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[title]Looking for a release? Perhaps you’re thinking about taking part in a half marathon, or throwing shapes at an all-nighter in some random warehouse? Or maybe, just maybe, you feel increasingly drawn to that magical place known as the mosh pit. You wouldn’t be the only one: more and more Brits are looking to hardcore music as a means to escape the everyday.
‘It’s down to both virality and the open-mindedness of people,’ says Isaac Hale, guitarist for one of hardcore’s biggest bands, Knocked Loose, days before their largest ever UK show at O2 Academy Brixton, back in March. ‘Hardcore shows are entertaining for the mainstream to watch. Some people love it and some people are laughing at it. There are a lot of viral clips on TikTok where people are just like, “Oh my god, what are they doing? I could never go this.’’ But it raises awareness for the genre.’
Hardcore is a subgenre of punk music characterised by high-speed, maximum-intensity song structures, as well as aggressive lyrics, distorted guitars, loud drums and lots of shouting. It began in the late ’70s and early ’80s with rival scenes in Washington DC, home to Dischord Records bands like Minor Threat, and New York, where Bad Brains paved the way for influential acts like Youth of Today and Gorilla Biscuits. Hardcore is more forceful than Sex Pistols or The Clash, but less intense than thrash metal. And while it never hit the mainstream, hardcore kept evolving – feeding into dozens of subgenres, even as its core scene splintered by the late ’90s.
Now, it’s seeing a comeback. With its DIY ethos and politically charged songwriting, hardcore punk has been experiencing a resurgence in recent years, and British artists are setting a precedent with their raw and uncompromising approach to making music. This is how they got here.
A global community
Two big bands are defining the global hardcore scene right now: Turnstile and Knocked Loose. The numbers don’t lie: they have 2.5 million and 1.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify, respectively. In 2023, Turnstile received three Grammy nominations for their third album, Glow On, including ‘Best Metal Performance’, and in 2025, Knocked Loose’s single ‘Suffocate’ earned the same accolade.
Their increasing popularity parallels the expansion of Outbreak, a festival that started at the 100-capacity Broomhall Centre in Sheffield in 2011 as a niche one-dayer, but is now taking place at Victoria Park under the Lido festival banner and the BEC Arena in Manchester. At peak Glow On success, Turnstile headlined Outbreak 2022 to a crowd of 5,000 people. This is a far cry from the 750-cap House of Vans show the band’s newest guitarist, Meg Mills, played with them back in 2018.
Meg’s story is a great one. The British-born, NYC hardcore-obsessed Turnstile guitarist cut her teeth with local Leeds bands Big Cheese and Chubby and the Gang before meeting the Baltimore group in the late 2010s. They enlisted her as a touring guitarist in 2022 and soon after announced her as a full-time member via the social media rollout of their upcoming fourth album, Never Enough, earlier this year. She’s seen the scene flourish in recent years.
‘In hardcore, everyone’s one person removed from even the biggest band in the scene at the time,’ she tells me on Zoom, the day news breaks of her permanent membership. ‘Turnstile had some big touring commitments coming up, and I was just on the radar, which is insane and amazing. Especially coming from the viewpoint of 11 years ago, when I was just a teenage fan, and that’s kind of a testament to how the scene is.’
She believes this sense of openness is what’s driving the scene’s expansion, removing the distance between fans and artists. At Turnstile shows, you’ll see the band’s videographer in the crowd, streaming live footage for the visuals behind the stage. They also maintain the no-barrier rule, which allows fans to run up on stage and throw themselves into the writhing pit below. ‘We’re all from the same, DIY, hardcore scene,’ she says. ‘It’s not like, ‘‘Oh, we’re the band now, and we’re on the big stage,” it’s about the fans. It’s for the fans.’
Crossing the Atlantic
Hardcore may have been born in the US, but Brits are giving it a whole new feel. There are, quite frankly, a shit load of bands coming out of the UK right now. There’s the metalcore sound exemplified in Yorkshire’s Malevolence, the Merseyside–twanged vocals in London-based High Vis, and the uber-fast London-based Stiff Meds. These come bolstered by independent labels such as Northern Unrest and MLVLTD Music, and upheld through promoters like Concrete Culture, festivals such as Outbreak, and a rising curiosity from more mainstream bookers at Slam Dunk and Download.
Bryan Garris, frontman of American band Knocked Loose, is famously a fan of the British scene. The band played their biggest headline show in the UK this March, taking over Brixton Academy with rockers Basement and thrash-crossover group Pest Control as handpicked support acts. ‘Every time we tour Europe, we always take a UK band, we’re always trying to keep up with all of mainland Europe’s up-and-coming bands,’ Bryan says. ‘But there are just so many UK bands that we like, like Demonstration of Power, Splitknuckle, Static Dress.’
Guitarist Isaac Hale is quick to chip in. ‘We need to also shout out Higher Power, who are a huge part of the UK scene in general,’ he says, explaining that the group have played a large part in Outbreak’s growth, performing on the festival’s second stage in 2022 and then the main stage in 2024 to a noticeably larger crowd. ‘We're all trying to check out as much as we can this year [when Knocked Loose headline]. We're fans of the music as much as anybody else is.’
Pest Control is one of the bands Knocked Loose will be looking out for. The Leeds-based five-piece combine hardcore punk, thrash metal and on-the-nose imagery (they’ve previously thrown giant cockroaches into the crowd) and caught the attention of Knocked Loose, who recruited them for their European tour. ‘When we watched Knocked Loose, I hadn’t seen anything like that for quite a long time, or on that scale,’ drummer Ben Jones says. ‘You’re used to seeing it in smaller venues, where everyone's getting involved and it's chaos, but seeing 2,000 people moving in the way they did, it was like watching a ’90s Machine Head festival video, where people had no regard for their safety, or had any inhibitions.’
The best bands are ones that don’t try to be from somewhere else
They’re keen to highlight how British hardcore has its own thing going on. ‘Each part of the UK, or each city, has its scene. And the music that’s big in those scenes varies quite a lot,’ Ben explains. ‘Birmingham has always been quite beatdown-focused [incorporating punk and hip-hop influences, like Speed], so when we played shows with local bands, the crowds were kind of confused about what to do with us.’
‘The best bands are ones that don’t try to be from somewhere else,’ Jack Padurariu, the group’s bassist, says. And he’s right. The UK’s 1980s hardcore punk pioneers, such as Heresy and Ripcord, drew from the DIY attitudes of their punk predecessors and mucked into each other’s record labels or played in each other’s bands. As a result, they built local scenes, underpinned by a loyal fanbase, and set a standard for future generations.
Cracks in the scene
Much like how Meg Mills and the Pest Control guys found inspiration in the pits of their local venues, so did Francie Dangar Wilde. The 21-year-old Londoner started as an emo fan but explored her punk leanings through Spotify’s radio feature and recommendations from friends, resulting in her finding hardcore. Through attending local shows, she discovered a community of other creatives and started her own ‘power violence’ band, Skrapper.
‘I’ve always been very self-conscious about my appearance, and the attitude of just not caring at all and going purely by energy really spoke to me; it was liberating,’ she explains. ‘As I explored more and more bands, the heavier stuff stuck with me the most. I have a lot of anger to carry, and it’s always been an outlet.’
She ended up following the same path as Meg, going from the crowd to the stage, playing bass with her band Skrapper. They’ve even played in proper London hardcore venues like New Cross Inn.
‘Hardcore is becoming more relevant to more people because everyone is getting angrier,’ she says. ‘There’s been injustice after injustice, blatant and unapologetic greed and bigotry perpetrated by the most influential and powerful people. Not only is it an outlet for rage, but the community is often so accepting and supportive. It’s inspired me to make music because it’s cathartic to let yourself be mad. Bad things have made me angry, and I don’t see why I should have to hide that away or bottle it up. I can’t even describe how therapeutic it’s been to just scream about everything and occasionally spin kick someone.’
I can’t even describe how therapeutic it’s been to just scream about everything
There’s a new wave of fans flocking to hardcore shows, and they’re mostly kids like Rupert, a 17-year-old from Brighton, who found most of his favourite bands (Title Fight, Crass, Hijōkaidan) on YouTube deep dives. He’ll be going to Outbreak this summer in London. ‘I was attracted to hardcore for its grittier aesthetics, which leaned more towards authenticity than playing up commercial success,’ he tells me. ‘I think the internet is so oversaturated as of late, so a lot of people around my age range search for more authentic and ‘real’ music and art to represent themselves.’
He’s unable to attend ‘99 percent’ of punk and hardcore shows due to being under 18, but says that ‘Outbreak provides a route for younger audiences to get into punk.’ ‘The line-up seems really attractive to me, I’m a big fan of artists like Danny Brown, Sunny Day Real Estate, and I'd love to see Fleshwater and Knocked Loose live too,’ he says. ‘A band like Have a Nice Life hasn't even done a show here in the UK before. It seems Outbreak knows its fans.’
@daitanfilms Pest Control playing a sold out Centrala in Birmingham on Friday 14th June 2024 as part of a Palestine benefit show put on to replace Download Festival which Speed, Zulu, Scowl & Pest Control had pulled out of. Filmed by David Tan and Kathryn McBride Audio mixed by Cameron Wilson of Lunchbox Prod. #pestcontrol #fyp #crossover #ukhc #ukhardcore #hardcore #hardcorepunk ♬ original sound - Dai Tan Films
Nevertheless, there is tension between the new breed of hardcore kids who are, supposedly, glued to their phones at gigs, filming themselves skanking and creating walls of death, and veterans of the scene. Kathryn McBride, who has worked as a live music videographer for Dai Tan Films for almost a decade, has noticed a sizable vibe shift in the crowd she’s so often right in the middle of. ‘It’s a tricky one, because it’s so fantastic to see it get to this level and see years of hard work pay off when they play a 10,000 capacity space,’ she says. ‘But the way people behave, interacting with bands in those moments, had so noticeably changed. Attention seeking isn’t quite the right word, but there is a sense of main character syndrome.’
People have turned moshing into a way of trying to go viral
The bands themselves acknowledge this. It comes up in my chat with Knocked Loose, who have been touring for about 12 years, playing everything from pub rooms in Norwich to the O2 Academy Brixton. ‘Aggressive music is way more in the mainstream media, and people have definitely turned moshing into a way of trying to go viral, and just make it about themselves,’ Isaac says. ‘In reality, the whole point of moshing is self-expression; reacting to the music naturally is what hardcore and metal music is all about.’
Out of the pit
Can the scene sustain its mainstream success, or is this just a flash in the pan? After American hardcore hit its initial peak in the mid ’80s, record labels started to snap up bands adjacent to the scene, hoping to tap into its raw energy as tastes began to shift – but the bubble popped and acts were dropped in favour of a more palatable grunge aesthetic. But hardcore itself didn’t die. It just filtered into smaller, local scenes and resurfaced in 2016-ish, with the success of Turnstile’s 2021 album Glow On acting as a marker for the genre hitting the mainstream again.
‘It seems that, from my experience over the past 10 years, everything seems to come around in full circle moments,’ Meg says, as we discuss the future of hardcore. ‘So it might be that you have a really strong local DIY scene, and then that kind of peters out for a while, and everyone’s like, ‘‘Oh my God, it’s died. We have no community in our small scenes anymore.’’ And then gradually, it’ll come back.’
Bryan Garris echoes this idea: though some people may just see hardcore as a fun trend, there may be others who genuinely find solace in it. So while they may find ‘wall of death’ TikTok videos funny, when they go and experience the shows live, they’ll get the chance to free themselves while yelling along to the music and become a part of a loyal community.
‘I think you’re going to get a lot of people who give the genre a chance,’ he says. ‘And I think it’s going to change a lot of lives. It’s an opportunity to show people new bands, get out to smaller shows, and support the local scene, instead of just liking it on the internet. That's where I hope that bigger shows like Outbreak lead to: more young kids starting bands, making zines or taking photos. The goal is to inspire people to be active.’
Regardless of what happens to the big bands at the top, there will always be an underground ecosystem of hardcore fans and musicians supporting one another through music and community. So whether kids like Rupert go to Outbreak and come out inspired to form a band, or just fancy filming themselves doing flailing their arms around like windmills on stage, it doesn’t really matter. Because they’ll soon learn that the rules of a hardcore moshpit apply to everyday life: don’t be a dick, don’t spend too long on stage, don’t kick people in the head, and most importantly, pick up your neighbours when they fall down.