Happy Meals

In 1993, we still weren’t surrounded by the mass comercial succes of Offspring’s “Smash”, and bands like Pennywise or NOFX were here still considered as underground bands. In Barcelona, the thing was the agressive hardcore by 24 Ideas and Innocents and Childhood’s popcore. In La Seu D’urgell (LLeida) Happy Meals were born. After some time bcore published their demo “Anomy” and that was the starting point for one of the most important melodic hardcore bands in our country’s history. But that was not only because of bcore’s help, but also by the help from Outline records, that published their debut album “Toaster” in 1999, being critically aclaimed by the press. With Gerard (later on he would join Maple) as the new bass player and singer they started to tour all over Spain. With the edition of a split cd with Abraxas (01) they toured the country with Undeclinable Ambuscade and they did shows with bands like Samiam, The Get Up Kids or Social Distortion. And that’s where the first period in the band’s history ended. The period considered as “melodic hardcore”. After the split CD with Abraxas the band reinvented itself and they slowed down the musical speed. The melodic influenced was more and more present in the songs, now clearly influenced by pop. Soon the band stopped playing that same song composed by Bad Religion, the one that every melodic band once plays, and they created their own language; inspired by punk rock but far from the speed and closer to power pop. Sometimes just pop music. The band split up in 2004 after their performance in Spanish big rock festival Festimad leaving a really cool taste in everyone’s mouth.