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I had a harder time putting this list together than I have for the past two years, though that’s not because hardcore was better in 2020 than in 2019 or 2018.
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Bands have figured out ways to make their music feel fresh and raw and exciting even without any possibility of this music existing within its proper context anytime soon. And yet hardcore has continued on in the no-shows era, and a whole lot of great music has come out. You can’t participate in that culture in your house, unless your house is also a place where shows happen. Part of it is that the music sounds better when bodies are flying all around you, and part of it is that the music comes from a specific culture. More than virtually every other genre of music, hardcore depends on the live experience. Then the pandemic hit, the shows stopped, and my new year’s resolution was fucked. I took a headbutt to the eye, a pair of glasses got bent up into some weird shape, and someone asked me what being 40 is like, and I was happy about all of this. Being there made me feel like I was in a community, something that I haven’t felt at most other shows in recent years. Those shows were fun and physical and exciting. I saw Restraining Order in a living room. To make sure I would follow through on this, I was going to start up a monthly hardcore column.įor a couple of months, it worked great. I was going to get over my laziness and my hesitance to DM strangers for directions to the shows. Richmond, one of the genre’s capitals, is just an hour from me, and every halfway-important band in hardcore stops through there. In 2020, I was gong to stop fucking around and dive all the way in. For too long, I’d just been checking in on hardcore from the sidelines, subscribing to a bunch of Bandcamp feeds and going to the occasional house show.