band formed their union, not in hopes of grandeur but wrought of their youthful love of music and a vision to meld disparate emo, hardcore and metal influences, ranging from the Get Up Kids to Grade, Penfold to Poison the Well. Inside of two years, SILVERSTEIN self-released their first two, somewhat jejune EPs, Summer's Stellar Gaze and When Shadows Beam, attracting a great deal of local attention and testing their road legs in eastern Canada in the process.

In 2002, SILVERSTEIN signed with Victory Records and released their debut album, When Broken Is Easily Fixed, securing their notoriety as the new distinct sound of the post-hardcore or screamo genre. The album set the pace as raw and intense yet melancholic with therapeutically acrimonious lyrics on heartache and betrayal. Such elements would become the legacy of SILVERSTEIN and whatever the genre, it was apparent they were an inspired group, making something original and relevant from the alternative music soundscapes of their youth. The album exceeded 200,000 sales, the enterprise was promising and with a cause worthy of dedication, the band wholeheartedly submitted themselves for the countless thousands of miles of highway ahead.

Their sophomore release, Discovering the Waterfront in 2005, exceeded their first album in both craftsmanship and commercial success, boosting worldwide sales beyond a half-million. Discovering displayed artistic growth as a harder, decidedly more metal album but with seamlessly more pop-sensibility. Audiences were provoked into hysteria and SILVERSTEIN met their every demand. Ever eager to keep their loyalists happy, SILVERSTEIN partook in extensive major tours: the Never Sleep Again tour with Aiden, Hawthorne Heights and Bayside, Europe with Simple Plan, Taste of Chaos, Warped Tour, Japan and Australia and finally the headlining Never Shave Again tour of the United States.

After chartering nearly the entire globe, SILVERSTEIN rerouted their explorative journey through the channels of their own lives for 2007's release, Arrivals and Departures, an album which maps the hardships of a band whose elastic lives are taut strenuously from tour to tour. Even then, tapped into in the depravities of a touring-musician's lifestyle, the band displayed only accountability and gratitude towards their fanbase, producing a lyrically relatable album about hope through perseverance replete with SILVERSTEIN's infamously infectious melodies and dynamism. Never weary, the band continued its inexhaustible campaign of performances on a summer-long tour with Rise Against, followed by a US tour with From Autumn to Ashes, more time spent in Europe, Australia, Japan and a sold out cross-Canada headlining tour with Protest the Hero. SILVERSTEIN's successes detail a history of artistic ingenuity enough to win hearts anew each album and the devotion and fortitude to maintain faithful relationships with their audience.

Present day, A Shipwreck in the Sand reflects such a history. The album is marked by further musical evolution in showcasing their most refined sound yet. The songs are faster, harder, heavier and more infectious and, yet, still familiar. The lyrics are more mature, rhetoric riddled and relevant than ever in their execution of a concept record which tells of a family whose house and dreams are consumed by a great fire. The ensuing lessons in pain, betrayal and despair along with an internal narrative of a voyaging ship's mutiny, resonate with the current North American, socio-political climate. Reaching new plateaus and maintaining continuity, the album reflects the band's devotion to the dreams they have obtained along their own vestal voyage. Life can too easily seem like a shipwreck, but with SILVERSTEIN, music is a beacon of hope that does indeed promise greater things on the horizon and their union has always been about love.