Torture weren’t supposed to be there. They’re not a festival band. They’re barely a band at all. Torture are the project of one guy, a young Chicago multi-instrumentalist who calls himself K.K., and he just added a couple of touring musicians. They only played their first show a few months ago. Their chug-splat music is almost comically unfriendly. They make statements against warfare on a global scale while encouraging you to beat the motherfuck out of your friends while they beat the motherfuck out of you — a strange tension that shouldn’t work but does. And now, K.K. is up onstage in sunny Los Angeles, making chug-splat music for thousands of people, standing up behind his drums and yelling into his Janet Jackson-ass headset mic: “This is your last fucking chance! I don’t give a fuck! Side to side! Front to back! I don’t give a fuck! Kill someone! Hurt someone!”

TORTURE pic.twitter.com/EINTzko3Cy

— haha iight (@DAZE_STYLE) July 14, 2024

The rise of Torture has been one of the weirdest things that’s happened in hardcore in recent months. Torture are not even a hardcore band, at least in the way that the term is generally applied. They’re slam-metal, a genre that’s obscure enough that I barely know what it is. Their music, with its constant time-signature switches and stomach-drop chugs and demon-roars, is ugly to the point of absolute parody. Because he leads the band while playing drums, K.K. can’t even do the hype-the-crowd theatrics that are usually required of a hardcore vocalist. But the crowd gets hype anyway. That’s the secret.

When Torture were a Stereogum Band To Watch last month, most of the comments were like: “What is this? This is terrible!” I get it. I can’t listen to Torture at home, either. I don’t know how many people can. Instead, when you’re not in the room, Torture are best consumed in live-show video snippets. It’s not the music; it’s the things that the music makes people do. Torture send an animal signal to people’s brains. It makes them switch into blood-drunk berserker mode. This should probably be incompatible with between-songs speeches about the genocidal slaughter in Gaza, but hardcore is a land of contradictions. I can’t wait to see Torture live.

torture pic.twitter.com/7tYJxEOQOs

— hate5six (@hate5six) May 16, 2024

If it wasn’t obvious by now, I wasn’t at Sound And Fury. I’ve never been to Sound And Fury. One of these years, I’ll make it. For a while, Sound And Fury has coincided with an annual beach trip that I take with my family. It’s a blissful and restorative ritual, something I look forward to every year, but I inevitably end up awake at two in the morning one night, watching people moshing in the sunlight 3,000 miles away and wishing, with at least part of my soul, that I was one of them. Even before it moved into a giant outdoor park, Sound And Fury was probably the most important event on the American hardcore calendar. It’s a DIY festival, run by people in bands, booked as a snapshot of the moment in hardcore rather than a nostalgic trip back to the ’80s or ’90s. That means Torture belonged there, and when the equally heavy Japanese band Kruelty couldn’t make it, they were last-minute additions to the lineup. This was fate working out the way that it should. Torture had to be there. But why? What does that say?

This is another one of those columns where I attempt a vibe-check on a festival, based on shaky and incomplete videos when I wasn’t actually there, like the one I already wrote on this year’s FYA Fest. This is not ideal, but I didn’t get my shit together enough to see any hardcore shows this month, so this is what you get. It’s this or a whole column on Filth Is Eternal opening the Baroness show that I saw, and nobody wants that. (Baroness live show is killer, by the way.) But the crazy thing about this year’s Sound And Fury is that I can attempt that kind of vibe-check. It’s not that hard. From what I’ve seen on my various feeds, Torture had the festival’s most talked-about set. Heavy shit is in.

A couple of years ago, Turnstile blew the fuck up and galvanized one of hardcore’s periodic personality crises. Turnstile are so talented and charismatic and likable that they couldn’t help but find vast audiences. Their pedigree runs deep, but they’ve always messed around with bright, catchy, engaging, non-hardcore styles. More bands have followed them into the melodic, accessible alt-rock side of the pool. But in that FYA column, I noted the possibility that the hardcore world might move away from the safer style that a band like Turnstile represent in a lot of people’s minds. Sound And Fury puts forward a big-tent version of hardcore, one where an arty shoegaze or post-punk band might play next to a death metal one. This year was no exception. By most accounts, though, the shit that stood out was the heavy shit.

I think the biggest pit in sound and the fury was made by BIGBOY

Full set https://t.co/gXMK8HWdNb pic.twitter.com/kuoWHksy3f

— Yo. (@hola_soy_keto) July 16, 2024

For the second year, a mostly-inactive band closed out Sound And Fury. Last year, it was Trapped Under Ice. This year, it was Have Heart. This was a big deal. Have Heart broke up more than a decade ago, and their infrequent reunion shows have been legendary. In 2019, they drew something like 8,000 people to a parking lot in Worcester, Massachusetts. This summer, they’re doing their first shows in five years, and the videos have been incredible. It’s genuinely stirring to see thousands upon thousands screaming along with those songs.

Have Heart al Sound&Fury 😍😍😍😍

Ed era il primo pezzo. pic.twitter.com/ZwJDQxRWcW

— Daniel Molinari (@Brainwashed91) July 16, 2024

Have Heart’s fiery, emotional, often-vulnerable music has been an influential underground force since they’ve been gone, but it’s also heavy. Fiddlehead, the currently-active band from two Have Heart members, have gone in a notably non-heavy direction, making anguished and melodic post-punk that’s sometimes about the hardcore world. (Those guys did double-duty this year, with Fiddlehead closing out the first Sound And Fury night.) In its way, Have Heart’s music is as friendly and engaging as hardcore gets. But in the right context, it can also sound like the apocalypse. They’re a reunited band, but they feel urgent and ferocious. Their presence on the bill was not a nostalgia-trip. It’s goosebump material.

New Video: HAVE HEART – Live at @sound_and_fury 2024 in Los Angeles, CA

Mixed and mastered by legend @HlGHDESERT

WATCH THE FULL SET IN 4K HERE: https://t.co/aMUuLHV7zW pic.twitter.com/2DnLqXnv7p

— 197 Media (@OneNineSevenMDA) July 16, 2024

The rest of the Sound And Fury bill moved in plenty of different directions. There was some stuff that you might characterize as straight-up indie rock: Prize Horse, They Are Gutting A Body Of Water, Chat Pile, Nothing covering Coldplay. The titans of melodic, emo-influenced hardcore — Koyo, One Step Closer, Anxious — were all represented. Touché Amoré played a surprise set. But the videos that keep popping up on my feed — not the most scientific survey, but I’m doing what I can — were the real heavy-ass chuggers: Torture, Peeling Flesh, Volcano, Sanguisugabogg, Big Boy, xWeaponx. People were ready to throw down to this stuff. If it wasn’t Torture, the weekend’s Speed-in-2022-style breakout might’ve been Glasgow’s Demonstration Of Power, partly because their ultra-pale, ultra-bald singer revealed himself to be a Shaolin-level master of the spinkick.

Literally swagged out style
More of this
(Set filmed by the GOAT @OneNineSevenMDA) https://t.co/Ggk8Vd51Fr pic.twitter.com/x1t362R2Xq

— LxR (@TrailOfLuis) July 14, 2024

Hardcore trends are cyclical, and this spinning-elbow goon music won’t necessarily be on top forever. In a lot of ways, the sheer breadth of the Sound And Fury lineup is beautiful. It’s incredibly cool to see a festival where both Sunami and Fleshwater — two very heavy bands, but two extremely different kinds of heavy bands — can both play near the top of the bill. This music isn’t necessarily supposed to be friendly, and the zeitgeist wave of bands like Torture might be a natural correction to a wider-visibility moment. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing, but it makes for a hell of a festival video.

Armor – “Fodder”

This election year is some depressing shit, but this song offers an alternative to the grim fate ahead of us. Rather than picking between two ancient egomaniac war criminals, what if our government was taken over by a swarm of medieval sewer mutants, riding into Washington on the backs of hypercharged crocodiles and bashing K Street lobbyists in the brain with their chain maces? It might sound something like this. Florida D-beat is the real hope and change that we need. [From Afraid Of What’s To Come EP, out now on 11PM Records.]

Blind Girls – “Loveless”

The word Loveless means important things to indie rockers of a certain age, but this ain’t that. My Bloody Valentine’s take on that word is a kind of loud, amniotic dream-state. Blind Girls, a convulsive screamo band from Australia’s Gold Coast, aren’t talking about that. They aren’t talking about the mere absence of love, either. Instead, this “Loveless” is more about wishing that someone in your life would swallow a live grenade — or, at least, that’s how it sounds to me. [From An Exit Exists, out now on Persistent Vision Records.]

Doldrey – “Moral Decay”

A monstrous breakdown usually makes me angry and excited at the same time. When the riff slows down and everything else drops out, it flips some mental switch, like haha yeah, arrrrrg fuck kill, whoo, grrr. But Singapore’s Doldrey make me feel something else with the breakdown on this absolute fucking epic. With this one, it’s a level of dread that almost makes me feel sad. The death-punk attack is fast and vicious and ugly, to the point where the cymbal taps sound like a fire alarm going off, and then everything lurches to a stop. When that happens, the feeling is more: Well, shit, I guess the entire world is about to be swallowed by a celestial demon. Damn. [From Only Death Is Eternal EP, out 8/2 on Iron Lung Records.]

En Love – “Hands Like Lightning”

A weird thing about having kids is that sometimes they want to fight you for no reason. A bigass 12-year-old will just wheel around and kick you in the stomach and then laugh about it. You can’t take it personally because that’s just what 12-year-olds do. I did that to my friends when I was 12, and they did it to me. When you’re an adult, you lose that urge, but maybe there are some exceptions. I have to imagine that the members of the Columbus band En Love are all older than 12 — touring would be difficult otherwise — but this is the kind of song that punches you in the stomach and laughs about it. [From Promo, out now on Delayed Gratification Records.]

Gasket – “Guillotine”

I keep talking about how weird it is to see Baltimore, my hometown, becoming a hotbed for hardcore when that stuff was only barely around when I was having all my formative punk-show experiences. You’re probably sick of it. I’m just bringing it up to say that Gasket, a relatively new Baltimore band, would’ve absolutely killed in those settings. Reeboks-and-Champion-hoodies hardcore wasn’t really a factor in my youth, but church-hall crust shows were a safe space for this kind of guttural evilness, and this song might’ve changed my life at 15. [From Babylon EP, out now on Blue Grape Music.]

Khasm – “Ad Nauseum”

The whole Ephyra ’00s-metalcore revival has been a tough one for me to figure out. These bands, as far as I can tell, are made up of kids, but their music has none of the quotation-mark smirkiness that usually comes with decades-past pastiche music. Instead, Las Vegas’ Khasm attack that sound with total apocalyptic sincerity, treating the moan-sung melodies and mountainous doom riffage and demon-screams like they invented that shit. I can’t understand it, but I can’t deny it, either. This goes hard. [From Theater Of War EP, out now on Ephyra.]

Poison Ruïn – “Confrere”

Do Poison Ruïn count as a hardcore band? Do they even count as a punk band? The aesthetics are punk as fuck, and I see their merch at every show, but this song sounds more like what might happen if prime ZZ Top were under a mind-control spell from an evil zombie witch. This is not a criticism. That’s fucking awesome, and I can’t think if anything else that even sounds like it. [From Confrere EP, out 8/2 on Relapse Records.]

Rat Cage – “Thatcher’s Back”

Can you imagine how the US might work if we had this kind of class consciousness and historical perspective? I don’t know how old the members of Rat Cage are. Maybe they weren’t even born during Margaret Thatcher’s reign. But people in the UK still know well enough to spit on the ground every time Thatcher’s name comes up, and the political situation over there is fucked up enough for this band to write a frantic, feral ripper about wanting to shred every trace of that awful woman’s legacy. Meanwhile, we’re still making laudatory Ronald Reagan biopics over here. We could learn something. [From Rat Cage/Gefyr split, out now on Bunker Punks Discs & Tapes/Flyktsoda Records.]

Sonagi – “Rain Shadow”

“Fuck the air! In your lungs!” Ryann Slauson is the hardest out. I don’t think Philadelphia screamo warriors Sonagi even identify as a hardcore band, and the parts of this song with the little xylophone dings are actively pretty. But when this shit surges upward and explodes, there’s absolutely nothing that makes me feel more bulletproof. [From Everything Is Longing EP, out 8/2 on Secret Voice.]

Torena – “False Compassion”

What is it about the cymbal taps here? This song is a brutal-ass machine, a masterwork of bulldozer riffs attacking at Ferrari speeds. The singer sounds like the spirits of the ancestors have returned to get their revenge on the foul forces of progress. In just about every way, it’s a perfect heavy hardcore song. But the thing that really pushes it over the top is these little ding sounds that somehow feel more violent and discordant than everything else. What a mysterious thing. [Stand-alone single, out now on DAZE.]