Former BURY YOUR DEAD guitarist Eric Ellis has returned to music after more than a decade away, launching a new band under the name ELLIS and releasing a music video for its first song, “Manners”.
Ellis played guitar on BURY YOUR DEAD's breakout 2004 album “Cover Your Tracks”, one of the defining records of the mid-2000s metalcore and hardcore crossover, as well as on 2006's “Beauty And The Breakdown” and the band's 2008 self-titled album. He left BURY YOUR DEAD in August 2008, citing medical reasons and personality differences.
His absence from the scene after that was involuntary. In 2012, Ellis was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison after being convicted of conspiracy and violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act as a member of a violent gang in Jacksonville, Florida. He served over a decade before his release.
Since getting out, according to the band's announcement, Ellis has committed himself to rebuilding his life through music, writing and recording an entirely new body of work under his own surname. ELLIS is described as a modern blend of hardcore, metalcore and groove-driven heavy music — a lineage that runs directly out of what BURY YOUR DEAD were doing twenty years ago, but delivered with the weight of everything that happened in between.
The band's first live performance is scheduled for August 1 at Hardlove in Jacksonville, Florida, where ELLIS will open the record release show for SOUTHPAW FLHC, whose new album “The Standard” arrives July 31 through Spinefarm.
Comebacks in heavy music are common enough; this one is unusual in what it required. BURY YOUR DEAD's early catalog remains widely cited by bands working in the same space today, and “Cover Your Tracks” in particular has aged into a reference point for the era. For the guitarist who helped write it, getting back on a stage at all represents a considerably longer road than most reunions involve.