Let me tell you about my friend Bryan. Great guy. Big music head. He goes and sees live music all the time now. He loves stuff like Silversun Pickups and Tune-Yards and Gogol Bordello. Last year, he and I went and saw David Byrne together. That was a good night. I know Bryan because he's a dad in my neighborhood. Our kids used to carpool together. Bryan works for the government. He throws murder mystery parties at his house sometimes, and those are fun. One time, I went bowling with him and a bunch of other neighborhood dads, and I was embarrassed because I sucked so bad. Bryan didn't grow up going to punk shows or anything, but Bryan loves Drug Church.
Earlier this month, Drug Church came through Richmond, and Bryan and I were there. Drug Church were deep in the second half of a big North American co-headlining tour with White Reaper, a distinctly non-hardcore rock 'n' roll band who used to get actual radio airplay. Bryan was fired up. This was his first Drug Church show. Bryan's wife Kate, another homie, was there, too, since she likes White Reaper from hearing them on the radio. Before Drug Church played, Bryan told me and my friend Jason that this might be the night. He might stagedive.
I did not take this seriously. Bryan is 50 years old. I'm just a tiny bit younger than that, and I go to punk shows all the time, but I haven't attempted a stagedive since I was 14 years old. I didn't fuck it up or anything when I was 14. It was great. I loved it. But the stagedive isn't something I do. I figure I'm far too large and far too old for that. I catch stagedivers now. As an extremely tall human being, it's the only time that I let myself go up front at shows. I'm like, "Well, somebody has to catch these motherfuckers." It feels like a public service, not like I'm the asshole blocking everyone's view, even though I'm probably the asshole who blocks somebody's view. Richmond's Canal Club has one bouncer who's slightly taller than me, and he usually posts up next to a support beam near the stage so that he can supervise the pit. He catches divers, too. He has fun with it. We were high-fiving over it after the Drug Church set. Anyway, I was wrong not to take Bryan seriously. Bryan meant what he said.
Drug Church bring out a lot of stagedivers. The stagedive is a key component of their live show, maybe the key component. Whenever the band plays a venue with no barricade, frontman Patrick Kindlon repeatedly insists that he wants to see bodies flying through the air — any bodies, with any level of flying experience. At that Richmond show, he made a beautiful little speech that practically used the stagedive as a metaphor for mutual aid. I can't remember exactly what he said, but it was something like this: It's an expression of true human trust to fling your own body out into unknown nothingness, trusting strangers to catch you. It's a sign that we can take care of each other and keep each other afloat. Immediately after he finished that speech, there was Bryan, up onstage.
Bryan did it. He fucking did it! It ruled! Bryan didn't do a Lionsault off the kickdrum or anything. He didn't pull some Jackie Chan shit out of nowhere. He kind of held up one finger, like "I'm going to do this one time." Then he took the leap — a slightly tentative leap, but a leap nonetheless. He did not fall on his face. He got caught, and then he got passed to the back of the crowd. (I didn't catch Bryan, but I did participate in the passing.) For the rest of the set, I kept seeing Bryan in the pit, his face all red and ecstatic.
This meant so much to me! I found it so inspiring! I go to hardcore shows all the time. Sometimes, they can be the greatest, most visceral experience that you can have. Sometimes, they can feel a little routine. The Drug Church show could've felt a little routine — a bunch of bands of varying levels of hardcore adjacency, making a tour stop in a half-empty room on a weeknight. But this show absolutely fucking ruled for two reasons. One reason was getting to see Bryan did what he did, having the opportunity to see these rituals through somebody else's eyes. That was special, and it reminded me how strange and powerful these rituals can be. The other reason was Drug Church. Drug Church kicked ass.
When I was working on this piece, I sent some of it over to Bryan, and he sent me back an explanation for why he's so drawn to Drug Church. I didn't even ask! With his permission, allow me to quote Bryan at length:
Why am I into Drug Church? First, they're genuinely good musically and lyrically. More importantly, they impart (very well) that everything sucks but at least we're in it together. This in opposition to Turnstile (everything rules if you squint just right!) or IDLES (which is either pathologically (correctly) political or just stupidly, Britishly tongue in cheek).
But Bryan, you say, that is just the root of punk and hardcore. Face the suck together. So why are you so obsessed now?
Because I wasn't lost and disenchanted at 14. It wasn't a message or community I could avail myself or engage (even if my best friend played bass in every punk band east of NYC throughout the 90s).
But I am now at 50. Twenty-three years of work and all my values postured to help make the world a better place. All turned to shit and no reset button.
So everything sucks now, on the daily. I see what no one else sees, and have spent my whole life picking out the — far away — bad guys. But I eventually found a genre (and a favorite band in it) that can just say — look over there, that is bullshit, good thing we all see it for what is. In that sense, I'm not so alone, even if I can't share my truth.
The virtual community through my speakers and rewatching live shows via YouTube did a lot of heavy lifting over the past year and a half. Actually being a real part of that community for one night, when I finally needed it five decades in... it was magical.
Man, look at that! I should just let Bryan write this fucking column. Anyway, Drug Church.
Drug Church tour all the time. They play racetrack rock festivals. They play hardcore fests. They play in support slots on pop-punk tours. They play off-night shows at VFW Halls. They never stop. Patrick Kindlon feels very strongly about this — that a band should play, that the road is an underused resource. As one of the hosts of the hardcore podcast Axe To Grind, he talks about it all the time, sometimes in entertainingly cantankerous ways. When hardcore started to have a crossover moment a few years ago, Drug Church (who, Kindlon insists, don't even really claim to be a hardcore band) took full advantage, and their audience grew. Earlier this year, they toured European arenas as Deftones' openers. Right now, they've got a song in a Taco Bell ad, and it was fun to hear Kindlon's Axe To Grind co-hosts lightly roast him about that a couple of weeks ago.
The White Reaper tour is an interesting one. Normal, non-psycho people like White Reaper, or at least they used to. This was a band that had a #1 alt-rock radio hit in 2019. They toured with Weezer and played Kimmel. (They also played a Stereogum SXSW party and contributed a cover to the Save Stereogum compilation a few years ago, so shout out to them for that.) Not that long ago, White Reaper drew huge crowds to every show. A couple of years ago, the band's rhythm section suddenly quit, and they parted ways with Elektra Records. Not long ago, they quietly announced via Instagram Stories that the East Coast leg of the Drug Church co-headliner will be their final tour. The tour ends in White Reaper's Louisville hometown on Saturday night, and I guess that'll be their last show.
At least theoretically, both White Reaper and Drug Church are punk bands. If you take vocals, presentation, and subcultural affiliation out of the equation entirely, the two bands don't sound all that different. Both bands make bouncy, stompy, catchy guitar music. They both play big, fuzzy riffs nice and fast, and they both have members who clearly grew up listening to '90s alt-rock radio. But when these two bands played the same stage in Richmond last week, the results were very, very different. If anyone had an inspiring, life-affirming epiphany during White Reaper's set, I must've missed it.
From what I'm told, White Reaper and Drug Church traded off headlining duties every night on tour. In Richmond, White Reaper played last, and their crowd was a whole lot smaller and less physical than the one that Drug Church had on the very same stage immediately beforehand. I don't mean to dwell too hard on the contrast, but it was instructive. White Reaper played what must be a pretty regular weeknight rock show in a B-level market. They performed some cool songs with high levels of competence and with some energy. My thing about them is that they sound like they want to be Thin Lizzy even though their natural inclination is to sound like the Cars. That's just me being a rock critic. It's the kind of thing I might say about a pretty regular weeknight rock show in a B-level market.
Public Opinion, the Denver band who sound a lot like Drug Church but with more garage-rock crunch, played first on the bill. I really like them, but they played to a very small crowd, which is what happens when you go onstage in the early evening on a weeknight. Spy got a more frenetic response, which makes sense because Richmond is a Spy kind of town. That band's sound is raw and nasty, but they've been touring hard, opening for whoever. Just before the Drug Church/White Reaper tour, they were out with Converge and Poison The Well. None of those bands is a natural match for what Spy do, but their thrashy attack is a lot of fun for anyone who likes any version of aggressive guitar music, and the road has turned them into a machine. They also look the part — like the scariest dirtbags hanging out in a 7-11 parking lot late at night. Their set was fun, but it wasn't Drug Church.
Drug Church are on another level. They're tireless road dogs, which is the only way that they're even able to function as a band. (Pat Kindlon lives in Australia full-time now; he's probably not flying back to the US for a quick weekend run.) The band is ultra-tight and locked-in, and their music has a tireless sense of spring to it. And they've got Kindlon, an absolute natural of a frontman with a commanding and gregarious presence. Kindlon always wants the show to pop off, and he commits to his efforts to making that happen. Live, Kindlon's intricately sketched-out character studies become bellowed strings of barely-discernible verbiage, but the animating spirit only grows stronger. Maybe they're unlikely envoys for this music out in the larger world, but they put on a fucking show.
Look, Bryan wasn't the only middle-aged suburban dad at that show. I'm one, too. This column is my excuse to get out to hardcore shows more often, but it's not like you're going to find me at a punk-house basement on any given night. Drug Church's version of hardcore, or of something like hardcore, is righteous and approachable and physically involving. For the middle-aged suburban dads of the world, a Drug Church show is about as good as it gets.
I got another chance to look at this music with fresh eyes a few nights after the Drug Church gig, when I took my daughter to see Fleshwater in Richmond. Fleshwater are even less of a hardcore band that Drug Church, but the connection is still fresh. At least a couple of them are still in Vein, at least theoretically. When I saw Fleshwater last year, they were on tour with Chat Pile and Balmora, and that show was a blast. The Richmond show was the last stop on a tour with fellow nouveau shoegazers julie and Midrift, and there were a lot of kids there. It sold out way ahead of time, and it got moved to the National, a 1,500-cap room several times larger than the venue they were initially booked to play. They packed that bitch out.
I don't have as much to say about the Fleshwater show, but it was my daughter's first heavy guitar-music experience. She got into Fleshwater because she likes the Deftones, and that's a pretty easy connection. She didn't do her first stagedive at Fleshwater or anything. Anthony DiDio, the band member who does all the talking onstage, really tried to get the crowd to react like a hardcore crowd, but this was a barrier show full of kids who had never been in that situation. Some of them crowdsurfed while filming themselves with their phones, my first time seeing that in person. I would've loved to see those phones all get sucked up in a tornado and flung far away. But the whole spectacle, all those young people in baggy clothes bouncing around, was cute and wholesome. I bet my first few heavy guitar-music shows in the '90s looked pretty similar. As an entry-level experience, this worked like a charm.
It's always fascinating when hardcore comes in contact with the rest of the world, and that's still happening even after all those trend-pieces about bands like Turnstile faded away. Speaking of which: I'm writing this on the day before I jump on a plane to Salt Lake City, where Turnstile will headline the Kilby Block Party, which is emphatically not a hardcore fest. I've seen Turnstile many times in many different situations over the past few years, but I've never seen them headline a gen-pop music festival before. I can't wait. When hardcore seeps out into the wider world and ceases to function as an underground system, some things do get lost in translation. The other side of that, though, is that you might get to see someone's world change right in front of your eyes. Just ask Bryan.
100 Demons - "Meat For The Beast"
When 100 Demons first blasted out of Connecticut at the end of the '90s, they were the heaviest thing that anyone had ever heard. It's been 22 years since the last 100 Demons record, and tons of heavy hardcore bands have taken their style as a blueprint and run with it. So it's heartwarming that this band, back in action once again, still makes some of the heaviest music that you will encounter anytime soon. The sheer ugliness of those guitar-solo pinch harmonics and the absolute fucking avalanche of a breakdown mark this as hazardous material. In a way, middle-aged ignorance is even more dangerous than youthful ignorance. These middle-aged men are back to their hooligan shit, so proceed with caution. [From Embrace The Black Light, out 6/5 on Closed Casket Activities.]
Ceremony - "Other Hells"
California legends Ceremony have been on a self-discovery journey for the past two decades, and their records have gone from frantic frag-grenade powerviolence to slinky-icy new wave. But unlike a lot of other bands that switch their sounds up constantly, Ceremony have never disowned their old selves. If you go see them live, they will move straight from New Order pastiche to anthemic throat-rip singalong as if that transition is perfectly natural. On "Other Hells," they figure out how to draw from all their past selves, to use something like that wobbly synth-siren in a basement punk context. It's messy and unformed, and that's exactly what's so exciting about it. [Stand-alone single, out now on Relapse.]
Engine - "Time Spent"
I love it when a brand-new hardcore band stumbles into something resembling melody, as if by accident. For LA's Engine, it's all in the bass. The young band has a rough, instinctive, throwbacky quality that pulls from pretty much every past hardcore generation — a revival of a revival of a revival. They're good at it. Big riffs. Hearty choruses. Vocals that sound like someone tried to use a metal trash barrel as an echo chamber. But the molten-funky low end elevates them to another level — to the point where they can cite Bad Brains as an influence and really mean it. [From Demo, out now on Rebirth.]
Forced Order - "My Will Never Dies"
It's been almost a decade since the last Forced Order record, and the members of the LA band have had other things going on, playing in Fury and Twitching Tongues and whatnot. But one of the fun things about hardcore is that no breakup is permanent, no hiatus indefinite. If you feel something deeply enough, you can always reassemble with your old friends to make fast, ugly, mean odes to your own stubbornness. Guidance counselors nationwide should be very concerned about the guitar shredding on this thing. [From Undying Spirit EP, out 5/8 on Triple B.]
Hundreds Of AU - "Own This Monster"
In the late '00s and early '10s, a guy named Jeff Cannonball fronted a New Jersey hardcore band called Black Kites. Jeff then became a much-loved indie wrestler who did a lot of insane things. Now, he's suffering from ALS, and the community is working to raise money for him. One of those fundraising efforts is Hundreds Of Black Kites, the new benefit EP from Jersey screamo warriors Hundreds Of AU. Even beyond the righteous cause, it's fun to hear this frantic, chaotic screamo band call back to a moment when hardcore and screamo were basically the same thing. [From Hundreds Of Black Kites EP, self-released, out now.]
Killing Me Softly - "Eight Pointed Futures"
It's pretty funny that there's an absolutely fearsome metalcore band named after a soothing pop/R&B hit from the '70s, especially since this Leeds band doesn't do anything softly. But Roberta Flack was a jazz musician before she was anything. If you squint just right, maybe you can hear some jazz influence in the way this band switches up tempos constantly, every new riff giving your stomach a midway-ride drop-lurch. Probably not, though. They probably just thought the name sounded hard. They were right. [From Spring Promo '26, out now on Streets Of Hate/Northern Unrest.]
Prisonnier Du Temps - "La Liberté S'Obtient Par Le Sang"
Maybe the single greatest scene in the history of the movies: Victor Laszlo walks into the Casblanca bar where the fucking Nazis are singing their stupid fucking German song, and you can see the gears turning in his head, the muscles in his jaw setting. He walks up to the band and demands to hear "La Marseillaise" right away, in that moment. Humphrey Bogart nods his OK, so the band plays "La Marseillaise," and an immediate wave of emotion washes over the place. All the French exiles stand up immediately, drowning out the stupid fucking Nazis, who just kind of trail off because they know they can't match up to this. People are crying and shit. Laszlo knows that he's done a stupid thing, that the Nazis are about to be all over him, but he knows just as well that it's worth it. Man, I rewatch that scene all the time, and it never loses its power. Anyway, when I get the green light on the X-treme sports Casablanca remake that I've been pitching, I'm doing that scene with this song instead. [From Prendre Le Pouvoir Par La Force, out now on La Vida Es Un Mus Discos.]
RISK - "Unstoppable" (Feat. Death Before Dishonor)
I don't really know guitar terms, but there's a certain kind of wheedly high-note thing that I associate with '80s thrash, and it always makes me want to skateboard into the Resident Evil hallway where the lazers cut you into pieces. I don't even skateboard, but I know I'd be fine because of that guitar noise. What is that? Is that a divebomb? I don't know. Usually, you have to build up to that sound, but this song does it in the opening seconds, and its just gets more ridiculous from there. RISK must be named RISK for a reason. When they play this one live, motherfuckers might start swordfighting with bar stools in the pit. [From Forever, out now on Triple B.]
Show Me The Body - "Dance In The USA"
Something I've been thinking about more and more often lately: The best hardcore frontmen spend a lot of their stagetime calling out dance instructions. You know: "Side to side!" "Everybody two-step!" "Open up this pit right now!" It's not that different from what, say, the "Cha Cha Slide" guy did. I know this song is about metaphorically trying to survive in a ravenously parasitic world, but it's also about dancing, about the sheer physical expression of human exuberance. I like to think that it has something to do with my dumb little "Cha Cha Slide" epiphany. Also, it helps that this might be the most jaggedly catchy song I've heard from Show Me The Body yet, and that band is not exactly light on jaggedly catchy songs. [From Alone Together, out 7/10 on Loma Vista.]
Stingray - "Black Milk"
Everyone who's involved in UK hardcore seems to be in about 14 different bands. With all those bands, it seems like they're like, "Let's just take one incredibly minute and specific style and do it with extreme focus." I like this approach! It means the bands tend to disappear after a few records since there's nowhere really left to go once you nail the thing you're trying to nail, but those records tend to rule. Stingray are UK hardcore types doing thrashed-out D-beat, and they crank that shit up so high — riffs so fast that the guitarists' fingers must turn into hummingbird blurs, vocals so echo-drenched that it's not clear they're in any language. It's ridiculous. I love it. [From Enemy EP, out now on La Vida Es Un Mus Discos.]
