Soundbites: Five Seconds Expired Reissue Early Catalog

I’d never seen a musician get kicked out of a club during their own set until one cold winter night in Winooski in 2003.

Back in those halcyon days, Higher Ground was still located in the Onion City, next to a Little Caesars that probably gave me food poisoning at least three times. (Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice … Hey, I was a broke college student. At that point in my life, I’d have eaten pepperoni I found on the ground.)

The band My Revenge was opening a local hardcore showcase that my friend and bandmate Ian MacDowell had invited me to as an introduction to Burlington’s punk and metal scene. After ignoring the club’s directive not to stage dive into the mosh pit, My Revenge’s vocalist found himself being escorted out.

“That’s so fucking punk rock,” MacDowell said, with a nod of approval toward the offending punk.

MacDowell, who had been in the hardcore band Tired of Trying before forming Lobot with me and a few other friends from film school, was in his element at the show. He promised I’d love the next act, Five Seconds Expired.

“At this point, they’ll have to start a brawl onstage to top that,” I said.

Fortunately, the band did nothing of the sort and instead delivered a blistering set of high-octane riffs and hardcore-inflected metal grooves, with vocalist Jeff Howlett‘s powerful screams rising above the huge sound. The pit of tattooed and pierced moshers churned before the band as it launched into a mercilessly heavy set.

Then a newcomer to the Vermont scene, I was surprised to learn that many of the attendees my age had grown up listening to the band. Five Seconds Expired were previously known as Slush and had been touring the Northeast and releasing albums since they formed in Burlington in 1993.

One of the final holdouts from a potent Queen City metal scene that thrived in the ’90s, the band wouldn’t last much longer, calling it quits only a year later.

But check that expiration date again: The band quietly dropped a “new” album on streaming sites last week. The Slush Years is a compilation of the band’s eponymous debut and the follow-up EP, Step Inside, all remastered by drummer and founding member Gary Williams. That release — along with a June 21 reunion show at Higher Ground (in South Burlington these days) — marks a 30ish-year celebration of one of Vermont’s most formative heavy bands.

Because much of the band’s music isn’t available digitally, “the original idea was just to remaster the two recordings,” Howlett, 55, explained in a video call from his home in Rock Hill, S.C. The rest of the band’s early-era lineup — guitarists Todd Dunn and Josh Cooper, bassists Shaun Varney and Tom Dunn, and drummer Williams — still resides in Vermont.

“It just snowballed after Gary started remastering everything,” Howlett added. “The songs sounded pretty good, so we realized we should do something live. It just felt right.”

But the band’s first rehearsal in decades didn’t go great. These days, Howlett is a photographer and filmmaker — he codirected the 2012 documentary A Band Called Death, about Detroit proto-punk band Death. He hadn’t played a show in years and decided to “just wing it,” throwing himself back into being a vocalist in a very, very loud band.

“That was a very bad idea,” Howlett admitted with a laugh. “I realized as soon as I tried that I would need some serious practice to do this right.”

Howlett spent a few months getting his voice into shape before heading back north to meet up with his bandmates at the Box, the Burlington recording studio of Rough Francis drummer Urian Hackney. Everything fell into place quickly: The band nailed the live set in one take.

“All the other guys are actual pros. They still play every day,” Howlett said. “I was definitely the shittiest musician in the whole crew! But that day at the Box was incredible — we sounded so tight.”

The live set from the Box will be part of the special-edition double album of The Slush Years, available at the June show. And don’t sleep on getting tickets if you want to catch Five Seconds Expired live. Howlett warned that this is not the start of a bigger reunion.

“We might do one more thing after the Higher Ground show — we’re still figuring that out,” he said. “But then, that’s it for Five Seconds.”

I’m looking forward to the show for a variety of reasons — chief among them, to see if anyone in a room full of aging punks and metalheads still has the juice to get kicked out. Nothing would make me happier than seeing a fiftysomething dude get dragged out by his Chuck Taylors. (Gently, though. Don’t slip a disc, old-timers.)

In the meantime, pop over to fivesecondsexpired.bandcamp.com to check out The Slush Years and pretend it’s the ’90s, when you could still survive a mosh pit.

This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2025.

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