Kris Huber was born on June 12, 1989 in Wilkes-Barre, PA. He developed an interest in music at a young age with the help of family encouragement. He took on the drums at around ten years old and studied under different instructors for approximately two years.
“Once I started grasping the concepts of counting out time signatures and, you know, the basic structure of grooves and beats, I decided to teach myself by listening to artists that I enjoyed and trying to analyze what the drummers were doing.”
Some of the artists he enjoyed in these beginning stages included Black Sabbath, Metallica, Rush, Dream Theater and Fear Factory. He recalled the first song he learned being “Waffle” by Sevendust. Drumming came naturally to Kris and in his early years when he saw other kids just playing instruments for the sake of playing, he already knew that he wanted to play professionally.
“I wanted to make music more of a career as opposed to a hobby.” Kris said. “Like, I always had a genuine interest in music and I always wanted to pursue that in the years to come.”
While he was in school, he started a cover band called Ytsejam. Kris considered this to be his job in his early teen years and while his school friends were working at pizza shops and flipping burgers, he was playing weekend gigs at bars at the tender age of fourteen.
When Ytsejam reached the end of its lifespan, Kris realized the appeal of original music when he became the vocalist for local death metal band Pillage.
“… The appeal of original material interested me more than going out and playing someone else’s stuff,” said Kris. “That’s when I started bouncing around from project to project, trying to find something that would ultimately be something that I would want to pursue professionally. Which, to me, the first one was really Futile Effort which was my solo project.”
After the fall of Pillage and when Futile Effort was beginning to surface, Kris was having a difficult time finding other like-minded musicians that were interested in the kind of material that he wanted to write. When he developed this solo project, he pushed himself to learn guitar, bass, and some piano to round out his capabilities without other members. When he fleshed out the material and found interested musicians, Futile Effort soon reached its demise as well.
“Eventually, I got some musicians together to play some of the material and write some more stuff. And it was going OK but the drive to want to succeed wasn’t necessarily there with some of the other members,” Kris said. “And then I had gotten an offer to play drums for Ethereal Collapse.”
At first, Kris was involved with Ethereal Collapse only to fill in for their drummer. When he was given the offer to play full-time, he scrapped Futile Effort. Ethereal Collapse went on to play shows with big metal names including Mastodon, Goatwhore, Whitechapel and Alestorm, amongst others. Kris saw success with Ethereal Collapse as the band received raving reviews and signed a contract to have downloadable music featured on popular videogame Rock Band®.
In 2012 Ethereal Collapse released a new album entitled, “The Precipice of Failure.” Not only recording drum tracks, backing vocals and clean vocals, Kris also contributed four songs to the final cut of the album. With a fast, thrash song, progressive tracks, and even a ballad, Kris found creative freedom with Ethereal. However, when offers for tours and possible record contracts were coming the band’s way, soon came forth the pressure on other members.
“Ultimately a common ground couldn’t be found to make that next level of commitment so I left [Ethereal Collapse] to pursue something more serious,” Kris said. “So here I am.”
With a deeper understanding of what he wants to do as a musician, Kris continues to push toward his goals with hopes of finding the right situation.
“I’d like to tour, write albums and even do drum clinics,” Kris said. “I just want to be able to perform for people. That’s all I ever really wanted to do.”
And that’s exactly what he’s been doing! Since 2015, Kris has been professionally drumming (and now even playing guitar) all over the eastern US with various agency bands full time while pursuing Live Audio Engineering which he studied in college. He’s also been taking on students both in-person and remotely in hopes to inspire and inform the next generation of musicians 🎵