There’s something in the water: Almost half a century after hardcore punk first took over the Bay Area, there is a new generation of bands putting the West Coast back on the map, pushing the genre further and demanding your attention.
Words: Christina Wenig
The US Bay Area is known for amazing heavy music. It didn’t take long for hardcore punk to smack the hippie vibes that the Summer Of Love brought out of San Francisco. Dead Kennedys and their northern neighbors Black Flag and Minutemen rang in a new age of grittiness and aggression, and helped lay the ground for a whole new scene under the Californian sun: Bay Area thrash and death bands like Exodus, Testament, Death Angel and Possessed (not to forget their L.A. contemporaries Metallica and Slayer) shaped the then young metal genre forever.
Building on the legacy of these pioneers, the local surf and skate culture as well as the influence of West Coast hardcore greats like Terror, a new wave of hardcore punk bands emerged within the last decade to prove that the Bay Area.
Drain – … Is Your Friend
Everybody loves Drain. Whether you’re a hardcore fan, a metalhead or a punk: Drain is your friend. So, obviously, their third album also carries this slogan as its name. Uniting all the strengths of California’s heavy music history, the band from Santa Cruz combines thrash riffs, punk energy and hardcore groove into blistering mosh pit hymns that simply will not let you stand still. They might be known best for their intense shows, but tracked live by producer Jon Markson (Drug Church, One Step Closer), … Is Your Friend has no issues hitting you just as hard with the unfiltered Drain PMA energy.
2. Gulch – Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress
It didn’t take Gulch long to become somewhat of a modern legend of the scene: Six years, one demo, one EP and, finally, their first and only album Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress built a monument for Bay Area hardcore that remains untouched today. Featuring Drain’s singer Sammy Ciaramitaro on drums and clocking in at merely 15 minutes playtime, the album is a gnarly, snotty burst of energy – hooks covered in filth, vocals covered in disgust, technicality covered in chaos. Top all that off with a delightfully sinister cover of Siouxsie And The Banshee’s Sin In My Heart, and you have one of the greatest hardcore albums of the last decade.
3. Scowl – How Flowers Grow
You can’t talk about Santa Cruz and the Bay Area without mentioning Scowl. By now, the band is known for wreaking havoc in the alternative rock realm with their sophomore album Are We All Angels, fusing their punk edge with irresistible catchiness. Years before this album led them to new heights like their TV debut on Stephen Colbert’s late show, their first album How Flowers Grow (2021) was an early manifestation of Scowl’s future success beyond the limits and boundaries of hardcore. The melodies are wrapped in spikes and razor blades and the songwriting favors tradition over innovation, resulting in an abrasive fury that delivers everything you could want in a hardcore punk album.
4. Spy – Satisfaction
There’s something raw, primal and unhinged about Spy that few of their peers manage to regurgitate. On their 2023 debut album Satisfaction, they rage through the darkest pits of their existential wrath, unearthing 13 minutes of absolutely mean-sounding bangers in the process. The bestial vocal delivery and production alone are enough to make you screw up your face in appalled awe, just before the bulldozer chug of these songs completely takes you out. Sunny California? Not around here.
5. Sunami – s/t
That escalated quickly: Sunami went from joke band to hype in no time. Half serious, half satirizing the bluntness of beatdown hardcore, their first album (2023) proved that some stupidly brutal music is all you need sometimes. Featuring former Gulch and Drain bassist Mike Durrett as well as members of Spinebreaker, Lead Dream and Hands Of God, the San José foursome is somewhat of a local supergroup – and they take representing their home seriously, shouting full force: “San José forever, it’s what I love, San José till I turn to dust”. That’s real Bay shit, as they say.
