Restraint was a metal/hardcore band Billy played with during college. Initially, the band consisted of Sean Lewis on guitar, Doug Shahian on vocals, and Colin O’Gara on drums. Billy met Sean and Doug in passing at a concert (In Flames, playing at the Palladium in Worcester, Massachusetts, on their first U.S. tour), but it wasn’t until he saw them perform at the College of the Holy Cross Battle of the Bands in spring 2001 that he got to know them.
Happy to finally see some fellow metalheads on campus, Billy asked if they wanted another guitarist. They did. So Billy joined the band the next semester, after exchanging lots of emails and music with Sean that summer. Later, they recruited bassist Mike Nitro to fill out the lineup. While initially Restraint played mainly covers of metal and hardcore bands such as Death, In Flames, Arch Enemy, King Diamond, Earth Crisis, etc., in late 2001, they recorded two original songs, one written primarily by Sean and the other by Billy, on a Tascam Portastudio 4-track cassette tape deck.
Billy also used these two songs as a supplement to his proposal for the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which he was awarded in 2002, and used to travel to Germany, Sweden, Finland, and Norway to study the metal bands he loved.