During their breakneck set at Chicago’s Empty Bottle in July, the Mississippi band MSPAINT reimagined the strict musical ethos of hardcore. The guitar-less synth-punk quartet played their brilliant new album Post-American front to back, tearing through the blistering nu-metal of “Acid” and the gooey electronica of “Flowers From Concrete” with a ferocity that invited reckless moshing and dudes clamoring for the microphone with veins protruding from their necks. Confirming their bona fides, MSPAINT literally pulled up figureheads from a new generation of hardcore onto the stage: Soul Glo’s Pierce Jordan delivered a searing rendition of the stop-start headbanger “Decapitated Reality” and Ian Shelton of post-hardcore group Militarie Gun led a rousing shout-along to “Delete It”: “I just wanna feel more alive!” MSPAINT don’t label themselves as a hardcore band, but their positivity anthems proved aggressive and forthright enough to warrant the tag anyway.
That show embodied the spirit of hardcore in 2023, a year of adventurous glow-ups and community uplift. When hardcore split off from punk to play a faster, aggressive version of that sound in the late 1970s, it created a broad code of ethics: no commercialism, avoid the mainstream, and speak your truth about what’s bothering you. But good luck getting a consensus on what hardcore really is or how to measure it nowadays.
The genre is always evolving, but this year bands found new ways to expand its boundaries in particularly considered, inspiring, and at times deeply sincere ways. California was a hotbed: Los Angeles’ Militarie Gun turned their love of Guided by Voices and pop hooks into Life Under the Gun, while Santa Cruz’s Scowl revived ’90s alt-rock on their snarling Psychic Dance Routine EP, and another L.A. group, Zulu, reimagined the scope of powerviolence on A New Tomorrow by morphing reggae and soul samples into a sound collage. Even Canadian hardcore band Mil-Spec dabbled in downtempo trance on “Belle Époque,” a poetic, gut-wrenching ode to the late Riley Gale of Power Trip.
Strides could be felt beyond the music, too. Fans remained open-minded towards influences and ideas they weren’t predisposed to like. Critics at national and international publications increased their coverage. And the culture at large opened its arms, with TV commercial syncs and bookings at big-tent festivals like Coachella and Rolling Loud.
Hardcore is not an exact science, but that’s never stopped fans from arguing over faux pas and which unspoken rules are being broken. So to see a new generation of bands ignore those dogmatic ways and be celebrated for taking risks makes this year feel less like a turning point and more like a new normal within the genre. In 2023, we found out what it means when a genre that preaches equality and expression—but has a history of turning up its nose at deviations from its core sound—loosens up.
Why are so many hardcore bands pushing against the genre’s limits right now? The trajectory of veteran frontman Justice Tripp offers one answer. He started out in the late 2000s, hollering over pummeling riffs with the beatdown hardcore band Trapped Under Ice. For the last decade he’s also led Angel Du$t, an outlet for testing how fast he could play pop-rock songs (the band’s name is a parody of strung-out ’80s shredders). But Angel Du$t’s heart still beats in time with hardcore, which is why you’ll often see kids spin-kicking in the mosh pit at their shows to songs that sound like Spoon or Blink-182. On this year’s Brand New Soul, Tripp and his Angel Du$t bandmates stylized hardcore riffs through indie rock instrumentation and pop production for the cleanest-sounding album of their career. Figuring out how to make all of it work together was a much-needed exercise in acceptance for Tripp. “It’s created a desire for me to make people feel welcome, to give a place to people who are different in the ways that I’m different,” he told Stereogum. “People who, for whatever reason it is, are as uncomfortable in society as I am.”
That progression towards a more accepting iteration of the genre aligns with the story of Fiddlehead, too. When the Boston band formed in 2014, frontman Pat Flynn described feeling uncomfortable treading the waters between hardcore, emo, and alt-rock after making his name as a pillar of straightedge hardcore in the 2000s group Have Heart. On this summer’s Death Is Nothing to Us, the band embraced those sounds without hesitation, and Flynn now regularly pauses Fiddlehead live sets to speak about hardcore’s evolution for the better. “We don’t sound like many other bands today [on this lineup] and that’s the fucking beauty of hardcore,” he said at a recent show, sweat dripping down his face. “There’s no fucking sound. It’s an ethic.”
Historically, plenty of restless hardcore bands have tried to branch out across the last 40 years—with decidedly mixed results. Boston luminaries SSD peeled off their hardcore cred in favor of classic rock guitar solos for 1984’s How We Rock before becoming truly unrecognizable with 1985’s Break It Up, a hard rock mess that’s still mocked today. New York punks Token Entry put a jock spin on funk rock with 1990’s The Weight of the World, a sloppy collection of songs that sounds like the Clash relocated to California and forgot to hire a real vocalist. On the other end of the spectrum, Reno legends 7 Seconds committed to power pop on 1986’s criminally underrated New Wind, and Orange County favorites Uniform Choice followed their hardcore classic Screaming for Change with 1988’s Staring Into the Sun, a winning post-hardcore record with a pop sheen.
For modern bands, however, the more influential precedents arrived later: Fugazi abandoning whatever hardcore remnants stabilized their early days for avant-garde rock on 1998’s End Hits, or Refused declaring their foray into techno beats and upright bass The Shape of Punk to Come that same year. Cave In foreshadowing their major label signing with the glossy radio rock of 2000’s Jupiter, or Blacklisted diving into brooding, experimental art-punk with 2009’s No One Deserves to Be Here More Than Me. Or even Baltimore’s Turnstile, the biggest hardcore crossover success of the last few years, exposing their love of feel-good grooves on 2018’s Time & Space and 2021’s Glow On. Propelled by artsy ambitions instead of dollar signs, those big swings connected—at times in spite of fanbases that craved more of the same.
The way listeners are enthusiastically embracing today’s rule-breakers in real time is a heartening sign of changing times (in contrast, when Turnstile started busting out of the hardcore box, they were initially ridiculed as 311 worshippers). Don’t misinterpret this as a new generation doling out blind praise, though. Criticizing an album for poor execution is different from criticizing an album for breaking from the mold, and today’s hardcore scene, including both artists and fans, understands that. Besides, berating punk and hardcore bands for selling out has lost all weight in a streaming economy where they’re lucky to break even, and securing a second job is mandatory.
When Taco Bell approached Scowl, Militarie Gun, and the Virginia group Dazy to use their songs in ads this year, every band agreed. “Taco Bell is an institution in the touring world; it’s what literally every band finds themselves eating, probably more often than they would like to admit,” explained Militarie Gun’s Ian Shelton. While the use of Dazy and Militarie Gun’s collaborative track “Pressure Cooker” was largely celebrated online, Scowl—led by frontwoman Kat Moss—found themselves in the center of a debate triggered by the Taco Bell commercial featuring their song “Opening Night.” That chatter was swiftly quelled by people calling out sexist hypocrisy, as both songs employ ’90s alt-rock influences but only one was labeled as sellout behavior. In an interview with Anti-Matter, Moss opened up about quitting her grocery job to tour full-time and be able to choose where her profits come from. “If this Taco Bell stuff makes me a billionaire, we are opening all-ages venues,” Moss laughed. “I love this scene. I love this community. The table is not all for me. If I’m eating, everybody eats.”
The prevalence of experimentation in hardcore this year was balanced out by steadfast faithfuls. Purveyors of subgenres like beatdown (Sunami, Pain of Truth) and crossover thrash (Drain, Pest Control), along with those who stayed true to hardcore’s original form (Gel, Destiny Bond), remained popular and helped champion the relative nonconformists. That healthy contrast spawns individualism, minimizes infighting, and encourages groups to support one another through song features or shared tour bills.
In the case of MSPAINT, they reached across the aisle directly, getting heavy music icon Taylor Young of Twitching Tongues to co-produce Post-American. “The desire for both raw and commercial sounds has always existed,” Young told New Noise Magazine. “[Find] what’s special about a band or song and then [hit] the gas pedal to the floor.” That mile-a-minute sound defines “Titan of Hope,” an invigorating combination of fuzzed-out bass, icy synths, and thundering drums that speaks to this moment. “Watch how I stray from the path/Now I’m conjuring alchemy,” singer Deedee puts it on the song. “This mindset is a titan of hope.”
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2023 wrap-up coverage here.
