The Hunger Strike
The Hunger Strike is an American alternative folk rock music band formed in a small farm town in southern Idaho in the 1980s by two high school friends, Tyler Lee and Patrick Lundberg.
Lee was born in Jerome, Idaho and was attending Jerome High School in 1988 as a sophomore when he met a new foreign exchange student in his English class on the first day of school. Patrick Lundberg was from Bergen, Norway, and had recently arrived to attend school for one year in the small dairy town in Idaho's Magic Valley, just north of the Snake River and the great Perrine Bridge spanning Jerome County with the City of Twin Falls.
Lundberg was well-versed in playing the guitar and Lee was the drummer and lyricist. They soon recruited Lee's younger sister, Angie (Farnsworth), to play piano and keyboards and sing backup vocals. While most of The Hunger Strike's original lyrics were written by Lee, he wasn't comfortable singing in lead, partly due to his lack of formal training, stage fright, and lack of ability to play the drums while singing. The band went through a few different lead singers (all female) including Lundberg's host sister and a few friends from school. But, ultimately, Lee sang as frontman at local shows and on the only recordings that exist of the band's music.
During the first year they played together, Lundberg taught Lee how to play the guitar which helped him better formulate lyrics to melodies he had in his head. Sadly, Lundberg left America for his home in Norway at the end of the school year in the summer of 1989. But, the two would remain friends through present day.
Upon returning to Norway, Lundberg co-founded the band AI Phoenix along with Mona Mørk and Robert Jønnum. They released their first album Film in 1998 on their own label. AI Phoenix re-released their 2001 album The Driver is Dead in 2024.
The Hunger Strike was on hiatus for short time following Lundberg's departure, though Lee continued to write songs. Then, in 1990, he met guitarist Matt Makorow, and Lee, Farnsworth, and Makorow continued The Hunger Strike together.
The Hunger Strike released their first and only self-produced album to date in 1991 entitled Relics. It featured the songs Sequoia, Angel Hair, and Your Mistake. The album was recorded in analog under their own label, Hazy Autumns Records. Relics is no longer in print and few copies of it exist.
In 2026, Lee decided to resurrect The Hunger Strike to produce all the material they'd written more than three decades earlier, along with several new songs written since then. Lee, Makorow, and Farnsworth are talking about producing and releasing old and new work in late 2026 and 2027.
Lee released a new song called Shine in 2020 under The Hunger Strike name. It will be released along with a few other songs in 2027 in an EP called Imperfect. There's also a playlist on The Hunger Strike's SoundCloud account featuring a few of the old demo tracks preceding the 1991 release of Relics.
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