If I'd heard Age Of Apocalypse's debut album Grim Wisdom when I was 14, I would've been extremely fucking in, but it never would've occurred to me that I was hearing a hardcore album. In the '90s, hardcore was expanding in a million different directions, but I didn't know hardly anything about that. For the longest time, I thought of hardcore as a subgenre of punk rock, and it took years for me to figure out that hardcore was something else. Like every other genre of music, hardcore is a branch that became its own tree.