One-liner
~22 wordsModern vintage rock band from north of Seattle hitting styles across the spectrum from punk/grunge to garage rock, revival, and pop/dance rock.
Electronic press kit
Modern vintage rock band from north of Seattle hitting styles across the spectrum from punk/grunge to garage rock, revival, and pop/dance rock.
Modern vintage rock band from north of Seattle hitting styles across the spectrum from punk/grunge to garage rock, revival, and pop/dance rock.
HiFi Riff Raff is a hard-gigging rock band from Lake Stevens, WA, just north of Seattle, anchored by veteran lead guitarist Matt Haller, whose résumé includes stage time with members of Bad Company, Heart, and other seasoned pros. After years of rocking out as the cover band Euphoria, the group rebranded in 2025 to mark a turn toward original material — songs that carry their blue-collar roots with equal parts attitude, energy, self-aware reflection, and wit. Alongside Haller (lead guitar, vocals), the steady lineup is Bill Zeilinski (vocals), Jeff "Peor" Hill (guitar, keys, vocals), Aaron Kimball (bass), and Dave Maragno (drums). Their debut EP, The Cool Kids (August 2026), draws comparisons to The Black Keys, The Rolling Stones, and Bad Company.
HiFi Riff Raff are exactly what the name promises: working guys from Lake Stevens, Washington — day jobs, families, decades of combined stage time — playing rock and roll like people with nothing to prove and something to say.
The band grew up around lead guitarist Matt Haller, a working musician and twenty-year multi-discipline music teacher whose friendships run decades deep in the Seattle scene; along the way he has shared stages with members of Bad Company, Heart, and other veterans of the Northwest circuit. Bassist Aaron Kimball and singer Bill Zeilinski have been playing alongside Haller for five years, and drummer Dave Maragno goes back further still, to their earlier band together, 8's & Aces. For years the lineup packed local dance floors as Euphoria, a covers act known for playing songs both faithfully and boldly reimagined.
The turn toward original songs came in 2023, when current guitarist and keyboardist Jeff "Peor" Hill joined. A producer with a music production degree from Berklee College of Music, Hill has been making records across genres since 2011, working with Grammy-winning and platinum-selling producers, musicians, and songwriters including Zach Cooper, Ian Kimmel, and Maxx Moor. He began recording the band's performances — and hearing themselves made the possibility of forming their own artistic visions into a reality. In 2025 they became HiFi Riff Raff: a name with an old-school ring and a tongue-in-cheek jab at themselves, from a crew decidedly not auditioning for teen idol.
Their debut EP, The Cool Kids (August 2026), doubles down on the joke. The cover, hand-painted by bassist Kimball, shows the high-school kids nobody voted most likely to succeed — one sporting a wedgie, one wearing a "kick me" sign, both fishing a third out of a trash can. The music inside is no joke. Tracked live in one room at Lake Stevens Music Studios and produced by Hill, the EP keeps its garage grit by design — a deliberate counterweight to the over-polished, increasingly artificial music flooding the feeds. "Rock is Dead" opens the argument with Black Keys-style garage blues that disproves its own title; "My People" swaggers through Rolling Stones territory with a soul-revue groove; and "Detour," a Bad Company-flavored heartland closer, is a song about second acts from a band living one. Rounding out the album, covers of the Beatles' Come Together and Bob Dylan's Moonshiner highlight the band's passion for recreating songs they love while sticking in the vicinity of the original or departing a long way (respectively). The Dylan cover features heavy rhythm guitars, driving drums, super gritty slide resonators, and a reimagined song form that builds and drops to match the tone of the original lyrics.
Between releases, HiFi Riff Raff keep their chops up the blue-collar way — lakefront parties and community gigs around Snohomish County — while working toward what's next: new originals unveiled as live demos in streamed mini-shows alongside the covers, and a follow-up record pushing into harder territory with heavier guitars and more live synths.