Hot Water Music brought more than three decades of to Heaven at The Masquerade on Sunday night, opening for The Menzingers on their Everything I Ever Saw tour. The band formed in Gainesville, Florida, in October 1994 and took its name from a Charles Bukowski short story collection. They built their reputation on raw guitars, a tight, jazz-trained rhythm section, and the gravel-and-roar vocal trade-offs between their frontmen, pairing punk roots with the uncompromising weight of post-hardcore.
Today the band is a five-piece: founders Chuck Ragan (vocals/guitar), Chris Wollard (vocals/guitar), Jason Black (bass), and George Rebelo (drums), plus Chris Cresswell (vocals/guitar) of The Flatliners. Cresswell first stepped in when Wollard took a break from the band in 2017 and is now a permanent member. Their tenth album, Vows, came out in 2024 on Equal Vision Records and was produced by Brian McTernan, who also worked on some of their early-2000s classics. On Sunday, they turned a support slot into a full-throttle, high-energy set that hit like a headliner’s, and the crowd was with them from the first note forward.
