The Hara: Moshpits, Gorillas and Nuggets Of Glory
“The gorilla turned away because he was scared of Jack.” All Jack Kennedy had to do to earn his place in what would later become THE HARA was jump into a gorilla enclosure and survive. Vocalist Josh Taylor was the zoo’s janitor at the time and tried to stop Jack from taking such a risk, because he’d have to “clean up afterwards”. But when it became clear that Jack was a gorilla repellent, Josh asked if he played an instrument, and upon hearing the magic words, “I play the drums,” Jack was in the band.
“Cut to a few months down the line, and Jack‘s now working at the zoo with me because we can’t earn enough money as musicians, and we still really need a guitarist,” Josh continues. “One weekend this guy came in with like 14 kids (his cousins) and said, ‘Yo, let’s go to the aquarium’.” Zack Breen laughs, “It was quite a while ago, I don’t really remember…” before Josh says, “kids almost drowned and…” Zack finishes, “things got real dicey, real quick.”
“I thought, this guy’s a risk-taker. And he was in the band,” Josh concludes their origin story. “It’s the characteristics you don’t think about when finding bandmates,” Josh explains, before running off to get his laptop charger as the threat of a low battery kicks him into gear; Josh is a risk-taker too. Risk-taking and some metal as fuck, borderline-idiotic behaviour are what brought THE HARA together, and what continue to characterise the alt rock turned alt metal threesome.
Their new album, The Fallout, marks a darker, heavier, more authentic version of everything Josh, Jack, and Zack want THE HARA to be. “We’ve always wanted to do heavier and heavier,” Jack says. “I remember the first time we got mosh pits, walls of death, and circle pits, and us all being like, ‘holy shit, did you see the crowd?’ The Fallout has everything to do with that. We’ve written it for live and, more importantly, for ourselves. We love the music that’s on it.”
A moshpit, or more specifically, crying in a moshpit, is the best way to experience THE HARA’s music, according to Zack. Jack lovingly coins this a “croshpit”. “Bath. No clothes,” is Josh’s suggestion. At first, Jack thinks the gym is the best place to listen to THE HARA, before elaborating, “a mosh pit in the bath at the gym”. “The angles that covers,” Zack remarks, “that’s the whole emotional spectrum.”
Suggesting that anyone listening to THE HARA should be destroying baths at the gym is very on brand for the trio, who love to break things themselves. “I just want to say it was an accident. But at our last show in Stockport, there was a pipe on the ceiling, and I dangled off it,” Josh explains. “And the roof pretty much came off. I think they tried to charge for it, but then we were like, hold on a minute, Jack can plaster. So how about we don’t pay for it, but Jack will come and plaster it.”
“Fuck me right,” Jack says sheepishly. “Yeah, fuck Jack,” Josh agrees. “They never got back, though, and it would’ve been a great TikTok video.” The pros of not actually having to pay for or fix the ceiling may or may not outweigh the cons of losing a great TikTok opportunity. THE HARA have been creating deliciously entertaining carnage on social media for a few years now, as they appreciated from the get-go the potential of using it to promote not just their music, but themselves.
“Social media allows you to open up and gives you that option to show that side of you,” Zack says. “You need to just be yourselves, have a bit of fun, and not take yourselves too seriously.” Jack adds, “It’s always sick when a video goes viral, and the top comment is ‘holy shit, the music’s actually fucking sick’. And it’s like, yeah mate, that’s what we mainly do. So it’s good that we’re good at what our job is.”
Walking hand in hand with THE HARA’s goofiness is the rip their clothes off and bare their souls approach they have to songwriting. “We’re very good at being depressed, but we’re very good at happy as well,” Josh says. “Some of the lyrics in The Fallout are quite on the nose, like ‘easier to die than it is to want to wanna live’. Sometimes there are those moments of extreme thoughts and feelings that I think are normal, and with the type of music we play and the heaviness of it, saying it as it is sometimes hits even harder than trying to be dead smart with metaphors.”
No matter how much life grinds them down, THE HARA have sprouted some “nuggets of glory” to keep them powered up. “[very dramatic hand gesture at his surroundings] If this isn’t it, what is?” Josh says. “Trust yourself and do what the fuck you want to do,” Jack says. “The power of no is massive,” Zack finishes. “You have to experience both losing an opportunity and being bummed about it, but then fast forward X amount of months and you’re like, wow, thank Christ that never happened because we might be somewhere totally different. I think that’s a big lesson that we’ve learned recently with Mascot Records, bringing in more people who we trust and admire.”
Sometimes people will suck, though, and deserve to be disarmed by a classic THE HARA insult. “We were out in Shoreditch, and this guy barged into me, squared up to me, and he had a scarf on,” Josh remembers. “I was like, hold up, Scarf Vader. I called him Scarf Vader.”
The Fallout is out now via Mascot Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS127 here:
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