The 10 Best Hardcore Albums Of 2024
Last month, Knocked Loose were musical guests on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Their performance was a spectacle: plumes of fire, a Poppy appearance, rain pelting down on the moshing crowd at the outdoor stage. Supposedly, at least one adolescent was frightened. Knocked Loose are currently the biggest band in all of hardcore, to the point where nobody can agree whether they’re a hardcore band or just an arena-metal band whose members are all hardcore kids. They’ve reached the point where they can stage that Kimmel spectacle, with all the attendant viral silliness, without coming close to compromising the ferocity of their music. That’s crazy.
Over the past few months, there’s been lots of conversation about whether the hardcore bubble has popped, whether the sudden post-pandemic boom of interest in the music is finally on the wane. Apparently, a few recent tours didn’t do the numbers they were supposed to do. Meanwhile, the underground zeitgeist belongs to heavier and less accessible sounds like the gurgle-splat pig-oink slam of PeelingFlesh. Maybe we’re no longer dealing with the euphoric unity-surge that came when Turnstile made their big leap up a few years ago. Maybe that’s fine. But a moment of surreal underground-mainstream crossover like that Knocked Loose Kimmel performance remains possible. So the real truth, I think, is that nobody knows anything.
Over the past 12 months, I had to work a little harder to force myself to leave my house and go to some shows, but that has less to do with the macro health of the subculture and more to do with me getting older and having to drive more than an hour to get to the place where the shows are. I still got to see some magical things, like a late-night Pageninetynine reunion set, a later-night emotional High Vis DIY-space gig, and the grand-scale insanity of Drain’s latest package tour. And I still heard a lot of records that I loved, even if all those records didn’t necessarily fit tidily within the hardcore box.
At this point, the question of whether a record counts as hardcore is one of the most tedious conversations that we can have. When I made this list last year, I went with the “you don’t get to decide” test: If a record has “hardcore” in its Bandcamp tags, then it gets to be a contender. But then Chat Pile put the “hardcore” tag on Cool World, and now that doesn’t feel like it means anything. (Chat Pile played Sound And Fury, and they definitely love hardcore, so that’s part of their sonic identity. But they’re not a hardcore band, and I think those guys would tell you that. They’re fucking great, though.) Instead, I went with a personal smell test, which probably won’t be the same as your personal smell test.
This is a list of albums, which means it’s missing some of the year’s most crucial hardcore records. Often, hardcore thrives in short bursts, and this list would look very different if I factored EPs, demos, and promo cassettes into the equation. So let’s take this moment to acknowledge some of the great short-players that came from hardcore and its adjacent worlds in the past year. You could make a strong case that the EPs from Gel, Sonagi, Mutually Assured Destruction, Pest Control, Secret World, Whispers, Poison Ruïn, Doubt, Private Hell, Bib, Conservative Military Image, and/or Punitive Damage are better than anything that you’ll see below.
A couple of things I noticed when putting this list together: Most of the albums on this list aren’t necessarily mainline fastball hardcore, but I think they work within that culture and tradition. Also, most of the albums that I loved come from pro bands, bands who tour heavily and who might not even have day jobs. That probably means that I slept on some great records that are a little deeper under the surface. I only just heard the debut from the one-man Richmond project Tarantula, for instance, and that thing is great. So leave your favorites in the comments section; I’d love to know what I missed.
This list is entirely subjective, and there’s plenty of stuff that didn’t fit, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t sick. There’s a lot more to this music than what’s in the list. If you’re new to hardcore and you’re intrigued, dig deeper. Plenty of other records could’ve appeared in this space, including the most recent joints from the Chisel, Spaced, Haywire, Nø Man, Touché Amoré, Missing Link, Nails, Firewalker, Life’s Question, Slug, Fucked Up, the Hope Conspiracy, Bootlicker, Sinister Feeling, and Bad Beat, among many others. I just got all excited typing out that list of names, and I also started to question whether I’d put this list together all wrong. I think that means that hardcore is still in a great place.
What a mess. What a beautifully disgusting mess. Public Acid play fast and ugly basement punk the way it’s supposed to be played, and Deadly Struggle sprint-splats its way through eight hammering, indistinguishable tracks in 14 minutes. When you play it loud enough, it feels like you’re being stampeded by a herd of shit-encrusted rhinos in battle vests. It’s like Jackson Pollock painting in phlegm. It’s like you described garage rock to a mob of inept drunks who had never heard garage rock before and then gave them a giant barrel of speed and told them to make a garage-rock classic. Nobody could’ve ever captured the euphoric insanity of a Public Acid live show on record, but this comes way closer than I would’ve ever thought possible.
I truly intended to put Knocked Loose’s You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To on this list out of sheer respect for their combination of big-room ferocity and heaviness, but then I remembered Stan Liszewski roaring, “Fuck every fucking cop that’s ever fucking lived!” Little Rock’s Terminal Nation are nowhere near as popular as Knocked Loose, but they rock even bigger. On Echoes Of The Devil’s Den, they sound like the towering demon on the album cover, combining death-doom immensity with hardcore immediacy like nobody else. A band from the underground — from this underground — has at least one song, “Embers Of Humanity,” that calls up memories of Pantera’s “Cemetery Gates.” That’s astonishing.
Richmond’s Candy have always been more experimental than most of their peers, but they lost me with their last album, the 2022 clank-hiss industrial experiment Heaven Is Here. On It’s Inside You, Candy recapture their groove without walking anything back. The album continues to fuck with hardcore’s boundaries, importing ideas and flourishes from across the landscape: jagged electronic squiggles, acid-house bleep-riffs, the odd DJ scratch. They put all of that in service of extreme guttural expressionism that still works as prime mosh music, and they deliver it with thrilling conviction. It conjures images of the ED-209 from RoboCop spinkicking. The companion-piece EP Flipping, released a few months later, might be even better.
It almost takes longer to explain the context behind Freedom Sweet Freedom than to listen to the LP’s speed-punching 14-minute whole. In 2016, Max Hellesto was imprisoned for assault, and his big brother Ian Shelton started Regional Justice Center as a response; the fast hardcore band takes its name from the facility where Hellesto was incarcerated. Nearly a decade later, Hellesto is home, and he joins his brother as one of RJC’s singers. There’s no peace and precious little celebration on Freedom Sweet Freedom. Instead, the brothers and their friends remain in frenzied and unstable attack mode, processing real trauma through maximum intensity. It’s a jarring, abrasive listen and a life-affirming experience at the same damn time.
A wave of young bands like Balmora, Domain, and Broken Vow has dedicated itself to resurrecting the crushing, dramatic sincerity of OG ’90s metalcore, and nobody digs into that sound with more rigorous true-believer zeal than the Tampa straight-edge brigade Contention. The apocalyptic grandeur of Artillery From Heaven is almost comforting in its scorched-earth severity. For Contention and many of their peers, this sound isn’t past-generations pastiche; it’s the only possible response to an epidemic of inhumanity. They’ve mastered the form, right down to the ominously quiet interludes and the suns-exploding breakdowns, and they dig into it with all the misty-eyed idealism of an early-’60s folksinger. It’s inspiring.
Disclaimer time: I think I’ve at least met all of these Virginia screamo warriors, and one of them, guitarist Alex Rudenshiold, is a friend. Alex played me an early version of this album years ago, so I’ve been anticipating it forever. It delivers. One of the great pleasures of hardcore shows is that you have no idea which people in the crowd will be onstage in the next band, and one of the great pleasures of Obsidian Wreath is that a bunch of young guys from Fredericksburg made a towering, ornate, beautiful aggressive-music opus. The quiet moments have that vast, orchestral post-metal glow, and the loud parts sound like an invasion of elephant-sized badgers with rabies. After all this time, Infant Island have made a stirring triumph of bleakness, a monument to crushed dreams and lost causes still worth fighting for.
Maybe the album took too long, and maybe it’s not as good as the EP. Maybe the band’s image is too perfect, too flashy. Maybe they risk being converted into a meme band whenever Jem Siow whips out his flute onstage. But the sheer blockbuster-level swagger of this record is overwhelming. The music isn’t deep, but it satisfies on a primal level. Speed tap into the ritualistic power of down-the-middle midtempo crunch-stomp singalongs, and they present that style in the sharpest, cleanest, hardest form. Whenever they go even a little bit left, as on the flute intro to “Real Life Love,” it works as the wind-up before the punch, and when the punch lands, it lands hard. The music works just like Speed’s (great) videos: It makes you want to assemble an unruly mob of your closest friends and kickbox down the street en masse. It makes you want to be part of something.
Nobody expected another Gouge Away album. Even Gouge Away didn’t expect another Gouge Away album. And even if there was going to be another Gouge Away album, nobody expected a gnashing, crashing blast of blearily giddy noise-candy quite like this. Years after moving on with their lives, the geographically scattered members of this great band reconvened, expanding and focusing their tart and unique sound into a riff-barrage as catchy as it is damaging. Sharp little touches — a bit of keyboard here, a vocal whisper-taunt there — add subliminal power, even if you don’t clock them for dozens of listens. Here, Gouge Away are freaked out, locked in, and ready to explode. They needed space, so they took it, and they did something beautiful with it.
“There’s something wrong with you, something broken at the source! Nice things come your way, but you want something worse!” That’s writing. Patrick Kindlon finds cutting, specific ways to deliver hard truths. The game is always rigged. Your search for meaning is doomed, and your most self-destructive tendencies will sabotage you every time. Some of the kids on the Walmart bulletin board were forgotten long before they went missing. In a fearsomely uncaring world, all you can do is take care of yourself and the people you love. Kindlon delivers those truths with street-preacher urgency, and his band uses his voice to anchor soaring, pummeling sugar-rush riff-rock so engaging and explosive that the endless fight, the struggle to take care of yourself and your people, feels worthwhile. Maybe, somewhere along the way, you’ll even have fun.
Hardcore records aren’t supposed to sparkle, but Guided Tour sparkles. It chimes, thrums, soars, hums, skitters, and glows. It also churns, roars, bellows, testifies, bangs on its chest, and does the things that hardcore records are supposed to do. With Guided Tour, London’s High Vis look beyond hardcore, taking in decades of communal British music, from pirate-radio garage to Stone Roses festival-psych, without losing their fundamental identity as a DIY hardcore punk band speaking truth to power. It all serves to bolster a message that we’re all we’ve got, that we’ve got to look out for each other. The sonic experiments all work, enriching and complicating a sweaty, back-pounding hug of an album. To sing along to these songs is to feel alive.
