Maybe, in recent years, you’ve noticed that more and more of your friends own record players. Following a fall-off in the CD and Napster eras of the 1980s and ’90s, the early 2000s saw record collecting as mostly an affected, hipster pursuit. Fast forward 20 years or so, and now fans of such mainstream megastars as Taylor Swift are bumpin’ their favorite tracks via groove and needle. It’s not just you — vinyl is back in.
But vinyl’s years of being off-trend changed the landscape of the industry. Worldwide, pressing plants of all sorts have shuttered. Even as records reclaimed the No. 1 slot in physical media sales in music in 2022, generating $1.2 billion in revenue and outselling CDs by 8 million units, actually getting records made largely remains an expensive process, with long lead times. And Jeff Betten, co-founder of Pittsburgh’s Hellbender Vinyl and, according to his LinkedIn profile, “Mayor of the Pittsburgh Music Scene,” has been watching the action all along.
Betten has been running record labels for almost 15 years and watched the progression of lead times on record pressings get longer and longer. “I had a front row seat to, ‘Oh, you know, it’ll only take a couple weeks to get some vinyl made, and it’s not that expensive, it’s not a big deal,’” he tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “Then, as time went by, I saw the entire progression of, ‘Now it takes six weeks; now it takes eight weeks; now it takes six months; now it takes a year!”
A few years back, Pittsburgh’s music mayor got a call from Pittsburgh’s real mayor. “The Mayor [Bill] Peduto administration challenged me one day to think real big, think blue sky [about the Pittsburgh music scene]. That was the point where I said, ‘Let’s try to make a vinyl plant here!’”
From there, he teamed up with co-owner Matt Dowling, whose band Paperhaus had been on the Misra Records label run by Betten. “I knew a lot of people in my network who wanted vinyl and didn’t know where to get it,” Dowling says. “So I called up Jeff and asked, ‘Did you ever start that plant?’ And he was like, ‘I got some pieces together.’
“I have a background in start-up and chemical and biological engineering. A lot of vinyl pressing is traditional chemical engineering; we’ve got chillers and boilers and things. So I kind of became obsessed and I said, ‘let’s roll.’”
Hellbender started quietly in early 2023, with bootstrapped funds from the owners, as well as some small investors. ”We’ve got a lot of skin in the game,” Dowling says.
During their first year in business, “we didn’t really shout to the high heavens, ‘hey, we’re open!’” Betten says. “We liked to joke that it was almost like the friends-and-family stage of a restaurant opening that first year. It was almost like a whisper network, where you had to know someone who knows us to even reach out, [and] that worked pretty well because it allowed us to grow at a healthy pace.”
Now, just two years into operations, Hellbender boasts clients such a Guster and Mountain Dew, and is pressing around 10,000 records a month in their modest, airy space on Lawrenceville’s Butler Street. The space itself supports what is among the founders’ most meaningful goals — using Hellbender Vinyl as the foundation on which to build community.
“One thing we recognized in doing this,” says Dowling, “while we started from a practical basis — you know, there need to be more manufacturers, lead times can be crazy, et cetera — we also realize vinyl is really just a currency within a larger network. What we are starting to call that larger network is people doing real stuff.
“That’s not even limited to musicians,” Dowling adds. “It means you’re real. You’re not AI. You’re playing shows, you’re actually engaging with the community. The people who appreciate vinyl and want to be a part of that world are people who are doing real things, like visual art, physical art, filmmaking, podcasts, books.” He tells City Paper that Hellbender plans to host concerts, talks, and art exhibitions in their space.
According to Betten, there is also community-building happening on a larger scale, in bringing a new manufacturing operation into the heart of Pittsburgh.
“I’m such a booster of the city of Pittsburgh and the region of Western Pa.,” he says. “I definitely see us having a long-term, vibrant impact. It’s a pretty big deal that we’re able to bring manufacturing back to Steel City, at this nexus of the creative economy and technology.“
On the tech front, “Our technology is brand new, and our machinery was custom-built for us,” Betten says. And on the creative front, in addition to the music being pressed in their plant, the folks at Hellbender have taken a striking visual approach to how their records are pressed.
Using a variety of brightly colored pellets (the material melted down and pressed into records), Hellbender has already set themselves apart with splashy splatterdiscs printed on their LiteTone press. Using the early days in business, when order volume was low, to experiment, they developed a process that produces beautiful, sometimes prismatic results. A recent pressing for the band Fuck Yeah, Dinoaurs! (“They asked us to go wild!”) is a kaleidoscope of psyched-out colors, resembling a piece of agate or something else you might find in a gem shop, as much as it does a disc of recorded music.
With Record Store Day coming up on Sat., April 12, Hellbender is ready to party — the gathering at their Butler Street plant will, of course, be Pittsburgh-centric, with Ex Pilots, Colatura, Ames Harding, The Mirage, and others on-site selling their records. It may just be the perfect occasion to get acquainted with Hellbender and the greater Pittsburgh music community.
Correction: An earlier version of this article conflated band Paperhaus with label Misra. The error has been corrected above.
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2025.
