The Concourse, a subsite of Deadspin, did a great profile on The Hard Times:

It’s all almost real, or clearly not real, or very terribly real. Even though it’s all fake. And it all comes from The Hard Times, the brainchild of Bay Area native Matt Saincome. Some people find punk, but in his case, it pretty much found him. “I’ve been into punk my whole life,” he tells me. “It’s the first music I started to listen to, because of my older brother Ed. I was strongly influenced by him, and I always ask him, ‘Hey, what do you think of this,’ just to get a little perspective. I went to my first punk show in elementary school. I was really into the Ramones, and the band was Catch-22 ... more a ska band, or punk-ska. Whatever!”