Forced Entry (band)

Forced Entry were an American thrash metal band from Seattle, Washington. They started out in 1983 as a cover band called Critical Condition, playing songs by Kiss, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and AC/DC. The group changed their name to Forced Entry in 1986. Over the next few years, they released three demos—All Fucked Up, Thrashing Helpless Down, and Hate Fills Your Eyes—with the second demo winning them a 1987 Northwest Music Award for Best Metal Band.

Their first album, Uncertain Future, came out in June 1989 on Combat Records, a subsidiary of Relativity. The band had turned down offers from major labels like CBS and MCA to sign there. The album got some good reviews, including from Guitar World, and Forced Entry toured twice to support it: opening for Coroner on the No More Color tour (alongside Atrophy) and supporting Sacred Reich on The American Way tour (alongside Obituary). Their second and final album, As Above, So Below, was recorded in late 1990 and released in June 1991.

It didn’t match the underground success or critical reception of the first album, but it did get some positive notices. Music videos for “Macrocosm, Microcosm” and “Never a Know, But the No” got heavy play on MTV’s Headbangers Ball; the latter video featured cameos from members of Alice in Chains. Relativity soon dropped the band, so they never toured for that album.

Forced Entry kept playing shows and tried to find a new label, but couldn’t. In 1995, they put out a four-song EP called The Shore and played a final Seattle show in August. They reunited once for a one-off performance at the Abrasive Rock Festival in 2002, and were scheduled to play the Seattle Metal Fest in August 2003 but pulled out for personal reasons, splitting up again afterward.

Guitarist Brad Hull stayed active in music, playing in local bands like L.S. Diablo, Sac Lunch, and Thug. He also formed L.S. Diablo in 2009 with his son Riley and Aaron Goff on guitars and Paul Marshall on drums, playing bass and vocals on a self-produced six-song album. Vocalist/bassist Tony Benjamins and drummer Colin Mattson jammed in a local band called DUMT but later retired from music. In 1993, Hull and Benjamins appeared in an episode of “The Lame List,” a recurring segment on the Seattle comedy show Almost Live!