Q&A: Biohazard's Billy Graziadei on reunion of classic lineup ahead of tour opener in New Kensington

The classic lineup of the pioneering hardcore band Biohazard reunited a few years back after not performing together for more than a decade, but festival shows around the world have guitarist Billy Graziadei feeling like he did back in the band’s 1990s heyday.

“I used to be a little crazier. I used to climb on the PAs and dive into the crowd. But people got hurt, and we got sued. I still do that, but I have a little bit more foresight into, sometimes, the consequences,” Graziadei said earlier this month. “It’s still wild and fun. I found the fountain of youth. For that hour and a half, I’m 25 again, and it’s awesome.”

Biohazard hits the road on their Divided We Fall tour, which opens Oct. 3 at Preserving in New Kensington. Along for the ride are New York rappers Onyx (“Slam”) as well as New Jersey hardcore band Bayway and the masked group Swollen Teeth. The Preserving show will be the first Pittsburgh area show with the classic lineup since 1995.

The reformed group — Graziadei, bassist Evan Seinfeld, lead guitarist Bobby Hambel and drummer Danny Schuler, with Seinfeld and Graziadei both handling lead vocals — are also releasing a new album, “Divided We Fall,” on Oct. 17. The first three singles — “Forsaken,” “(Expletive) the System” and “Eyes on Six” — feel like they fit in alongside albums like 1992’s “Urban Discipline” and 1994’s “State of the World Address,” according to Graziadei.

“We’re looking forward to playing a lot of those (new) songs,” he said. “The similarities between then and now, there’s a lot of similarities. It’s no wonder why the record is resonating with a lot of people, especially the three songs that we dropped.”

In a Zoom call earlier this month from Los Angeles, Graziadei spoke with TribLive about initially being skeptical about the reunion, starting the tour here, the new album and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.

How’s life in the Biohazard camp with this tour about to start?

It’s killer, bro. We put the band back together. What I thought was just going to be a couple of shows, it turned out to be a couple of years. And if you would have told me, you’re going to be talking … about a new record that you’re as proud of as you were back in the early ‘90s, I would be like, nah, we’re not going to make it that long. So it just worked. It clicked. We had high five after high five on stage every night. It never got worse. We never lost a step, and Biohazard being the only band from our genre in that era with the original members, bro, we’re hotter than fire in the deepest volcano of Hawaii. So it’s killer. I’m on point (laughs) I sound like a walking advertisement.

But yeah, dude, it’s been a great vibe. And I was the skeptic. I didn’t think it would last past a couple of shows. I was the holdout. I was the guy that said, nah, I moved on to different things, other bands, my solo band. And then we have a great time together on stage. The things that mattered to us when we were younger are completely insignificant now. I think that’s probably the key. We grew up a little bit. We still have the fire. I think Biohazard now on stage, we have more energy on stage than most bands in their 20s these days. But we found the fountain of youth and tapped into it, and it just resonated. It’s been blowing through our veins ever since. Pretty psyched, bro.

You’ll be starting your tour here in Pittsburgh. It’s been a while since you played here.

It’s been a long time. We’re psyched to come back and have a killer show. It’s great to set the tour off there. We want to start off with a bang and set the pace being on tour with Onyx, who we never toured with. We were in Belfast, Ireland. I think it was sold out, but we get off stage just to grab a bottle of water and towel off for a second before we went on and finished the show with a couple of songs. The guys in Onyx are standing there and they’re like, yo, let’s do a song. Somebody said they were in town and we’re like, oh, if they want to jam, have them come down for soundcheck. And they never showed. So we didn’t think it was going to happen.

So unprepared, they’re like, let’s jam. So what do you want to do? We are unmistakenly raw and real unrehearsed. We went on stage and we just (expletive) winged it, and it worked. A lot of fans posted videos, and it got this rave response. I was like, wow, let’s try to put a tour together. I always wanted to tour with them. We only played with them in New York for a video we did for a song called “Slam.” So now we’re doing that tour. … We’re looking forward to Pittsburgh being the first kickoff night. Usually the first night of any tour is always the most real. It’s the most unrehearsed, unpolished, which is real. The last night of the tour, usually people play the last night in their hometown, the last night or the first night. Our last night is in Toad’s Place, New Haven, which is weird. Usually bands close in New York or they close in L.A. So keep it real. Biohazard is a working class band with working class ethics and morals and hard work, drive. So it’s great to start off in one of those great cities like Pittsburgh.

With Onyx, are there any possibilities of a collab on stage with “Slam” or “Judgment Night”?

A hundred percent, bro, a hundred percent. I think we were on tour with Sick of It All a long time ago, and I think that it was in Pittsburgh, and I got a phone call from our manager saying, hey, the guys in Onyx, who we knew, they want you to do a remix. So I flew home. We had two days off between the tour. I flew home, did a remix for “Slam.” I erased everything except for the vocals and re-played all the music. I did a sample of Danny, the Biohazard drummer’s drumbeat, and they loved it. We did a video for the song. It was a big thing, and that was the beginning of our relationship.

Then from there, we got a call to do a soundtrack for “Judgment Night.” The soundtrack is phenomenal. The movie, not so phenomenal, but it was a ground-breaking thing. It was the first mix of hip hop and metal. For us, it was natural. Those were our influences, but it was the first time the world saw a lot of collaboration between those different types of artists. It was cool to be in the beginning of that movement and be a part of it. So I’m looking forward to actually doing a tour like this. We did a tour a long time ago with House of Pain, and Korn opened up the show. It was an awesome tour.

It’s going to be filled with a lot of great, awesome, off-the-cuff things. The Onyx guys are still like 20-year-olds, same thing. When a band finds a point in your career where you resonate so well on stage together that it brings you back to your youth, it’s awesome. It’s obvious when bands get back together because it’s a “reunion,” and it’s a money grab. It’s obvious they’re going through the motions, and they’re paying their bills in their head and all these things. To do Biohazard where we don’t rely on it, it’s a great thing because I’m there because I want to be.

You have the new album coming out in October. There’s been three songs that came out so far, so have you been happy with the response to them so far?

Yeah, dude, we dropped the three singles, and it’s beyond music. It’s not just the songs. I found personally that over the years, you always want to try to outdo what you did yesterday. That’s a great fuel and inspiration to push forward in life. With Biohazard, we created something unique and new and special that gave us a better focus in life than some of the downward negative things that we were into. And it saved us.

Resonating and refocusing on that era of the band was a result of a few things. One, we were on tour for a couple of years playing a lot of those classic songs. So that live energy from that early era of the band was flowing through our veins more than the platelets and red and white blood cells. Then we sat down with our producer and Matt (Hyde) said to me, “Listen, you continue doing BillyBio, your solo band” — and I have a band called Powerflo with Sen Dog from Cypress Hill. He said, “All that stuff’s great, love it. But I don’t need you to be Billy Biohazard 2023, ‘24. I need you to be Billy Biohazard from (expletive) 1993.

Forget all the (stuff) that you learned and forget the growth and forget all the vocal things that you do.” I have a very stringent technique of warming up before a show, whether it’s stretching, vocal warmups, all these things that I do, the things that I drink, the food that I eat, things that I don’t eat. I threw it all out because back then I didn’t know those things. Back then is when we made some of the best music, Biohazard, that grabbed everybody’s attention. So I went in cold every day to sing on this record. I didn’t do vocal warmups. I just sang from my heart, and that’s it. I just completely destroyed my voice. But in the end, it was Axl Rose who said, just sing your (expletive) heart out, and you’ll figure out how to do it live later.

Singing with all those techniques that I’ve developed over the years is cool. But the most important thing is tapping into that emotion. There’s no pedal. There’s no plug-in that has passion and heart and soul. You can’t turn that on or off either. It’s either there or it’s not. So I eliminated all the extra noise in my life, especially at the time, to be Billy Biohazard from the early ‘90s. And Matt brought that out of all of us. Bobby, Danny, Evan, he really helped us see what we do best and erase a lot of the outside noise that would, especially me, I think I was the most difficult one because I’m so active musically over the years. I don’t want to rewrite the same song, but I love having the same energy from the era of “Urban Discipline,” “State of the World Address.”

With “Divided We Fall,” I think it fits right there in the middle. It’s really interesting looking back now. The times in the world were very similar in the early ‘90s when we made those records as they are now, the strife in the world, the division. It’s even more crazy now because it’s on social media every day. You can’t look on your content, your feed, whether it’s Facebook or X or Instagram, and not see all the craziness in the world. During those times of strife and trouble, the underground music scene is an escape. It’s a place to go and release all that (expletive) pent-up pressure. That release is important. When you don’t have that in your life, you feel like an outsider, you feel like an outcast, at least I did. And then suddenly, because you realize all the people around you, you just don’t jive with, you don’t mix well with. They just think different, they are into different things, the music they like, the views, they’re just different.

Then suddenly you find a group in the subculture, and you can call that the hardcore scene or the punk scene or the metal scene or the thrash scene or whatever genre, but it’s the subculture, it’s the alternative culture to the mass sheep. That is a home where you suddenly feel like you’re welcome, you feel like you’re among peers. When you find that, you’re saved. It was that subculture and underground scene that made me finally realize I wasn’t different, I wasn’t an outcast, I wasn’t an outsider, I was just in the wrong crowd. That is why I think the music scene and the underground subculture scene has grown so much over the years because the more pressure there is that builds up, the more you need to release.

You can’t release that when you feel like you’re guarded and you’re sticking out among a group of people that you don’t fit in with. But then when you feel like you’re among friends and family, you can come out of your cocoon and spread your wings and express your views and feel welcomed and feel supported, like the wind beneath your wings. That’s a common thing, I think, between those early years of Biohazard and the current situation.

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How do you filter all the stuff that’s going on in the world into the music and into the lyrics?

We’re a filter — I wouldn’t say maybe a filter — more of a magnet and the things that are going on in our lives influence our writing. We’ve always been writers where we just speak the truth, what’s in our heart, period. That influence of the outside world, it just trickles down and comes out on pen and paper and then into a song. It’s real, it’s relatable. And I think that’s why, for me, all I know is that it’s cathartic release. When I speak about things that are in my heart, I feel better, and they say it’s always good to share what’s inside. When you hold it in, it eats away at you, it causes so many issues.

It took us a long time to realize that and unintentionally we stumbled onto that release. I think being real and sharing our authenticity through our lyrics, it also resonated with a lot of people that could relate to those problems. When you’re 17 and you’re dealing with something and there’s hundreds of issues – and issues seem like they’ve gotten bigger and broader over the years – but they’re the same. Social media brings them out, and people talk about them more. Back then we used to hold it in, but when you have something going on in your life and you don’t talk about it, you feel like you’re the only person going through that situation.

But the minute you talk about it, you realize your best friend went through the same thing or is going through the same thing or somebody else you know. That helps you heal and helps deal with it and helps you confront that issue and rise above it and deal with it and move on and become stronger as a result. So those things are benefits to one, being a creative and being able to write and express yourself, but two, as a music fan, we all have certain memories that a certain record or a certain band brings up. When you feel in a certain mood, whatever that may be, you put that record on that kind of gels with that emotion and it brings you back to the same feeling you had when you fell in love with that band, whether it’s Black Sabbath, Metallica or the Bad Brains.

That’s an awesome thing. That’s why we’re all music fans because we listen to music with a little bit deeper focus, that it’s much more impactful. It’s not elevator music that’s in the background. That’s a true fan, somebody who absorbs really what the artist is expressing. So to be a fan and a creative musician, call me whatever, but I just make things out of emotion. I make something out of nothing, something that is impactful to me I turn into something that hopefully is impactful, but there’s also an entertainment thing. I don’t take it too deep. So that’s my morning coffee rant. (laughs)