And while you can’t exactly accuse Red Death of mature songwriting - this is still strictly bark-grunt-roar music - the riffs and scream-along choruses are stickier and more memorable than they’ve been. On this album, the eight songs go by in a comparatively leisurely 27 minutes. Last time around, Red Death only had one song over two minutes. They’re playing guitar solos, too, and those solos have that squiggly, atonal death-metal siren-scream thing going for them. The band still plays fast, but there’s more dynamic range, and the judder-crunch mosh parts are now the most exciting parts of the band’s songs. Play it loud enough now and you can feel the bass punching you you don’t have to just imagine that happening at a live show. But the recording quality has jumped up three or four ladder rungs. The new album is still short and sharp and mean, and it doesn’t let up on the intensity one iota. than it is to any past iteration of DC punk or hardcore. Red Death are in there, too, even though their face-punch racket is closer to late-’80s hardcore/thrash crossover bands like D.R.I. It’s taken the form of bands like Coke Bust, Kombat, Protester, the just-broken-up and already-missed Pure Disgust, and the hardcore-adjacent Priests.
But in the past few years, riotous and feverish old-school DC hardcore has returned with a vengeance. In the past 10 or 15 years, since Dischord slowed its once-unfathomable release schedule and the original architects of the scene have mostly gone on to have adult lives, it’s been a little harder to trace the constant evolution of the city’s punk rock. It’s the place that gave us Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Positive Force, the Revolution Summer, and, in a lot of ways, the whole idea that punk music can be a transformative, fulfilling, humanist force instead of just a raw negation. Washington, DC has done more for American punk rock than almost any other city. And then there’s the whole apocalyptic new reality: These kids now have a concrete and despicable rage-target, and there are moments where speeding, hurtling, violent music is the only thing that makes sense. Thanks to easily disseminated Bandcamp links and cheap tour-van gas, you might even argue that hardcore’s healthier now than it’s been at any point in recent years.
Bands are piling into vans doing split 7″s with each other, and coming together around festivals like Washington, DC’s Damaged City and Toronto’s Not Dead Yet. The basement house shows and American Legion Halls and crumbling, freezing loft venues aren’t the same anymore, and message boards and Subreddits serve the same functions that zines once did, but that underground still thrives. Instead, the circuit has twisted and squirmed and evolved. The people who started the genre have mostly moved on or learned to coast on past glories, but the newest offshoots of the continuum no longer have much of anything to do with them. For decades, DIY hardcore has existed as a whole international underground network, and it’s never gone away. Or, more accurately, it never stopped happening.
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