No one could ever put the finger on the Hybernoid sound; this is because it was pretty unique in mixing a Cocteau Twins style guitar with a scathing and aggressive distorted guitar melody. Guttural vocals pigeonholed the band into the extreme music scene, but this added to the unique elements of the sound and stirred up interest from 4 or 5 different record labels. Reviewers were always trying to pin a sound on Hybernoid; none really reflected what it was all about. Drawing elements from early hardcore punk (Amebix – No Sanctuary era), extreme metal ( Carcass and Bolt Thrower), indie (Chameleons, Cocteau Twins) gave the band a diverse grounding for their onslaught on the ‘underground’ music scene. Hybernoid was never really a ‘household’ name in the UK, the band played a sell out gig supporting Paradise Lost at Bradford Rios and that was their 15 minutes of UK fame (humorously signing autographs and pretending to be proper pop stars), they did a tour in Holland, interviews with all the big European music magazines, had a license deal in Poland with Sick Records, had another license deal in Germany with Massacre Records, were on Lithuanian television, did a live interview on evening Romanian radio, were played on a daytime chart show on Dutch radio, plus more. The crowning glory of the Hybernoid career was the debut album ‘The Last Day Begins’, this certainly created a massive impact on the international underground music scene at the time, this album was licenced all over the world and sold many thousand units.
The demise of the band was spread over a couple of years; practicing in a farm barn (full of chicken shit) was really no fun in winter (when you cant feel your fingers) and keeping everyone motivated was a problem. The royalties from the albums went back into new equipment so we were never going to be rich and there were not many groupies either (well ok none then). We set off with our goal to release a 7”, 3 singles and three albums we had gone way beyond all our expectations. The last album Advanced Technology was a stab into the world of hard dance music but blending in previous Hybernoid trace elements, (this time using a full dance music studio with sequencing and sampling - thanks to Andy Slater) this outing was quite commercial in content and could of pushed the band into a different direction with most people saying that it should bring us much sucess. However the 15 minutes of fame was over and very poor record label performance resulted in the band calling it a day. (Plus we were by this time too old to be pop stars, lost our good looks and Bennett had starting going bald!) You cant be a pop star and have a bald swede.......
If anyone is daft enough to want to listen to Hybernoid, (it might be worth a laugh) we have 3 mpeg (part track) sound files (at about 1.5 meg file size each). As for albums, we don’t have any left and I don’t know where you could get them from now,
Source: http://www.geocities.com/cococonnection/hybernoid.html
