Hydra Head Records’ Chaotic, Influential History Gets Book Treatment

Hydra Head Records may have been built on handshakes, artistic freedom and a healthy disregard for conventional genre boundaries, but keeping the thing running was considerably messier. Now, more than a decade after the influential independent label announced it was winding down, its sprawling history is getting the deep-dive treatment with Deconstructing Towers: The Story of Hydra Head Records, an upcoming book from Decibel Books.

Due in December, the 500-plus-page volume was written by music journalist and Great Falls bassist Shane Mehling and draws on interviews with Hydra Head artists, former bandmates and ex-employees. It also includes a 32-page color section, rare and previously unpublished photographs and new cover art by Hydra Head founder Aaron Turner.

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Turner launched Hydra Head in 1993, initially as a distribution company, while he was still in high school. After moving to Boston in 1995, he grew the operation around the city’s metal and hardcore community, eventually turning it into a full-time label after graduating from college in 1999. Its roster would come to encompass an unusually wide swath of heavy and experimental music, including Isis, Cave In, Botch, Converge, Neurosis, Pelican, Jesu, Torche, Boris, Sunn O))) and Merzbow, among many others.

In 2012, Turner and co-owner Mark Thompson said they were shutting the label down amid industry changes and what Turner called a “self-induced whirlwind of chaos.” At the time, the label planned to maintain its catalog while attempting to pay off what Turner described as “rather sizable debts.” It released only a handful of projects in the years since before officially closing in 2020.

Deconstructing Towers promises to get considerably deeper into the tension between Hydra Head’s ideals and the practical realities of running an independent label. An exclusive excerpt published by Decibel centers on Cave In and the period surrounding the band’s breakthrough Jupiter, when major labels began circling. The book recounts how Hydra Head suddenly found itself dealing with an artist whose ambitions had outgrown the label’s ability to service them.

“Jupiter was a landmark record,” former New England Product host Chris Rucker recalls in the excerpt, describing Cave In as the outlier among Hydra Head’s roster and predicting the band was going to “rise to the top with a bullet.” Major label attention indeed followed, eventually leading Cave In to sign with RCA in 2001, with Hydra Head retaining certain vinyl and other release rights.

The episode also illustrates the peculiar hazards of an underground band suddenly becoming music business bait. Cave In guitarist Adam McGrath recalls being approached by a parade of managers, lawyers and other industry figures, some legitimate and others less so. “We didn’t realize how weird the music industry is with all these different characters who — some of them are actually who they say they are — and some of them are just snake oil salesmen,” he says.

For Turner, Cave In represented both a potential escape velocity for the band and a possible lifeline for Hydra Head itself. He envisioned the group becoming the kind of breakout success that could help stabilize the label, citing Sub Pop’s relationship with Nirvana as a model. But he also acknowledges the limits of what Hydra Head could provide — and its own organizational shortcomings. “We were always scrambling to fucking figure out how to pay for the records that were in press,” Turner says in the excerpt, adding that the label was “also mismanaging it in quite a number of ways.”

“I like to think that the heart was always in the right place—and that what came out of the label left a lasting and positive impression within the underground realm it occupied,” he continues, crediting Mehling with “diving headlong into the detritus left in the wake of Hydra Head’s existence” and calling the label a “sprawling, ungovernable, ferocious and (hopefully) endearing beast.”

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