This summer, the city of Paris put on a show for the world. The obvious highlight of last month’s Olympic opening ceremony was the ecstatic vision of beloved prog-metal titans Gojira, all perched on scattered castle ledges like gargoyles, duetting with Marie Antoinette’s severed head and with an opera soprano singing from a passing boat. Two weeks later, blog-rock overlords Phoenix headlined the closing ceremony in the center of the Stade De France, doing a 2009 Will Never Die Bonnaroo Superjam with Air and Ezra Koenig and that one song from Drive. Throughout the two ceremonies, other French and French-enough musicians made their presence felt: Aya Nakamura, Juliette Armanet, Céline Dion, the Minions, that guy with the angel wings and the accordion. It was a lovely spectacle, but at least one strain of vital French music was sorely absent.

A few hours after the Olympic closing ceremony had its big ending, with its Tom Cruise stunts and its listless Snoop Dogg beach performance, I saw one of the best bands in all of France — the best that I’ve heard, anyway — play a mean, surly, life-affirming set in a sticky, sweaty Richmond DIY space with no air conditioning. Syndrome 81, from Brest, are at the forefront of a surging French oi scene that has a fully distinct sound and approach. That scene is doing heroic work in reaching the US. Syndrome 81’s Richmond show was the first in a week-long East Coast run. Returning Parisian heroes Rixe — whose kickass new single would be in this article’s second half if it didn’t feel redundant — are doing a full US run; they’ll be at the very same Richmond venue in a few weeks. Prisonnier Du Temps, the Brest band led by Syndrome 81 bassist Jacky, launch an East Coast tour of their own next week. (Shout out to Michael D. Thorn, the guy who took the photo at the top of this page, for putting me onto them.) The French couldn’t beat us at basketball — though they came close, twice — but they seem determined to prove their total superiority in the field of stomp-chant music.

All three of those bands are different, but all three share a certain approach. They’ve taken this strain of punk rock that comes from a very specific time and place — working-class UK hovels at the turn of the ’80s — and done their own thing with it. These three French oi bands have figured out ways to combine the primal chant-along urgency of down-the-middle street-punk — the blustery glam-stomp beats, the strained and simplistic almost-folk gang-chant choruses, the euphorically pissed-off lyrical class solidarity — and infused them with the icy textures of post-punk. Some of these bands use keyboards and/or drum machines. Most of them have dank, skeletal basslines. All of them bring a strange, atmospheric depth to music that’s never been anyone’s go-to source for strange, atmospheric depth. Prisonnier Du Temps are death-rock enough to cover the Cult.

I’m sure there are people who can tell you all about French oi, tracing historic threads of evil, ominous pop through whichever French port town got the first shipments of Blitz’s Second Empire Justice. As different forms of oi make their presence known within the hardcore landscape, the sheer awesomeness of that street-punk/new wave hybrid has gone global enough to give us Edmonton’s Home Front, one of my favorite bands around right now. I can’t tell you whether these French oi bands are about to have a zeitgeist moment, but I can tell you that I think they’re fucking awesome, and I love the weird synchronicity of three of them arriving on our shores within a few weeks of each other.

It must be pretty fucking difficult for a European band, any European band, to mount a tour of America’s DIY venues. Plane fares are expensive! Van rentals are expensive! If you’re flying halfway across the world to play to a couple hundred people in unventilated warehouses, you’re probably blowing a significant chunk of change. The members of Syndrome 81 are not kids. Syndrome 81 got their name because the band’s two original members, singer Damien and bassist Jacky, were both born in 1981, and you don’t have to be a math whiz to understand that this puts them into the grownup category. I cannot help but admire the determination that they must need to undertake any kind of American tour, especially given that they’re playing communal singalong music in a language that most Americans don’t speak. Damien seemed very amped to find the one guy in the Richmond crowd who could sing along in French.

In person, the goth-rock overtones mostly disappear from Syndrome 81. Those reverby production decisions don’t necessarily translate to the DIY-space sound system, and what we’re left with instead is an exceptional oi band with style and energy and hooks to burn. Damien looks a bit like an overgrown toddler, which works well for an oi frontman; he also jumps around with a whole lot more vigor than most fortysomething bandleaders. The charged-up anthems don’t turn the local hardcore-scene venue into the warzone that it sometimes becomes, but oi isn’t really mosh music, and much of the crowd for this night seems just as old as the people in the band. I’m two years older than those OG Syndrome 81 guys, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen so many fellow greybeards at a DIY gig. Older people don’t kill each other in the same way, and maybe oi is music for older people, at least compared to much of the greater hardcore world. As an older person, I’m good with that.

A truly wild hardcore gig is a spectacle. That spectacle isn’t too much like Gojira on those castle ledges, but it’s breathtaking in its own way. This Syndrome 81 show wasn’t that kind of spectacle, but it felt great anyway. Vive les punks français. If anything, this particular Syndrome 81 show was a great testament to how much overlap there is between a couple of thriving hardcore subscenes — oi and the scrabbling, messy early-’80s-style attack of raw basement punk.

Tallahassee’s Armor are exemplars of a Florida scene that’s full of fast, feral hardcore punk bands like Protocol and Ideation. Armor had a big weekend in Richmond, playing two different guerrilla gigs with some of Virginia’s finest before jumping on the Syndrome 81 show as a last-minute addition. The last time I saw Armor was the weekend before COVID came to town, and they’re sharper and harder now than they were then. Armor looked like they must’ve been at least a little tired after all those Richmond shows, but they still got what might’ve been the biggest reaction of the night.

Armor share a few members with Piston, the Tallahassee oi band who played next. I’d never heard of Piston before this show, but I could see the crossover between Armor’s hectic attack and Piston’s midtempo chug. Those two bands’ styles are different, but they both bring a similar fervor. I ended up spending a bunch of between-bands time hanging out with Piston’s singer, who is my age and who has the Fred Perry logo tattooed on his face. Very nice guy. I did not identify myself as someone who might write about his band. Maybe I should’ve done that.

Richmond locals No-Heads, another band on the bill, play a lot of hardcore shows in the area, but they are definitely not a hardcore band. Their sound is full-on down-the-middle street-punk traditionalism — shouty delivery, boom-boom-boom midtempo riffage, that dint-dint-dint-dint-dernt guitar sound right before the riff comes in that I’m pretty sure the OG oi bands took from the Who. All that stuff is awesome, and I would’ve loved No-Heads when I was in high school. On a different end of the spectrum were Reckoning Force, leaders of an apparently-on-fire basement-punk scene in Virginia Beach. Reckoning Force closed the show, and the singer — only guy in the room in long sleeves — did his best to fire up the crowd by flinging himself offstage recklessly. It worked pretty well.

All the bands I saw on Sunday night are iterating on different punk styles that go right back to the early ’80s, and all of them are doing different things with their points of inspiration. That’s weirdly reassuring. Every band doesn’t have to advance the form. Sometimes, it’s enough to just do an old style really, really well, and that initiative is always a big part of hardcore. But Syndrome 81 stand out by fusing a few flavors of early-’80s music and by making them sound bold and fierce and new. The setting couldn’t possibly have been more different from the Olympics, but once again, the French put on a show.

Blood Sermon & 3ND7R – “Only The Absolute Strongest”

Lots of split releases employ the cool trick where the two bands both contribute a couple of songs and then team up on another one. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard one quite like this. Sweden’s Blood Sermon and Italy’s 3ND7R are both ultra-heavy straight-edge bands, but they sound nothing like each other, and I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that they’ve never even met. Rather than an actual collaboration, “Only The Absolute Strongest” is pretty much two complete tracks, stitched together, with a little bit of jungle breakbeat barely holding everything together like still-wet Elmer’s Glue. The two halves have nothing in common! The recording quality is totally different! They didn’t even try! I would not advise this approach for anyone else, but it works here because the idea is so weird and audacious, and also because both songs rip. [From Unstable Elements split EP, out now on DAZE/Quality Control HQ.]

G.O.O.N. – “Do It”

Some things that I hear in Denver’s G.O.O.N. that I almost never hear in circa-now hardcore bands: the Stooges, mid-period Black Flag, Mudhoney. There’s a certain breed of garage-punk swagger-puke motorcycle-jacket rock ‘n’ roll that hasn’t really had much currency in the underground since Hank Wood & The Hammerheads were running wild, but it returns with glorious starburst intensity on “Do It,” G.O.O.N.’s magnum opus. It’s a five-minute song where the band just forgets about singing and rocks out for like three and a half of those minutes. The percussive zone-out stretch feels like spending the peak moments of your acid trip lying at the bottom of a wet dumpster, in the best possible way. [From God’s Only Option Now, out now on Convulse Records.]

Open Kasket – “Cut-Out”

“Open Casket” would’ve already been a hard-ass band name. When you take a name like that and then spell the word Casket wrong, you signal to the world that you’re about to make something so heavy that gravity might collapse in on itself. Open Kasket are from Little Rock, so you already know they’re about that life. But even with all that information, I was unprepared for the primal gurgle-muck of “Cut-Out.” Maybe I’m tripping, but the unrelenting death-trudge riffs here remind me of Sepultura’s Chaos AD, which was the heaviest shit I’d ever heard in eighth grade and which still may be the heaviest shit I’ve ever heard. This is like Sepultura for people who get their lights shut off because they think they’ve figured out a new way to scam the power company. [Stand-alone single, out now on Barbaric Brutality.]

Peer Pressure – “Ruins”

I don’t think I’m inventing strawmen when I saw that some discerning-music-listener types like to look down on hardcore for taking itself too seriously. To that, I say: Yeah, no shit. That’s one of the things that’s so fucking great about the music. Consider: Quebec City’s Peer Pressure coming through with a sincere heart-on-sleeve ’90s-style anthem about how the human race is poisoning the world and how we’ll all regret the traumas that we are currently inflicting on the planet. Would this be more effective if they made a joke? A winky, self-aware comment on the ineffective nature of protest art? No! Nobody wants that shit! You want to hear from people who seem to feel that they can alter the course of human history if they scream loud enough! That’s way more inspiring! [Stand-alone single, self-released, out now.]

Pest Control – “Time Bomb”

Last year, Leeds marauders Pest Control dropped Don’t Test The Pest, one of the hardest works of berserker crossover-thrash that I’ve heard in years. “Time Bomb” suggests that record might’ve just scratched the surface. Pest Control are so fast and mean and angry that I’m not even mad this isn’t a Rancid cover. This breakdown makes me want to cannonball into the spike pit from Mortal Kombat. [From Year Of The Pest EP, out this fall on Quality Control HQ/Triple B Records.]

Queensway – “Baltimore Blood”

I’ll be honest: There’s no way a song called “Baltimore Blood” was not gong to make it into this roundup. This one could’ve cut off after the Macbeth-sample opener, and I would’ve still fucked with it. (I had this idea about how Macbeth is the most Baltimore of all Shakespeare’s plays, but I am not willing to put in the actual scholarship to back that claim up.) Similarly, it’s great just to see ultra-heavy Baltimore bruisers Queensway back in action after an extended layoff from releasing music, so I’m already on board. But this thing is so majestically ugly and bloodthirsty that all my disclaimers are totally unnecessary. It’s always great to hear music that sounds like a series of bricks falling from a second-story window onto your head; it’s just that much better when that music proudly reps your hometown. [From “Of Flesh, Bone, And…” b/w “Baltimore Blood” single, out now on DAZE.]

Regional Justice Center – “Freedom”

Regional Justice Center exist for a very specific purpose. Ian Shelton’s younger brother Max got into a fight and was given a six-year prison sentence for assault. Ian had to make splenetic, choked powerviolence about the fear and anger and helplessness that comes when a loved one is incarcerated. He literally named RJC after the facility where his brother was locked up. Years later, Max is out of prison, and Ian is getting famous as the guy from Militarie Gun, hanging out with Post Malone and shit. So there’s a glorious circularity to RJC’s return, now with Max out front, screaming his face off. “Freedom” is both triumphant and resolutely, ferociously angry — a whole lot of conflicted emotion in a song that’s barely a minute long. [From Freedom Sweet Freedom, out 9/20 on Closed Casket Activities.]

Risk – “Gravity” (Feat. Street Power)

This shit doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes, it can just be two down-the-middle Boston meathead all-stars getting together to yell about fighting (or whatever) over some of the sickest riffs you ever heard. “Gravity” belongs to the proud tradition of hardcore songs with so many sick riffs that it has to burn through like three of them before the song even properly starts. When the intro takes up at least half of the song, you know you’ve really got something. Subgenres are great and all, but sometimes you need to hear someone nailing fastball midtempo hardcore as if there’s no other way for it to be done. [From Demonstration Of Destruction tape, out now on Triple B Records/Collyde Records.]

Squint – “Magic”

It’s almost too catchy, like to the point where I get suspicious. This is how “industry plant” conversations get started — when a band comes in with such a focused, propulsive, accessible take on an ostensibly underground genre (in this case, Drug Church crossbred with the first Foo Fighters album) that it just seems impossible. But Squint, from St. Louis, are the real deal. There hasn’t been an album yet, but every existing Squint song has the potential power to break containment and pop up on the normie world’s radar. When the songs are this good, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. [Stand-alone single, out now on Sunday Drive Records.]

Sikm – “Now I Must Comply”

This month’s column comes full circle. I know virtually nothing about Sikm, except that they’re from Atlanta and that they share members with some other bands I’ve never heard of. How do you pronounce their name? Is it like “sic ’em”? No idea! But here’s what I can tell you: Sikm are now America’s finest French oi band — so dedicated to capturing the strange magic of street-punk en français that they went to Paris and recorded this shit with Rixe’s Maxime Smadja behind the boards. USA, baby! We’re catching up! We’ve got four years for Americans to get good enough at French oi that we can include it in the 2028 Los Angeles opening ceremony. [From Now I Must Comply EP, out now on Beach Impediment Records.]