while you were sleeping 2020

i didn't listen to anything here as much as i listened to "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls

This piece is dedicated to Wade Allison and Riley Gale. RIP.

If there’s any genre of music that is defined by anger as an all-encompassing emotion, it’s my truest musical love: hardcore. More than any other genre, hardcore felt like it was there for me this year. But we’ll get to that in a second, because there was just an onslaught of quality music this year. There was definitely some stuff I loathed and actively resent the thought that people expected me to like it— Ultra Mono by IDLES, for example. There was also some stuff I was expecting to like but came away from kinda sleepy and wishing it would grow on me, like Ways of Hearing by Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. But the plethora of stuff I actually enjoyed far outweighs those.

Although I think it was just a bit of a down year for the genre, there was a smattering of great releases from the vague spheres of emo and pop-punk: Teenage Halloween put out a ripper of a self-titled album that sounds like if Jeff Rosenstock were a zoomer; Jeff Rosenstock himself never fails to clear the increasingly high bars his previous albums set, and No Dream is no exception; Barely Civil’s I’ll Figure This Out and Dogleg’s Melee are both records that see each band aging gracefully into their sounds; up-and-comers closure. and Ogbert the Nerd took their rough-and-tumble, twinkly indie-power-pop to increasingly polished and effective places with I Don’t Mind and I Don’t Hate You, respectively; Floral Tattoo released an album of genre-melting post-emo in You Can Never Have A Long Enough Head Start; KennyHoopla put out some ridiculously catchy singles for How Will I Rest In Peace If I’m Buried by a Highway? while collaborating with both scene contemporaries like nothing,nowhere. (on “Blood”) and stalwarts like Travis Barker (on “Estella”); Bartees Strange released a shapeshifting behemoth of a debut with Live Forever; Stay Inside expertly straddled the line between soft, lush emo and shrieking post-hardcore on Viewing; new releases from Nothing (The Great Dismal), Clearbody (One More Day), Gleemer (Down Through), Terminal Crush (Columbus), Fake Eyes (A Drip Is All We Know), cursetheknife (Thank You for Being Here, parts I & II), and Modern Color (From the Leaves of Your Garden) show the shoegaze/slowcore revival at full creative capacity; Nailpolishh’s Hollows is the best-constructed and best-produced emo trap record of the year, especially impressive as this year also had great releases by heavyweights in that field like The Moments I Miss by Wicca Phase Springs Eternal and Sofubi by 93FEETOFSMOKE; Taking Meds took another incredibly strong step forward with the EP The Meds You Deserve, a typically witty and pop-savvy update on their LP from last year; I unreservedly love the restrained, earnest guitar rock of the self-titled LP by Ways Away; Guitar Fight from Fooly Cooly’s Soak triggered my inner “go out and skate” energy; Home Is Where put out an incredible single in “The Scientific Classification of Stingrays” and their forthcoming material shows them really coming into their own. There was also the California Cousins/Floral Patterns split, which showed both bands at the absolute peak of their powers, particularly California Cousins— they’ve pushed their hyper-technical yet dancey yet ferocious screamo-pop-punk into the hottest territory yet. Windbreaker’s Long Time Caller, First Time Listener is a wonderful Kid Dynamite-indebted piece of beautifully rowdy pop-punk that deserved to be a breakthrough record in its own right.

Hip-hop produced a landslide of material as cutting and vital as it was catchy and varied: BIG $ILKY’s Vol. I and II are beautiful showcases of the unique chemistry between Psalm One and Angel Davanport as they spit and spasm their way through punchlines and condemnations of fence-sitting moderates; the production on Navy Blue’s Àdá Irin could best be described as “skate-jazz,” and his flows are just as fluid and dexterous as that combination implies; Westside Gunn’s Who Made the Sunshine, Benny the Butcher’s Burden of Proof, and Statik Selektah’s The Balancing Act form an unofficial trilogy of sharp, smart, hardened hip-hop that sounds as old-school as it does thrillingly modern, like if the members of Mobb Deep had been born in the 90s; The Koreatown Oddity’s Little Dominiques Nosebleed is as idiosyncratic as it is unflinchingly autobiographical; I am pretty sure everyone loves the fourth Run the Jewels record, for obvious reasons; Oddisee’s The Odd Cure artfully and faithfully reproduces all of the conflicting emotions triggered in the early days of the pandemic; Alfredo by Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist is another flawless blast of perfection from Freddie, equalling even his incredible collaborations with Madlib; Innocent Country II by Quelle Chris & Chris Keys shows them becoming the up-and-coming alt-rap duo to watch, with incredible synchronicity between rapper and producer; the recent collab between Billy Woods and Moor Mother, Brass, is unfortunately not streaming, but is well worth the money; Armand Hammer’s Shrines, a less-recent collaboration between longtime duo Billy Woods and Elucid, solidifies both rappers as being at the center of some of the most creative and exciting shit in the rap underground; Denzel Curry and Kenny Beats both continued their hot streak with the absolutely stellar UNLOCKED; Rico Nasty’s Nightmare Vacation might have been the most punk rock album of 2020; Fat Tony & Taydex’s Wake Up combines the stream-of-consciousness grit and fury of Ghostface Killah’s best solo material with the silky vocals and sampledelica aesthetics of the early Soulquarians neo-soul artists; and X. Kubrick’s The Seven Levels of Happiness is an intriguing, fun-as-fuck exercise in reproducing 90s rap with painstaking verisimilitude (for those unaware, X. Kubrick is hardcore kid Xavier Wilson, who has played guitar in bands like Simulakra, Vicious Embrace, and Year of the Knife, has done a shitload of art and design within the scene— perhaps most notably the Serration/Dying Wish split— and did everything on his debut EP here completely solo, from rapping to producing to art).

I’d also be remiss not to mention some of the sick-ass pop artists I’ve really been digging this year, from newcomers like Food House to big names like 100 Gecs (for real, that “Hand Crushed by a Mallet” remix is still on weekly rotation for me) to Nnamdi, whose avant-garde approach to pop music reached a career-defining high this year, as well as great releases from the metal world by bands like Internal Rot (shit-kicking grindcore with a disgusting guitar tone) and Afterbirth (psychedelic slam)— tip of the hat to David Anthony on both of the latter.

But it was hardcore that captured my attention this year, and not for the reasons I initially thought.

I thought 2019 was a truly stunning year for hardcore, a leap forward in both the genre’s relevance and its sheer density of quality releases. For this reason, it’s been surprising to me to see how much of that momentum carried through into hardcore throughout 2020. Even with the obvious roadblock of not being able to play shows, so many of these releases managed to stick in my craw. I’ll be taking the longview on what records I’m considering to be within the world of hardcore (and, in a few cases, hardcore-adjacency) in this newsletter, simply because the wide variety of sounds all, in my opinion, can comfortably sit alongside each other at a show and that’s all that really matters. But although there was no shortage of completely furious records released this year, one thing I want to point out as I run through these releases is how many of these records seem to hinge on an unspoken-yet-visceral sense of hope in the face of trauma.

I’ve always felt like you have to be a specific type of angry person to be into hardcore; angry in a way that’s as hard to define as it is easy to identify. It’s not so specific as to be exclusive, but not so broad as to be inclusive— it’s the dividing line between punk and hardcore, maybe. But one thing that 2020 did was turn anger in general into a virus, worming its way through the country and the world until it suffocated all of us like so many kittens on a baby’s face. And the specific type of anger that informs hardcore in turn flourished, in tandem with its central tenets of tenacity and community and restlessness, against all odds.

You’d be forgiven if, as a casual observer, you didn’t notice much of hardcore at all this year. Recent big-name heavy-hitters like Vein and Code Orange released a thoughtful remix album and a restrained acoustic set, respectively— Vein as a snack between full-lengths, and Code Orange as a companion piece to their latest studio effort, Underneath, which saw them leave the sonics of hardcore further and further behind them in search of more melodic hard rock as heady as it is ignorant. Meanwhile, other hardcore/hardcore-adjacent musicians were focused on side projects— the Ceremony/Creative Adult/Sabertooth Zombie supergroup Spice released their debut LP this year, a sinewy, stressed-out blend of post-punk and shoegaze, while Title Fight’s Ned Russin recently released a very strong single for his 80s-new-wave-informed indie/power pop project Glitterer.

However, this perception belies a surprising wealth of activity. The metalcore revival scene, despite its reliance on the chaos and aggression of live shows, saw no shortage of releases— Chamber kicked out a member in advance of their proper debut LP, Cost of Sacrifice, an engaging combination of clean tech riffs and bilious fury, while Year of the Knife finally unveiled Internal Incarceration, a scathing, smart, and unremittingly heavy derivation of death metal and hardcore fusion that’s also surprisingly hooky. My babies Eighteen Visions released Inferno, an EP that shows them embracing both the blistering metalcore and yearningly catchy hard rock of their past into a surprisingly fresh package. Your Spirit Dies released The Process of Grief, the purest distillation yet of the band’s precision-strike combination of mid-2000s melodeath-inspired metalcore and 90s metallic hardcore bruising. Literally, while I was writing this, I was made aware of the Threat EP by Pittsburgh’s Blood Menace, the solo project by Jake Yencik from rising hardcore superstars Shin Guard, and it’s so heavy it made me feel like I was going to puke (which is a great thing). I’m pretty bummed that Fall from Grace Face First ended up being Binary’s swan song, but it’s fitting that they went out with the most tightly-focused and devastating material of their tragically short career.

The Zao-influenced cats in Thirty Nights of Violence experienced a songwriting breakthrough with You’ll See Me Up There, which is complemented well by the piercing assault of 156/Silence’s Irrational Pull. Behindcoloredglass’s Divine Visions of Remiel, Methwitch’s Indwell, buriedbutstillbreathing’s Exhumation, Serration’s Shrine of Consciousness, Cauldron’s Last Words: Screamed from Behind God’s Muzzle (which is borderline MySpace deathcore), Bloodbather’s Silence, and Rain of Salvation’s In Times of Desperation all also made strong showings in the metalcore realm, though in my opinion, the peak was indisputably Typecaste’s Between Life, a ferocious four-song assault that weaponizes that classic clicky-typewriter drum tone along with animalistic vocals and some of the gnarliest guitar and bass tones in the game to produce something truly impressive in an admittedly oversaturated field. It’s joined at the absolute top of the heap by the skull-cracking misanthropy and effluvia of Splinters from an Ever-Changing Face by END, the brainchild of Brendan Murphy of Counterparts and Fit for an Autopsy guitarist/producer extraordinaire Will Putney. (I’m not sure if Boundaries are canceled or not, but regardless, their new record was okay too.)

Speaking of oversaturation, the more straightforward, beatdown(ish) variant of hardcore also had a pretty good year— although it peaked early with Three Knee Deep’s full-length, which is danceable and hooky while also feeling like you’re being pummeled in the head repeatedly. That said, don’t discount other contenders; if you thought Pain of Truth’s No Blame…Just Facts and Seed of Pain’s Flesh, Steel, Victory were full of wonderfully dumb caveman riffs, Gridiron’s Loyalty at All Costs, Sector’s The Virus of Hate Infects the Ignorant Mind, SF METAL by Foghorn, and Out for Justice’s Northeazt Takeover are downright protozoan in their primitive ignorance. (To be clear, I think that rules.) If you didn’t hear the World of Pleasure EP, you missed out on some of the dirtiest-sounding and most savage heavy hardcore I’ve heard in years, all ass-beater riffs and emotionally ragged yet completely unfuckwithable vocals. And to be perfectly honest, no discussion of ignorant hardcore in 2020 is complete without a shout-out to the absolute kings of ridiculously stupid and stupidly incredible Your-A-Bitch-core, motherfucking SUNAMI.

I didn’t even hate all the nu-metalcore this year; the Orthodox LP was better than I expected, if a bit overlong, and the self-titled release from Victim of Your Dreams forecasts great things to come. But the real curveball was Omerta’s Hyperviolence, one of the weirdest things I’ve heard all year, a fiendish, fucked-up deconstruction of hardcore tropes through the lens of nu metal with a sinister and genuinely uncomfortable emotional edge to it.

And of course, if we’re speaking in terms of pure heavy shit, 2020 was particularly good to us: Xibalba’s Años en Infierno is yet another step in that band’s endless quest to somehow turn their music into a nuclear bomb, Fuming Mouth’s Beyond the Tomb is a stellar metalcore EP (and I know the people in that band wouldn’t take kindly to that label, but too fucking bad, I know what my ears hear), and Piles of Festering Decomposition, the debut EP by Ohio’s 200 Stab Wounds, is one of my favorite Maggot Stomp releases yet, a Pyrexia-esque combination of 90s-style NYDM riffs with just enough hardcore groove and intensity to make it extremely addictive.

Moving onto the world of slightly more underground hardcore, Initiate’s Lavender was a clever re-contextualization of late 90s California hardcore a la Carry On with just a touch of intricate melody. Buggin’s Buggin Out takes a deeply NYHC-indebted base and adds invigorating stomp riffs and infectious gang vocals that put it well into memorable territory. Soul Glo’s Songs to Yeet at the Sun has been written about to death at this point but it’s still worth noting just how fucking sick it is. Spy’s Service Weapon is one of the most violent, scuzzy, and misanthropic hardcore offerings I’ve heard in years, and it all goes by in less time than it takes to smoke a cigarette. En Love’s Love Will Drown the Nest is an atonal, dissonant, and wholly bracing take on hardcore-meets-post-hardcore that establishes the band as one to watch from Ohio (and to my ears they form a kind of less-outwardly-chaotic but no less abrasive counterpart to For Your Health, whose In Spite Of is already set to be one of my favorite LPs of 2021).

Gumm’s Piece It Together is a unique and engaging hardcore record hiding beneath the veneer of a 90s fuzz-rock guitar tone, while Gadget’s Spreading the Love shows that band’s straightforward, slightly metallic-tasting hardcore coming into its own (if you can get past the Fozzy Bear vocals). I’m a fan of neither chain punk nor egg punk, but even I have to admit that Bib’s Delux takes the egg punk style to new, catchy, thrashy heights while sacrificing none of their fundamentally nerdy energy, while Geld’s Beyond the Floor does the same for chain punk (with a dash of bracing psychedelia for good measure). Stepping Stone’s Escape from the Junkyard is one of the most engaging crossover thrash records I’ve heard in years, both feet planted firmly in the hardcore side of territory with the pugnacious vocals and groovy slowdowns, but with some tasteful solos and just enough choppa-choppa, along with a self-aware 80s aesthetic that somehow turns the whole affair into something that already feels nostalgic.

Choice to Make’s Vicious Existence expertly splits the difference between the youth crew and NYHC revival sounds without sounding like dated cosplay in the least, while End It’s One Way Track avoids what could be a cliche update of the No Warning/Backtrack school of hardcore with sheer conviction and charisma. Speaking of No Warning and Backtrack worship, Struck Nerve’s Rattle the Cage is one of the most gloriously pissed-off records of the entire damn year. And if you miss Title Fight and you’ve already played the shit out of bands like Anxious and One Step Closer, I cannot recommend Long Island’s Koyo more highly; their Painting Words Into Lines EP is basically a melodic hardcore clinic in the best way possible.

Regular readers of this newsletter are probably already well aware of powerviolence godheads Regional Justice Center, so reiterating how fucking great their releases this year were would be redundant, but that’s too bad, because both “KKK Tattoo” and the material they did Justice Tripp were fucking incredible. Also on the powerviolence front was Zulu’s My People… Hold On, the side project of DARE drummer Anaiah Lei, which converts trauma and exhaustion into pure emotional devastation and catharsis as well as furious sonic viscera— and the fact that it was all written and performed by one person (with a guest spot from Aaron of Jesus Piece and a co-writing credit from up-and-coming rapper/producer Tony Bontana) makes it one of the most purely impressive releases of the year. (I wonder if this turned any kids on to People… Hold On, a fucking incredible soul record from 1972 by Eddie Kendricks, formerly of the Temptations. Shouts out to my dad on that one.) The most underrated powerviolence record of the year, though, is probably Domestic Scene by Tourist, a band from Chula Vista that expertly channels the disturbing, fucked-up, marginal vibe of the original SoCal powerviolence bands from the 90s a la No Comment and Despise You.

And on the lower-key front, there were a ton of melodically-inclined EPs this year from bands that seemed to be channeling the off-kilter, unconventionally melodic strains of Revolution Summer harDCore. Militarie Gun’s My Life Is Over is one of the best and brightest of these, but Memory Screen’s To Nowhere feels like the long-lost dumpster baby of Lungfish (in a good way), while Forgotten Favorite’s self-titled debut EP sounds like Embrace if they’d overdosed on 90s Olympia twee (I also mean that in a good way).

In addition to a ton of new-school prospects, the older kids are getting in on the fun too. After the post-punk digression a few years ago, Trash Talk are back in fine form with the Kenny Beats-produced EP Squalor, which shows the band at their most vicious since Eyes & Nines. Speaking of “back in fine form,” Terminal Bliss is the newest project from members of pg99 and Mammoth Grinder, and it’s the most straightforward hardcore any of the members has produced yet, while simultaneously being more aggressive and sharpened than it has any right to be.

But the reinvigoration of hardcore elder statesmen doesn’t end there. This year I completely fell in love with Freedom Beach by Constant Elevation, the collaboration between legendary NYHC drummer Sammy Siegler and Movielife/I Am the Avalanche frontman Vinnie Caruana— it’s the best stuff either of them has done in probably 15 or so years, a totally speedy and rough-hewn ode to the old days of youth crew with a heavy dose of melody. I also completely adored the Every Scar Has A Story EP, the collaboration between Rob Fish of 108 and Tom Schlatter of You & I/The Assistant/Hundreds of AU/a million other amazing screamo bands, which is just as emotionally devastating, sonically fierce, and melodically on-point as you’d expect from those two names. Dropdead and Racetraitor both had extremely strong showings in 2020, the latter even doing a split with /leftypol/ provocateurs Neckbeard Deathcamp and emotive grind (? they’re completely unclassifiable but totally fucking amazing) act Closet Witch. Unreal City, a monstrous riff machine composed of members of heavyweight championship bands like Eternal Sleep and Integrity, upped their game again with Cruelty of Heaven, which makes the 13-year gap they took between records sound like less than a day.

Tim Singer of Deadguy/Kiss It Goodbye fame roared back into action with the debut EP from Bitter Branches, This May Hurt A Bit, which is an absolutely punishing combination of Singer’s trademark terrifying-emotional-battery-ram vocals, incredibly lithe and dark bass-driven progressive song structures, and guitar work that completely forgoes riffs for an overwhelming and earth-shaking yet completely fluid textured approach; Singer also reunited his old band No Escape for a fine new track that stays completely true to that band’s haggard, traditional-hardcore-with-a-touch-of-artsy-dissonance approach. It was also a big year for Scott Vogel of Terror; not only did his primary band drop a solid surprise release, but he revived both 90s metalcore bruisers Buried Alive and melodic hardcore supergroup (also featuring members of Strife, Berthold City, Gorilla Biscuits, CIV, Judge, Rival Schools, Fadeaway, and one of Vogel’s very first bands, Despair) World Be Free, who dropped some of the strongest material of both bands’ careers yet with Death Will Find You (a mixture of new songs and re-recorded old ones) and One Time for Unity, respectively.

And of course, we have to talk about The Weight and the Cost, the debut LP of Be Well, which features Battery vocalist/super-producer Brian McTernan in an emotionally-charged return to form that trades in some of the most revealing and vulnerable lyrics I’ve ever heard on a hardcore record as youth-crew-oriented as this one. The band’s pedigree is insane— members have played in Ashes, Bane, Converge, Darkest Hour, Fairweather, and more— but this project is singular and incredible for what it is.

The latest (I think fourth?) wave of melodic youth crew revival was at its absolute strongest this year, with genuinely stellar records like Change’s Closer Still and Mil-Spec’s World House proving that even a genre as well-trodden as youth crew still has artistic vitality and innovative juice left inside of it. Even Ecostrike, who have previously (and wrongly) been dismissed as Earth Crisis copycats, leaned into the sound for this year’s A Truth We Still Believe, and it’s their best yet— completely energized and fat-free.

Even more interesting were the bands who sound like the post-hardcore cousins to the youth crew revival— Tuning’s Defining the Purpose is a delightfully offbeat yet still endearingly catchy and melodic piece that genuinely excited me (and you know how jaded I am), while Winds of Promise and Truth Cult unleashed Cut. Heal. Scar. and Off Fire respectively, both of which are completely twisted and off their rocker in their own special ways while remaining hooky and undeniably compelling the whole way through; Winds of Promise have a bit of a spoken-word/Single Mothers kind of snotty delivery thing going on, while Truth Cult just sound completely fucking unhinged. There was also the invigorating traditionalism of Crow by Old Ghosts, which just reminds me why hardcore can be some of the best music in the world even when it’s staying strictly formula.

Post-hardcore itself experienced an absolutely fantastic year. Newcomers like Somerset Thrower and Entropy both traded in a warm, polished, and extremely enjoyable throwback to the 90s school of post-hardcore (with influences ranging from the power pop of Sugar to the locked-groove borderline-grunge of Handsome), while Moonkisser’s Summer’s Fleeting Majesty channels Jupiter-era Cave-In to produce some truly powerful and affecting guitar rock and GILT’s Ignore What’s Missing is some of the most painstakingly well-structured and heartrendingly performed stuff in the post-hardcore vein since Brand New’s The Devil & God Are Raging Inside Me (only not canceled). Meanwhile, space-rock-cadets Hum unleashed Inlet, which deserves to stand among their best work while sounding as ahead-of-their-time now as they did back in the 90s before everyone started jacking their steez, and Ian MacKaye, Joe Lally, and Amy Farina regrouped for the self-titled debut album from Coriky, which sounds like if Fugazi kicked out Guy Picciotto but never broke up after The Argument.

As much as it warms my heart to see oldsters like MacKaye still having fun, I still think that perhaps the definitive post-hardcore record of the year was Record Setter’s I Owe You Nothing. Even though I’ve been following my homies in that band for a while, I was still absolutely gobsmacked by the stratospheric leap in quality this already-great band experienced with this record— some of the most well-composed, visceral, anthemic, and achingly intimate, vulnerable, and personal songs of the year are to be found on this release, which is best experienced as a complete entity. Don’t even look at the tracklist— it’s an enveloping experience all to itself.

If post-hardcore has its own cousin, it’s screamo, and that genre in and of itself experienced an absolutely banner fucking year in 2020. The year was uniquely bookended by Envy’s The Fallen Crimson in February and Respire’s Black Line in December, both of which are records that sought to expand the boundaries of an already boundary-pushing genre with unconventional instrumentation, increasingly complex song structures, and most daring of all, genuinely hopeful and beautiful melodies that balance against the desperately shrieking heart of the subgenre in order to give its listeners something to hold onto in a year that felt especially hopeless. Spattered throughout the middle were masterpieces like Svalbard’s blackgaze-inflected When I Die, Will I Get Better? and two gargantuan releases from Richmond’s Infant Island, Sepulcher and Beneath, both of which cement that band as one of the most forward-thinking and exciting bands in the entire genre.

Other screamo highlights of this year included Madrid’s Boneflower, who combine influences both from “true” screamo and the 2000s variety of pop-screamo a la Thursday and Glassjaw to effervescent effect on Armour, and Baltimore’s No Note, who add a dash of sassy flavor to their bleak and hopeless concoctions on If This Is the Future Then I’m In the Dark. Annakarina recently unleashed Always Moving Forward, a riveting blend of deeply personal songwriting and bracing art-punk. Mouthing’s self-titled debut was one of the most uncomfortable, chaotic, and unnerving releases of the year, even in a genre as discomfiting as screamo, while Dianacrawls advance their blend of addictively experimental “funkviolence” weirdness with A Glitter Manifesto, and Houston’s own It Only Ends Once contributed their characteristically heartbreaking brand of blackened screamo on standout Lost In My Own Hollow (which opens with a track that’s literally 20 minutes long and flies by in goddamn moments).

Screamo also has its own elder statesmen who put out ridiculously good material this year, from parted/departed/apart by Frail Hands and Survival/Sickness by Crowning to Shawn Decker’s always-reliable powerhouse Coma Regalia, whose Marked ups the already-impressive ante of their previous records. Nuvolascura’s As We Suffer from Memory and Imagination is a polished-yet-impossibly-savage-and-inchoate improvement of the formula they established with their last LP, while the members of Majority Rule reconvened for a punishing piece of progressive hardcore with NØ MAN’s Erase. But one of the most exciting pieces of old-guard screamo comes from Stormlight, which sees members of Loma Prieta and Lord Snow putting together the most intricate blends of cutting coarseness and breathtaking melody I’ve heard a screamo band pull off in a long time.

Pivoting back to more straightforward hardcore, the new school of bands just continues to impress me. Life Force and Vanguard are two Texan vegan straight-edge bands who were both signed to New Age this year and blew me away with their respective debut records, Hope and Defiance and Rage and Deliverance, with both their unabashed heaviness and their undeniable commitment to their ideals. I also always want to give love to great bands coming from my hometown of Las Vegas, and The End of Everything’s debut EP Things Are About to Change is an emotionally and sonically brutal piece of music that draws from the same poetic well as American Nightmare and the same musical well as heavy East Coast bands like Turmoil and Snapcase. UK’s Big Cheese released their debut record Punishment Park, which is some of the most tightly-written and well-executed heavy hardcore I’ve ever heard from that side of the pond (as regular readers of the newsletter know, I’m infamously racist against the Brits); the Great British Empire also produced the solid, gritty metalcore of Climate of Fear’s Stained with a Dismal Beauty. Another UK band I was extremely impressed by was Higher Power, whose latest, 27 Miles Underwater, alternately summons the spirits of Glassjaw, Alice In Chains, Helmet, and Into Another into an intoxicatingly catchy and hard-hitting stew of bouncy fun.

Other records by up-and-coming hardcore acts I was particularly impressed by: Power Alone’s Rather Be Alone, which sounds like smacking face-first into a brick wall and loving every minute of it (with the blissfully short melodic hardcore standout “All We’ve Got” sweetening the pot just enough to make it through); Drowse’s Dance In the Decay, which takes everything I loved about Mysterious Guy Hardcore and strips away the corniness for an exhilarating, under-twenty-minute run of bracing, unremittingly fast hardcore; Tilted’s Corner of an Empty Room, which sounds like Hot Water Music by way of early Title Fight with gloriously lo-fi, gruff production and an incredible sense for dynamics; Blind Idol’s Town & City, which is the most bullshit-free hardcore record of the entire year; Excide’s Two of a Kind and “Actualize/Radiation Reel,” both of which sound like ass-kicking hardcore discovering 90s alt rock in the most exciting way; and FAIM’s Hollow Hope, which brought me back, sense-memory style, to the late 2000s when I was first discovering bands like Punch and knew instantaneously that hardcore was going to be a part of me for the rest of my life.

This isn’t even mentioning some of the second-tier releases that I was fairly pleased by but didn’t outright adore or return to much— Mindforce’s latest EP is good even if it fails to live up to the insane expectations set by Excalibur, Gag turned in another solid performance on Still Laughing, Slap’s self-titled EP is straightforward Floridian metallic hardcore goodness, Heavy Discipline’s self-titled is a stripped-down straight-up shot of old-school-styled hardcore punk, Richmond’s Nosebleed have one track out but it rules, Vile Spirit’s blackened hardcore shines through on Scorched Earth, the new songs on the Mortality Rate reissue are great, the neanderthal crossover thrash of Pummel’s Our Power is appealingly over-the-top, Highway Sniper’s Greatest Hits is a fun piece of antisocial fuck-you-core from Skylar Sarkis of Taking Meds and Eric Egan of Heart Attack Man— though I hope to look back on them fondly throughout the next year. Spine’s L.O.V. EP comes out today and from the available tracks it already seems like a fucking ripper. And of course, if you’re really into the DEMO-CORE scene, here’s some of my favorites from that world:

GLEAN- Demo 2020: Jangly, fuzzy, deeply emotive and propulsive guitar rock that reminds me of both power pop and hardcore at the same time. RIYL Pretty Matty as much as I do.

Bent Blue- Between Your and You’re: Absolutely phenomenal San Diego band that sounds like if, say, Rule Them All got really into Revolution Summer. RIYL Gray Matter, One Last Wish, One Step Closer, Restraining Order, Lifetime.

G.I. Bill- Demo 2020: If you still have Title Fight’s Floral Green on repeat, you’ll probably fall in love with this.

Fleshwater- demo2020: I know a member, or maybe multiple members, of Vein are in this band, but I don’t know who. It’s driving 90s-style alt rock with just the perfect amount of metallic edge. RIYL: mid-era Deftones, the better/heavier Smashing Pumpkins songs, trying to remember your dreams.

Pillars of Ivory- Genesis Demo Twenty Twenty: If you only listen to one of these demos, please make sure it’s this one. I love it so much and I don’t even really know how to describe it? The songs aren’t separated, so it flows like a 13-minute mini-mixtape, and it touches on pretty much every aesthetic I dig. RIYL: DJ Screw, Subzero, Mindforce, The Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito Show, Ego Trip magazine

And, if you’ve somehow managed to make it this far, I want to congratulate you. You’re clearly a sibling-in-arms, and I hope that you A) found your band name-dropped, B) are impressed at how few releases I missed (although I’m positive I missed a shit-ton), or C) discovered something new that you really loved. But there’s still a few more records I want to talk about before I let you go.

I love Every Time I Die. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to name my 5 favorite hardcore lyricists, Keith Buckley would certainly be in there, and I think they’re a remarkably consistent band— the singles they dropped recently are some of their best work yet. They are indisputably the pride of upstate New York hardcore, maybe second only to luminaries like Earth Crisis and Snapcase. But as much as I love them, and hardcore from all over the country— and, indeed, the world— hardcore in 2020, and, in a way, 2020 for me in general, belonged to the Best Coast, the West Coast.

DRAIN and Gulch are Northern California bands who share members, but could not have more drastically different approaches to music. DRAIN’s absolute ripper of an LP, California Cursed, synthesizes every strain of West Coast crossover thrash into a succinct beast of an album— from Suicidal Tendencies to Cryptic Slaughter, you can see an entire lineage in them, and yet they sound explicitly modern and free of any elements of cosplay or Nostalgia Poison. Meanwhile, Gulch’s Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress takes aspects of Japanese hardcore, noise, first-wave black metal, and gutturally primitive death metal riffs and mixes them together into one of the most violent musical soupcons of the year, if not the most violent; they managed to make the already bitterly caustic sound they fermented on their demo sound soft in comparison, and yet when the LP culminates with a completely earnest yet completely iconoclastic take on Siouxsie & the Banshees’ goth classic “Sin In My Heart,” you take it completely seriously. Both records are more than worthy of the cavalcades of acclaim they’ve received this year.

Then, from Southern California, you have Rotting Out, who have in previous years genuinely sounded like the lost, hardcore-oriented follow-ups to the first Suicidal Tendencies LP. They’ve always been a great band, but never quite exceptional. That changed with this year’s Ronin, an LP that comes in the aftermath of frontman Wally Delgado’s eighteen-month prison bid. It’s not that their sound has changed all that much— the basic songwriting conceits are still the same, although the band is, on a technical level, at the absolute peak of their powers, and the production is absolutely flawless, which helps a lot— but Ronin shows Rotting Out, and Wally in particular, at their absolute most vulnerable. An album-length examination of institutional oppression, childhood trauma, and unflinching self-reflection, Ronin deserves to go down as Rotting Out’s masterpiece.

And now we come to the end of this monstrously-long missive. If you know me at all, then you know that I am an enormous fan of Touché Amoré— I’ve seen them live more than any other band, and I’ve followed their career feverishly for a bit over a decade now; from the screamo-oriented excoriation of To the Beat of a Dead Horse to the self-examinations of creative pressure and social anxiety on Parting the Sea Between Brightness & Me and Is Survived By to the tragic and revelatory beauty of Stage Four, I’ve felt like the band has grown up with me and mentored me all at once, and there’s nary a song less than incredible in their entire discography. Lament is no exception; I thought the band’s sonic evolution had reached its apex on Stage Four, but Lament finds ways to throw curveballs at the audience without ever completely departing from their bread and butter of melodic hardcore. There’s the discordant pop-punk-gone-wrong-gone-right of “Reminders,” there’s Andy Hull lending his malleable pipes to “Limelight” (in the process making me forget that I actually loathe Manchester Orchestra), and there’s the emotional climax of the album, “A Forecast?” At first almost sounding like an update to the band’s previous piano-driven mini-epic “Condolences,” “A Forecast?” is absolutely heartbreaking, and I try not to use cliche adjectives like that often. Jeremy Bolm’s lyrics are as acerbic, witty, and self-aware as ever, and in the process he manages to sketch a tragicomic portrait of himself laid bare for the listener, analyzing his emotional response to the emotional response of his fans while also processing the aftermath of the grief that Stage Four spent its runtime analyzing, and still finding time for lovably pithy toss-offs like “I’ve lost more family members/Not to cancer, but the G.O.P.” which are as cuttingly specific and intimate as they are relatable. Lament is the best album of 2020, and thank the hardcore deities that Touché Amoré were around to write it.

-xoxo, Ellie

UPDATE: Today I also listened to Scalp’s Domestic Extremity and You Lose’s Mental Warfare. Shit is fuckin nutso.

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