"Everyone's a target!" That was something that Division Of Mind bassist David Jaycox bellowed during the first song of his band's set at the Richmond venue the Camel last month. Those three words were an incitement, not an exaggeration. There's video of DOM's set on the internet, and it's fun to watch, but it doesn't come close to capturing how it felt in that room. I was by the door of the club, which is somewhat inconveniently right next to the stage, and it felt like the place was exploding. Bodies and limbs flew in every direction. The people in that room needed a violent, cathartic outlet, and that's what a DOM show is.
Near the end of the set, Division Of Mind frontman Zachary Acosta-Lewis had a few words to say about what hardcore is, what it can do: "It's been such a fuckin' deluge of horror and terror and violence and horrible shit that gets beamed into that fuckin' evil rectangle in your pocket every day." Everyone's a target. Allow him to continue:
The way this whole shit functions is that this entire infrastructure, this system, all these institutions that are supposed to protect you and give you your rights were designed very specifically to give you the impression that there's no fuckin' alternative to them, there's no fuckin' alternative to having your tax money go to drop bombs on fuckin' people in Palestine and Iranians and people in fuckin' Syria and everywhere else across this world that these companies and businesses fuckin' bomb for profit, and everything else that makes you think you gotta work fuckin' 60 hours a week, and you think you gotta be ready to get fuckin' beat by ICE if you fuckin' go outside while your neighbors are getting disappeared.
And I don't have the fuckin' answers! I know y'all think that shit sucks. I don't have the fuckin' answers. And I don't know how to tell anybody — I'm not an activist or a protester or a fuckin' politician or anything else. I'm just a fuckin' hardcore kid. The thing that hardcore impressed upon me when I was a very young person was there is a fuckin' alternative. An alternative lives in all these fuckin' people right here.
It's not fuckin' perfect. It's not gonna save the fuckin' world. It might not actually save anything. We might all be fuckin' dead in here. I don't know. But the only options I ever saw when I was a fuckin' young kid, a young adult, were people that came to spaces like these with like minds, like me, and wanted to fuckin' have an alternative to all that horrible shit. I don't know if it's gonna work. I don't know if it's gonna fuckin' play out. But that's what you got. And if you're up here in this fuckin' room, you got that. Not a lot of people have that shit.
I did my best with that transcription, anyway. I'm sure I didn't nail all of it, but you can hear it for yourself just past the 15-minute mark of the video below.
I love Division Of Mind's music, a heavy and guttural chug that sometimes, at least on record, veers into dank, haunted industrial territory. But the things that keep bringing me back are those speeches, which I find genuinely inspiring, and the absolute bedlam that DOM unleash when they play. Those two things seem like they should contradict each other. They don't.
Zachary Acosta-Lewis often talks about community, about taking care of each other and finding a place where horrible shit is not in command. He's very good at laying it out. In his other life, Acosta-Lewis is a college professor. His mid-show speeches are passionate and elegant, and they sometimes sound like they were written out beforehand. He means what he says. But at DOM shows, people joke about beating their friends up, about killing each other. Those jokes are not just jokes. Crazy things happen at those shows. At least one person had to stagger out during their set at the Camel that night. The camaraderie and the violence exist side by side with each other. They should detract from one another, but they feed each other instead. I should be used to that by now, but I never get used to it. I'm drawn to that. I think it's beautiful.
I've seen Zachary Acosta-Lewis make some version of that speech many times. Living near Richmond, I'm spoiled for Division Of Mind shows. They play in their hometown all the time, and they don't play anywhere else very often. I started writing this column six years ago, and DOM's self-titled LP came out just before the column began. They still haven't released anything else since then. I keep hearing that there's a new record on the way, and it keeps not arriving. That doesn't matter. I'd love another one, but I don't need it. I just need to see them get up in front of a crowd and destroy every once in a while.
This particular night felt especially combustible. People were ready for that show. The Camel can comfortably fit a few hundred people, and that place was packed out. It was the first Richmond show for Eliminators, the new San Francisco hardcore punk band led by onetime Richmond fixture Ace Stallings. Ace is still intermittently active with the stomp-ass Richmond band Mutually Assured Destruction, but he moved out to the Bay Area a few years ago, and he does a lot out there these days, booking shows and helping to plan the annual RBS Fest. Eliminators make fast, raw, mean hardcore punk, and Ace started the band specifically so that he could play shows with fellow Bay band Fentanyl.
Mutually Assured Destruction play hardcore as groove-metal, and Ace sings in a titanic Danzig-style bellow. Eliminators aren't like that at all. They're fast and nasty and ultra-simple, and their primitive pummel hits on a primal level. Ace is a real presence. He's a big motherfucker who plays a lot of rugby, and you can tell. Whether he's howling or barking, the guy has gravitas.
The Richmond show was supposed to be the opener on an East Coast weekend run for Eliminators, but things didn't work out that way. The day after the Camel show, a gigantic arctic storm hit the eastern half of the country, burying us under snow and then ice. Where I live, schools were closed for a solid week, and I couldn't even move my car until I used a pickax to clear out some of the ice. It's been weeks, and the snow is only finally melting now. I was amazed that Eliminators even showed up, but being in a hardcore band requires a certain heedless level of commitment. They managed to play one more gig, a Philly matinee the next day, and then had to leave on one of the last planes back to California. When I emailed Ace for a photo just now, he said, "Hey the 2/4 shows we played were very sick!"
Those of us at the Richmond show knew that the storm was coming in, that this show might be the last communal thing we get to do for a little while. The end-times feeling extended beyond the weather. The morning after the show, I woke up to the video of Border Patrol agents murdering Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. It's a severely fucked up time to be alive in America. Forces that used to operate in shadow are right out in the open now, not even trying to justify what they're doing, daring humanity to stop them.
On top of all that, the Camel show happened on the same day that tickets for United Blood, the great Richmond hardcore fest that just returned last year after a long hiatus, went on sale and sold out in two minutes. That was probably the main thing that anyone was talking about at the show: Did you get tickets? And if you didn't, how are you going to get in? What's your strategy? (I didn't get tickets, and I'm still trying to figure out a way in, just like everyone else.) That night, a whole lot of people in Richmond were in the right mood to go to a hardcore show, and that hardcore show popped off in a big way.
This was one of those perfect-storm shows where everything just felt right. They happen sometimes. It wasn't a big, anticipated occasion. Other than Eliminators, all the bands on the bill were local. The Camel doesn't quite have the clubhouse feel of the Warehouse, the great Richmond DIY venue that shut down last year, seemingly for good. (I generally don't identify DIY venues in this column, but a ton of past editions have been about Warehouse shows. It's one of the best venues I've ever been to, and its loss is felt acutely.) That night, though, the Camel was good enough. I missed maybe half of the set from seemingly very young openers No Paradise while waiting in line outside, but I did get to see all of Lose Sight, a Richmond band that also seems very young. Their Richmond Straight Edge 7" came out on the day of the show, and it's nasty as hell. Some of those songs already sound like anthems.
The crowd reacted to No Paradise, though seemingly not as much as No Paradise wanted. They reacted to Lose Sight and Eliminators, too. They went bugnuts for Division Of Mind, which is what happens every time DOM play and which never gets old. This was one of those nights that's about more than the bands who play, though I liked all the bands who played. It was about the feeling in the room — the sense of having each other's backs in a world where everyone's a target.
Burning Lord - "Ambush"
This song is literally about medieval warfare, but it's got so much bounce, so much swagger. Did medieval warriors have swagger? They must've. It just probably didn't look much like the way we understand swagger today. At a time when maybe half of the bands on the current hardcore underground want to sound like New York in 1988, Burning Lord actually pull it off. But their version of that sound conjures images of a Derrick Henry stiff-arm with an iron gauntlet, which is a whole other thing. [From Collateral/Burning Lord split, out now on Fortress.]
Crush Your Soul - "Style Dominates"
Jay Petagine from Mindforce has one of the greatest voices in present-day hardcore. It's a nasal Noo Yawk bark that he deploys in staccato bursts. He's got the self-assurance of a rapper, even if he never actually raps. It works great on Mindforce's elemental dinosaur-stomp, and it truly elevates the ignorant shit that he makes with his side project Crush Your Soul. This is the band where Jay gets to go full Merauder, at least when it's not sample skits and random boom-bap tracks. When Crush Your Soul are at their hardest, which is what "Style Dominates" is, they hit like the Clothesline From Hell. [From Ice Water, out now on Streets Of Hate.]
Giallo - "Black Cat"
Not a Janet Jackson cover. Nasty-ass Minneapolis band Giallo named themselves after a particular form of cheap, aesthetically arresting Italian horror movie, and that cinematic style its own very specific soundtrack. The band Giallo sometimes play around with the creepy knife-edge sonic style of those pictures, and they sound cool when they do. Sometimes, they also sound like the Tasmanian Devil whirl-crashing through a series of plate glass windows, and that sounds even cooler. Their epic album-closing Stooges-core dirge somehow pulls off both of those objectives. Play it loud enough, and you will feel like you're rolling around in gutter murk and razor wire, possibly because the power of a witches' coven compels you. [From Tenebrarum, out now on Convulse.]
Holder - "Ruin The Best Of Me"
I've talked about it before. I've probably talked too much about it before. I still just can't get over it — this whole new generation of crazy-young bands, like Balmora and I Promised The World, who are so dedicated to reviving the '00s JNCO metalcore that came out before anyone in those bands was born. That stuff seemed silly and arcane when it was new, but these new bands all launch themselves into it with total conviction and sincerity, and more often than not that shit works. Holder work on the screamo side of the spectrum, but this isn't Infant Island-type screamo. It's vast and clean and violent. When it all surges upward and hits, I feel like someone just drove an 18-wheeler through my ribcage, straight into my heart. [From Ruin The Best Of Me double single, out now on DAZE.]
Killing Pace - "War Machine" (Feat. Antichrist Siege Machine)
Here's my internal monologue when I'm thinking about the Killing Pace song "War Machine": The song is called "War Machine," right? And it's got a guest vocalist from the band Antichrist Siege Machine. But a siege machine would be a kind of war machine, right? And then an antichrist siege machine would be a particular type of siege machine? If you're launching a siege against Nazareth, maybe? So isn't the title kind of redundant? And here's my internal monologue when I'm listening to Killing Pace song "War Machine": ARRG! RAAAH! FLUUUUR! KREEEH! BLOOOOOD! [From HCPM, out now on Triple B/Streets Of Hate.]
Knocked Loose - "Hive Mind" (Feat. Denzel Curry)
When Turnstile want to mess around and experiment, they make a prettily trippy new wave song. When Knocked Loose, Turnstile's closest peers on post-pandemic hardcore-boom popularity, want to mess around and experiment, they dial into the Memphis-inflected gurgle-splat slam of a band like PeelingFlesh, expanding it into something bigger and deffer and bringing in a double-time rap star who can match their energy. It's an ideal version of Judgment Night mall-metal for an age when malls have become abandoned, desiccated husks. [Stand-alone single, out now on Pure Noise.]
Loose Leash - "This Chaos"
Loose Leash are a brand-new DC band that includes ex-members of Bacchae and Give, and they haven't even played live yet; their first gig is opening Angel Du$t's record release show in Baltimore next week. They already rule. In this song, I hear echoes of the classic DC hardcore of generations past, the stuff where people were just ripping their metaphorical veins open and spilling their feelings onstage. There's also a whole lot of funky low-end and some classic-rock shredding that most of their contemporaries would never attempt. It's early, and DC bands have a habit of breaking up immediately after forming, but they could be something truly special. Keep an eye on them. [From Loose Leash demo, self-released, out now.]
Ritual Cross - "General Dynamics"
David Anthony, the great music writer and occasional Stereogum contributor, is the guitarist in this Chicago band. I've never met David, though were were apparently unwittingly hanging out at the first Avail reunion show, but I have a ton of respect for him. He likes a lot of ultra-deep Japanese hardcore and underground metal that I don't understand, and I get the sense that he wouldn't like a lot of the music that I cover in this column. That's how it goes! We all got opinions! Ritual Cross make ultra-nasty crust and don't put their music on streaming services. Whenever they can do anything to make their music less accessible, they do it. The vocals on this song sound like echo-drenched demon burps, and the guitars sound like surfing on a tidal wave of dumpster juice. It's fucking awesome. [From II, self-released, out now.]
Taker - "Boots" (Feat. Jenny Woo)
I've heard two great oi records in 2026, and they both come from the same group of miscreants in Buffalo. First, it was Violent Way's A Need For Something More. Now, it's this one from Taker, a group that shares at least one member with Violent Way. I might like the Taker take even more because they sound like Scary Ramones — Too Tough To Die, if they actually were too tough and didn't die. Shoutout to the Guided By Voices cover on this record, which is scratching a mental itch that I didn't know I had. Also, I'd never heard of Jenny Woo before. Apparently, she comes from Canada and makes acoustic oi, which does not sound like my thing. But she bodies this fucking song. It's wild to hear someone singing soulfully on a track like this. [From Sons And Daughters, out now on RubyDisc.]
Unreal City - "Emptiness"
Pittsburgh's Unreal City released a beast-ass album in 2020 and then nothing else after it. They didn't break up, though. They just went inactive for a while because frontman Joseph Sanderson, formerly of Eternal Sleep, could temporarily move to Southeast Asia and become a Muay Thai champion. That's not me being cute with the descriptions. That's what this guy did. Now, Unreal City are back with a metallic spine-cruncher — some real Ong-Bak shit. [From Blood Memory EP, out 3/6 on WAR.]
