Who are you and how did you come together?

Hacktivist are a 5 piece band consisting of Timfy James, J Hurley, Ben Marvin, Josh Gurner and me (Rich Hawking). We came together after Tim J and Ben had got together and jammed over some riffs that Tim had been playing around with since he had departed from his previous band. J's grime style delivery of the vocals over the tech-metal style grooves really gelled and added a whole new dynamic to the music and so the guys carried on coming up with ideas until Hacktivist branched out from a simple side project type thing into a complete band setting with Josh and me joining the ranks in late 2011.

Where are you from?

In and around Milton Keynes

How would you describe your music style?

I would say it's a mixture of tech-metal and grime/uk hip hop

What’s been your best live experience?

Personally, I would have to say playing the main stage at Rock Am Ring this summer just gone and also playing two shows over in Russia. They were completely different settings but they were both massively important to me as I'd never had the chance to play shows on that scale before or in such far away places. They're definitely some of the highlights of my entire drumming career.

Tell us about your current mini-album:

Its a re-release of our EP that we put out last November. We only did a limited run of the physical copies and so we wanted to re-release it so that we could have more copies for people to actually own. The cool thing is that this time we're actually doing a limited pressing of vinyl copies of the EP too. We also added more tracks to this issue, it now has our track "Elevate" on it as well as a couple of re-mixes and a live version of "Blades" from a show we played on our last tour with Enter Shikari.

What Do you enjoy most about touring?

For me, as well as having the chance to just go out and smash the drums on stage every night, I'd have to say that I most enjoy the chance to broaden my horizons. Being able to go to new places, including lots of different parts of the UK, is really interesting and it's great fun meeting new people all the time and being able to go and party and have a laugh somewhere new.

What can people expect from your forthcoming Cardiff gig?

Lots of energy! We love performing for our fans and getting them involved in the show. We definitely feed off the crowd at our shows, the more into it they are, the more we get into it too. Although, recently Josh hurt his back stage-diving so he might be a little more subdued this time...who knows once the adrenaline's kicked in though!

Where can people hear your music?

Our website www.hacktivist.uk.com has all of our music on there for people to buy and also some free downloadable content. Other than that we have most of our tracks up on our youtube page which is under the username "HacktivistUK" and we also have some of our tracks up on our facebook page (www.facebook.com/hacktivistband).

Once our EP is all released again we're going to be sorting out getting it back onto iTunes and Spotify etc