When it comes to hardcore's intersection with the mainstream, it's hard to remember a week like this.

On Nov. 15, it was announced that Turnstile — the high-flying, shamelessly hooky, stylistically rangey Baltimore punks — had been nominated for three golden gramophones at the 2023 GRAMMYs, for tracks from their 2021 breakout album GLOW ON.

Coupled with their sound, their story — of rising from cramped vans and vet's halls to become triple-GRAMMY nominated, and about to support Blink-182 on a national tour — has placed them at the forefront of hardcore for very good reasons.

But with that can arise reductive thinking: that from an industry standpoint, Turnstile, somehow, are the lone, self-contained ambassadors for the entire hardcore scene.

The same goes for Code Orange, who came up as authentically punk as anyone. The Pittsburgh band rapidly expanded their palette to become breathtakingly heavy and experimental, scooped up two GRAMMY nominations for Best Metal Performance, then went on to open for Korn across the US.

The notion that Code Orange and Turnstile somehow are hardcore is spurious. It diminishes the larger community, and its matrix of creative interchanges, that are responsible for these breakout acts' very existences.

For those unfamiliar with hardcore: think the original punk-rock sound of ‘76 or so, with the tempos and intensity cranked to the nth degree. Acts like Minor Threat, Black Flag and Circle Jerks were its early pillars; forward-thinking stylists like Bad Brains expanded its boundaries.

In the ensuingdecades, hardcore spawned innumerable subsets, like powerviolence, beatdown, youthcrew, and D-beat. It also engendered a network of communities that can act both as nurturing subcultures, and philosophically and creatively arid spaces.

But a cursory look at the contemporary hardcore scene reveals that what was once a rigid, defensive, hyper-masculine subculture — think basketball shorts, beatdowns in the pit and message-board flame wars — is changing rapidly.

Today, hardcore and hardcore-adjacent bands are full of women and people of all racial backgrounds; all gender expressions and walks of life are welcome to rock or just watch. Traditional orthodoxies are crumbling as a slew of fresh acts rewrite what hardcore can be — and sound like.

The ideological purism is becoming more porous; musically, bands are bringing in elements from big-tent indie, synth-rock and 2000s radio hits. Big melodies and big choruses are in. The songs are funny, intelligent and thought-provoking. Hearts are often on sleeves.

Turnstile and Code Orange demonstrate how hardcore has expanded and continues to flourish as an art form for everybody, not just an unbending few. 

And if you love either of those bands, maybe you'll love these too.

Scowl

Kat Moss' route to punk as personal salvation was like that of innumerable young outcasts in her position: she needed a counterweight to stifling, conservative suburbia. (In her case, the Gold Rush waystop town of Rocklin, California — a half-hour drive from Sacramento.)

"Sacramento was like hick-town suburbia, and I was around people who didn't think like me and didn't get me," she told Revolver. "I felt very alone. I'd dye my hair and play my music loud when I'd drive through the neighborhoods. I just felt so 'f— you' about everything."

Once she met her future bandmates in Scowl — guitarist Malachi Greene, bassist Bailey Lupo and drummer Cole Gilbert — she found an outlet for that displaced rage and alienation: a bracing scream that slices you up, backed by thunderous hardcore.

Still, she approached this mode of self-expression on her own terms, embracing a subversion of stereotypical femininity as a visual aesthetic, from onstage bouquets to floral dresses and album art.

Musically, the Santa Cruz-based Scowl were combustible from their earliest demo, released back in 2019. But their 2021 debut LP, How Flowers Grow, is where their artistry took, er, bloom: where their earliest work was an invitation to a knife fight, Scowl now sounds like they're compelling you to dig your own grave.

But the heaviest, most uncompromising moments (like the eponymous closer — good heavens!) truly land because of the moments of levity. Case in point: "Seeds to Sow," where Moss switches to clean singing over percolating, sax-inflected pop.)

All of this together has made Scowl fans out of Post Malone and Fred Durst; the latter picked them as support for Limp Bizkit.

Soul Blind

If you're looking for a list of carbon copies of Minor Threat and the like, look elsewhere. Because hook-filled, genre-blurring, slickly-produced bands like Soul Blind are bellwethers as to where the music at large is going.

In this case, the blend is of hardcore-adjacency with post-grunge and post-hardcore — imbued with a mesmeric twist of shoegaze like Swervedriver and Hum. 

Hailing from New York's Hudson Valley, mononymous bassist/vocalist Cen, guitarists Finn Lovell and Justin Sarica earned their bona fides — their last strictly hardcore project being God of Wine.

When they added Juan Espinosa (later replaced by Steve Hurley) to the mix, they headed in a much more melodic and radio-friendly direction, without sacrificing an iota of intensity.

"Bands like Failure, Hum, Sunny Day Real Estate, My Bloody Valentine, and Deftones all influence our sound," Cen explained to No Echo. "We wanted to make music that captured the sound of our youth while adding our own modern touch to it."

Soul Blind released their latest LP, Feel it All Around, this fall — and it uncannily sounds like 2002 and 2022. Mainstream emo rubs against visceral post-hardcore; songs like "Seventh Hell," "Stuck in a Loop" and "System (Failing)" simultaneously bruise and uplift.

Drug Church

A comic book writer and podcaster when not "singing" in Self Defense Family and Drug Church, Patrick Kindlon is one of the most irascible and compelling voices in alternative music.

Whether he's articulating his individual-over-collective philosophy on the page, ranting about the confused state of comics in his newsletter, or offering fact-damaged celebrity journalism on the podcast "Worst Possible Timeline," his perspective hooks you; you can listen to the guy talk for hours.

While the mellower, rangier Self Defense Family's last album, 2018's Have You Considered Punk Music, showed Kindlon exploring his relationship to craft and creation, Drug Church's latest is a blow to the jaw.

Building on Cheer — their slickly produced and highly memorable third album from that year —  Hygiene is a masterclass in dynamics; its performances and arrangements deftly push and pull the listener.

Granted, Kindlon doesn't write the music: guitarists Nick Cogan and Cory Galusha, bassist Patrick Nguyen and drummer Chris Villeneuve do. But as the mouthpiece, Kindlon is impossible to ignore.

In "Super Saturated," he castigates those who spend "Nights spent inside/ Gifted with endless foresight"; in "Million Miles of Fun," he's at wit's end with the news cycle. But following that tune is arguably the band's key song, and monument to humanity first: "Detective Lieutenant."

With an economy of language, Kindlon lays out the supremacy of pure artistic feeling: "If I do a double murder/ What this song did for you doesn't change an iota." When the chorus detonates, it amounts to a death-blow for those quick to cancel, unperson and vilify: "We don't toss away what we love/ I won't toss away what I love."

Militarie Gun

The most hardworking man in punk business is right in Drug Church's orbit: Ian Shelton has played in Self Defense Family, and co-hosted a cheeky hustle-and-grind podcast with Kindlon called "I Don't Care If This Ruins My Life."

Shelton established himself as the drummer and screamer in the grind-y punk band Regional Justice Center; when he got vocal about the band's conceptual roots in the prison system and his then-incarcerated brother, he found himself widely misunderstood — to his chagrin.

"People say I sing about the prison system. It's not even true!" he told GRAMMY.com in 2021 while hoofing it to an L.A. recording studio. "What I've done with my space in the press is that I've talked about it."

In interviews, Shelton may readily reference Securus Technologies and JPay, both for-profit prison firms that have had a deleterious effect on his family life. But the music he makes strikes a subtler, more personal note.

In both Regional Justice Center and his slightly more melodic, pop-centric band, Militarie Gun, Shelton grouses and howls about day-to-day anxieties and his Robert Pollard-like compulsion to continually create. (He's just over 30, but his Discogs page is getting frightening.)

While his Militarie Gun bandmates — guitarists Nick Cogan (also of Drug Church) and William Acuña, bassist Max Epstein, and drummer Vince Nyugen — weave jagged, colorful lines behind him, Shelton is gruff and immediate.

At a recent, sold-out gig at St. Vitus in Brooklyn, with fellow hardcore-adjacent acts Sugar Milk, Dazy, and MSPAINT, Shelton howled the chorus to "Don't Pick Up the Phone": "I want money/ I want love!" Suffice to say, bodies flew.

MSPAINT

Are MSPAINT hardcore? Are they dance-punk? Are they post-punk? They're none of it and all of it.

Along with Taylor Young of Twitching Tongues and God's Hate, Shelton co-produced their 2022 single "Acid" — the perfect entryway to these intriguing purveyors of synth-inflected heaviness. The ambiguous opening keyboard lines offer few clues of what's about to hit. Then it hits.

"We're beyond peace at this point/ It's just another ploy/ A marketing scheme tranquil and enjoyed/ By a network of demons yelling at the sky," singer Deedee howls, as the synths continue to churn, underpinning their slamming, declamatory punk.

Named after the infamous freeware, the Hattiesburg, Mississippi quartet of Deedee, synthesist Nick, bassist Randy, and drummer Quinn is relatively new on the scene; their self-titled EP dropped the week the pandemic hit.

But given the startling freshness of their young discography, it's tantalizing to wonder where they could go from here. Because this particular permutation of hardcore — one that meets electronic textures and block-rocking beats — has never been done quite this way.

Buggin

Initially called Buggin' Out before being compelled to change their name due to trademark infringement, Buggin is an excellent next stop if MSPAINT's Beastie Boys-style inflections are your thing.

Back when they were named after Giancarlo Espocito's character in Do the Right Thing, the Windy City hardcore crew slugged out an excellent self-titled debut EP, with plenty of '90s-style bounce and face-peeling performances from vocalist Bryanna Bennett.

The renamed band returned in 2021 with the heart-racing and profoundly fun Brainfreeze, a two-song single bundling the title track with a cover of the Beasties' Check Your Head cut "Gratitude" — previously interpreted by Rollins Band, the Transplants and Refused.

Buggin plans to release their debut album next year; in a 2022 interview with CVLT Nation, Bennett took their ever-swelling buzz in stride.

"For me, it's still crazy how much people like us all over," Bennett marveled. "In my mind, I'm just some guy that was tryna have fun with the homies and diversify our local scene." Sometimes, that's all it takes to breathe new life into a form of expression.

End It

Ah, the old heavy-music go-to — a sample of a quaint tune of yesteryear that melts and slows, before the band crashes in and steamrolls it.

In this case, poor Patsy Cline's "I Fall to Pieces" is summarily shattered by End It in their track "BCHC" — or "Baltimore City Hate Crew." 

"What's shaking, you f—ing chumps?" exhorts frontman Akil Godsey in the galloping 58-second opener to their 2022 EP Unpleasant Living. "You don't like us, and we don't like you/ Use your 24 to mind your f—ing business, and I'll mind mine, b—!"

From there, End It turn in some ferocious, dyed-in-the-wool hardcore, aided and abetted by another hardcore-crossover lynchpin: Justice Tripp from Trapped Under Ice and Angel Du$t. He appears on the class-struggle batterer "New Wage Slavery"; in the video, Godsey plays Omar from "The Wire."

Thanks to the deft writing of guitarists Johnny McMillion and Ray Lee, bassist Pat Martin, and drummer Chris Gonzalez, Unpleasant Living relays a coherent, cohesive statement in all of eight minutes.

After the acerbic scene commentary of "Hatekeeper," the Baltimore crew goes for the throat with crushing closer "The Comeback." You won't want End It to end it.

Speed

Representing the burgeoning hardcore scene Down Under are Speed, who dropped their latest EP, Gang Called Speed, last June. And the lead single, "Not That Nice," unflinchingly addresses one of the most reprehensible blights on society in recent memory.

"We wrote 'Not That Nice' in reaction to the Asian hate crimes born from the pandemic. The sad stories of innocent, good civilians falling victim to racial violence," vocalist Jem explained in a press release. 

"I found myself thinking, 'This is someone's grandma, grandpa, mum, dad, child…' Unfortunately, much of this stems from the often perverted portrayal of Asian stereotypes in the media," he added. "To the scared and uneducated few, the sad reality is that this rhetoric translates to oppression and real-world violence."

Coming from Speed — three of its five members are of Southeast Asian descent — "Not That Nice" lands with brute impact. "We're breaking through/ Set fire to a f—ed up truth," Jem snarls in the tough-as-nails video: "Bite my tongue? They're racist/ My story ain't told by fools."

Clearly, "Not That Nice" and the other tracks landed: their set at Sound and Fury Festival in Los Angeles the following summer went so hard, the footage of the gonzo, seemingly bone-snapping pit went viral.

When the Instagram account @viralclipz posted it with the caption "Who's going to this concert lol," none other than Shaquille O'Neal responded "me."

Regulate

If you connect with the sound of Drug Church's Cheer and Hygiene, partly thank Jon Markson; he produced and engineered both albums. Also in his swelling portfolio is New York punks Regulate's 2022 self-titled album — their first in four years and a signal of swelling evolution.

That's partly because — much like the acclaimed Turnstile — vocalist Sebastian Paba reaches for influences far outside the scope of hardcore.

Listing the influences on the record for Brooklyn Vegan, Paba cited artists as divergent as James Brown ("a template for performers on stage and in the studio"), Bloc Party (calling Silent Alarm "a perfect record that builds drama and anticipation"), and Santana (praising their self-titled debut's "undeniable groove and swag.")

Paba's evocation of Santana is telling, as Regulate incorporates Latin sounds in innovative ways — as on "Ugata," which toggles from a diaphanous daydream to twisted riffage.

Identity-related themes pop up in the lyrics as well: "Hair" faces down racialized beauty standards, "C.O.P." reflects the age of reckoning with racist police killings, and "New York Hates You" positions the city in opposition to vampiric gentrifiers.

"This place will chew you up/ This place will spit you out," Yaba threatens. "Time to go home now/ We won't see you around." The NYHC kings have spoken.

Zulu

When it comes to hardcore's positive developments regarding unorthodoxy, adventurousness and inclusion, is there a band that ticks as many boxes as Zulu?

Hailing from Los Angeles, the all-Black powerviolence band — vocalist Anaiah Lei, guitarists Dez Yusuf and Braxton Marcellous, bassist Satchel Brown, and drummer Christine Cadette — deals heavily in themes of Black identity; when it comes to genre distinctions, they maintain an omnivorous muse.

"A lot of the influence comes from soul, and it comes from R&B, and it comes from reggae, and it comes from funk and jazz," Lei told Kerrang in 2022 of their two EPs, Our Day Will Come and My People… Hold On. "Somehow, it worked out really well." (Their next album, A New Tomorrow, due in 2023, promises to continue in that vein.)

As Lei went on to explain, this often manifests in interstitial samples that provide dynamism and contrast — both on record and in their live show. The opening track on My People… Hold On — which features the cover of a weeping Black mother and child — is a recitation of a poem by Alesia Miller.

"When I cry over the limitations put on my humanity, when I am scared of what age my nephew will be perceived as a threat, when I desire to be held and handled with fragility,"  Miller declares in the poem, "it only translates as bitterness to the ears that hear me."

When Zulu then barrels in with "Now They Are Through With Me," the effect isn't of one-size-fits-all, one-dimensional rage, but of a riveting spectrum of feeling.

"They got me caught from every angle/ Not just the white, blue and red/ It's my own blood and flesh," Lei screams. That viscera is unforgettable to behold.

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Speed once felt inert.

When the Sydney hardcore heroes started, there seemed to be no path forward to a full-fledged livelihood. "Within the realm of possibility, we didn't see any way of investing into the band full time and that not just leading to feeling disenfranchised," says guitarist Josh Clayton.

"Because we saw every single band that we witnessed around us who had gone full time," he continues. "There was no tangible way to do that without it becoming work and without all of the joy of it being like a true creative outlet being sucked out of it."

That life force is not to be tampered with — and it's captured in the title of their new album, Only One Mode, out July 12. To Speed's vocalist, Jem Siow, the title connotes "finding your people, finding yourself, and going hard as f— with the things you believe in, the convictions that you have in mind, whatever they may be."

Long story short, that inertia was fleeting. A key 2022 appearance at the kingmaking hardcore festival Sound and Fury burst them out of their continental bubble. Those in the know have been watching Speed put Sydney evermore on the hardcore map; now, with Only One Mode on the precipice of release, that flag might be irreversibly planted.

Read on for an interview with Siow and Clayton about the themes of Only One Mode, the band's sudden hurtle into the stratosphere, fighting dilution in the hardcore scene, and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

How would you describe the dynamics of the Sydney hardcore scene, as opposed to other hardcore scenes around the world?

Siow: Sydney, and Australian hardcore in general, has never really been a globally recognized scene. It's not a really scene that has a super long history or one that has as much depth as some of the more popular scenes like New York or Boston, for example.

With Speed, it was really important that we claim Sydney hardcore from the very beginning. When Josh and I and the rest of Speed got into hardcore, we were like 12 or 13. In the mid-2000s, hardcore was really almost at its peak, because of the boom of Parkway Drive — Australia's biggest heavy export and biggest hardcore band at the time.

When it got to around 2018, 2019, for the five years or so leading up to that, the whole scene on this side of the world really dwindled — where it went from having thousands of people across Sydney go to shows in the years prior, to maybe only just about a hundred or 150 people left.

Because of that filtering out of the crowd, I feel like we were left with the people who were like the lifers, the people who really cared about it for all the right reasons, enough to stick around. We found that we [needed to] band together and put our heads together, put our differences aside — whatever slight differences there were — and worked together to rebuild the scene, and push and reinvigorate the culture again.

Sydney hardcore, to us, isn't really branded or defined by a certain musical style. It's more of a collective attitude to work together. That commonality between us is the love and passion for hardcore, the relationships and the experiences that it's given us.

I think that's the brand of Sydney right now. It's very inclusive. It's very welcoming for the people who see it for the right reasons. We're bound together by a common mentality of wanting the best for the scene and wanting the best for each other, which is bringing up the new generation and supporting all the new bands and the new people who are being involved.

Clayton: If you zoom in on Sydney, it has its own very unique cultural context, at least for our generation. It's unique, not just to the world, but to Australia specifically.

Because, for most of the 2010s — I think it was for about 10 years — there were some laws in place in Sydney that basically strangled its nightlife. That left an entire generation of young people in Sydney without much of a cultural identity, I think. There weren't a lot of opportunities for creative communities to really flourish in the face of that.

I think [people were forced to] sit on the fringes and create their own communities. I think that has set the table for the era that we're in at the moment, where a lot of that stuff has been walked back. But, also, I think it's left our generation with a really strong appetite to create their own scenes, and given a lot of young people in Sydney a really strong DIY ethic.

That really set the table for hardcore to come back to Sydney in a strong way. Because, [hardcore is] naturally so DIY. So, I think a lot of people have gravitated towards hardcore or adjacent communities that have a lot of overlap with hardcore. That, I think, is what sets Sydney hardcore apart.

Learn more: Like Turnstile And Code Orange? 10 More Bands Expanding The Boundaries Of Hardcore

You guys have mentioned that Speed's mission is to promote Australian hardcore culture. Drill into that more.

Clayton: Historically, hardcore comes from North America. If you ask somebody their favorite hardcore bands, 99 percent of them are going to be North American hardcore bands from the '80s onwards. Australia has never really made a significant splash in the international hardcore community because, with most of the scene existing within North America, people don't really tend to look outside of those borders.

We've always had this massive underdog mentality because the idea of being able to be a globally recognized hardcore band or a globally recognized hardcore scene is such a lofty ambition. It's never really been done before. We can count on one to two hands, I guess, how many Australian bands have ever even made it over to America to play.

So, for us, it's always been this huge ambition to try and push that forward and make Australian hardcore familiar to people all around the world. Because hardcore is such a global thing. We witnessed it firsthand. We've seen how hardcore exists in Europe and how it exists in Asia. We've met so many people around the world who've interpreted hardcore as a culture and put it within their own environment. 

A lot of those stories get lost a lot of the time because the dominant culture just exists where it exists. That's been something that we've pushed really hard to change and wanted to be the flag bearers for Australian hardcore. Because there is so much unique stuff that exists here. There are so many labels. There are so many awesome bands.

Our entire experience of hardcore is informed by the bands that we saw growing up who were all Australian. We could have told you 20 Australian hardcore bands when we were 15, but probably only five American ones, because we were just so focused on what was happening in our backyard.

I think that's why that's been such a strong agenda for us, is because it's so special to us. We just want to share it with everybody else in the world.

Take us through the period between 2022's Gang Called Speed EP and Only One Mode.

Siow: For the band as a seven inch was approached as our holy grail. When we started the band, we didn't see beyond the seven inch. It was just, "We'll do a seven inch after the demo, and that's it." With that in mind, especially riding that seven inch during Covid, that was written to be played and written for 200 people or so.

But, the month after that record was released, we played at Australia's biggest hardcore festival, Back On The Map. And, it was coming out of Covid, and it was 800 people sold out, all-Australian hardcore lineup only. It was the most insane show that we'd seen in over a decade.

I think that that show really marked, historically, a turning point and the renaissance of Australian hardcore here. But then, also, two weeks after that, we were flown over to play [Los Angeles'] Sound and Fury 2022, which was not only the biggest hardcore festival in the world, but it was also three times the size it had ever been coming out of Covid. It was like 6,000 people.

That was our 15th show. For us to be flown over to play a show like that, it was almost laughable between our friends how insane this kind of opportunity was. To go over there and play in front of this many people and have a set like we did was completely earth-shattering for us. It was beyond any dream we'd ever, ever, ever conceived.

This is like 6,000 people beating the s— out of each other, going into an absolute war zone, to an Australian band in the middle of the day on a Saturday over there. That completely just changed our lives multiple times in that one show, Sound and Fury.

After that, I think it just completely altered the trajectory of what we thought was possible with this band.

Two Only One Mode songs that jumped out at me were "Kill Cap" and "Caught in a Craze." Can you talk about those?

Siow: The title of "Kill Cap" is a bit of a play on words. A good friend of ours from Sydney runs a brand called Killjoy. And, he had a hat that says, "Kill," on the front of the cap. It kind of, in some ways, becomes anonymous with Speed because we'd worn it so much around.

But, in the context of this song, "Kill Cap" is actually short for killing capacity. And, it's a song about suicide, because we've all lost friends and important ones in our life over the years to this. 

Clayton: To me, "Kill Cap "is maybe the most unique Speed song of all, lyrically. From my assessment, every other Speed song is so confident in the message that it sends. It's so strong. This is how we feel, this is what we think. Take from that what you will.

Whereas, "Kill Cap" I think is a really open-ended song where it doesn't have an answer. It's a song that's just like, "This is a f—ed up thing that we've all experienced, and we don't know what else to say about it except that it hurts." You know what I mean? I think that it's easily the most vulnerable Speed song. 

Siow: "Caught in a Craze," the last song on the record, was written with a direct awareness of our context, especially in the last two years and how things have changed.

It is an incredible feeling and position to be in when many people have referred to us as their gateway band into hardcore. Hardcore, right now in 2024, is arguably the biggest it's ever been, which is an incredible thing. But, the avenues and the pathways in which people have found the space, it's very different to how we did when we were kids.

Read more: Meet The First-Time GRAMMY Nominee: Turnstile On Mainstream Attention, Touring With Blink-182, Repping DOMi & JD Beck

This is not on some jaded s— to say it needs to go back to the old way. But, Josh and I didn't find out about going to shows via TikTok or through seeing a celebrity talk about it or make a joke about it in some way, or wear some merch.

We found out about this because we went to our local record store and there was a flyer that pointed us in the right direction. And then, from that show, found out about another flyer. And, met people there and kept coming back and kept coming back over years and years and years, and learned about the culture through observing the etiquette and through participating.

For the last five to 10 years in Australia, it's been how do we get kids to come to shows? How do we get more people to come to shows? How do we make people feel the same way we do about hardcore? Now, coming out of Covid, the question snapped quickly to, Wait, how do we make sure this s— doesn't get diluted?

Because, there's almost too many people coming to shows now who aren't really getting it for the right reasons. So, "Caught in a Craze" is really about that. It's people who are caught in this craze, who are seeing this kind of spectacle and digesting hardcore on a superficial level, seeing it as being maybe just this violent spectacle or this new trend of the moment.

That's really normal. That happens a lot of the time, and that's OK. It's just through a filtration process; the right ones will generally stick around. But, I think that this song is really acknowledging our awareness of that.

There are a lot of people as well — we'll call them vultures from the mainstream market — who are trying to f—ing capitalize on this s— or capitalize on the moment.

We, as a band, see that, and we are navigating that, and we're keeping a close eye on all the newcomers that are trying to take what they can from the space.

When Code Orange's Jami Morgan came to work with Steve Albini, he knew that he and the band had to be prepared. They knew what they wanted to do, in which order, and "it went as good as any process we've ever had — probably the best," he glowed.

And a big part of that was that Albini —  a legendary musician and creator of now-iconic indie, punk and alternative records —  didn't consider himself any sort of impresario. 

"The man wears a garbage man suit to work every day," Morgan previously told GRAMMY.com while promoting Code Orange's The Above. "It reminds him he's doing a trade… I f—ing loved him. I thought he was the greatest guy."

The masterful The Above was released in 2023, decades into Albini's astonishing legacy both onstage and in the studio. The twisted mastermind behind Big Black and Shellac, and man behind the board for innumerable off-center classics, Steve Albini passed away on the evening of May 7 following a heart attack suffered at his Chicago recording studio, the hallowed Electrical Audio. He was 61. The first Shellac album since 2014, To All Trains, is due May 17.

Albini stuck to his stubborn principles (especially in regard to the music industry), inimitable aesthetics and workaday self-perception until the end. Tributes highlighting his ethos, attitude and vision have been flowing in from all corners of the indie community. The revered label Secretly Canadian called Albini "a wizard who would hate being called a wizard, but who surely made magic."

David Grubbs of Gastr Del Sol called him "a brilliant, infinitely generous person, absolutely one-of-a-kind, and so inspiring to see him change over time and own up to things he outgrew" — meaning old, provocative statements and lyrics.

And mononymous bassist Stin of the bludgeoning noise rock band Chat Pile declared, "No singular artist's body of work has had an impact on me more than that of Steve Albini."

“We are very sad to hear of Steve Albini’s passing,” stated the Recording Academy’s Producers & Engineers (P&E) Wing. “He was not only an accomplished musician in the various groups he played with, but also an iconic producer and engineer who contributed to some of the greatest albums in indie rock, from artists such as Nirvana, the Pixies and PJ Harvey. Steve was a true original. He will be greatly missed, but his influence will continue to live on through the many generations of artists he inspired.”

To wade through Albini's entire legacy, and discography, would take a lifetime — and happy hunting, as so much great indie, noise rock, punk, and so much more passed across his desk. Here are five of those albums.

Pixies - Surfer Rosa (1988)

Your mileage may vary on who lit the match for the alternative boom, but Pixies — and their debut Surfer Rosa — deserve a place in that debate. This quicksilver classic introduced us to a lot of Steve Albini's touchstones: capacious miking techniques; unadulterated, audio verite takes; serrated noise.

PJ Harvey - Rid of Me (1993)

Some of Albini's finest hours have resulted from carefully arranging the room, hitting record, and letting an artist stalk the studio like a caged animal.

It happened on Scout Niblett's This Fool Can Die Now; it happened on Laura Jane Grace's Stay Alive; and it most certainly happened on PJ Harvey's Rid of Me, which can be seen as a precedent for both. Let tunes like "Man-Size" take a shot at you; that scar won't heal anytime soon.

Nirvana - In Utero (1993)

Nirvana's unintended swan song in the studio was meant to burn the polished Nevermind in effigy.

And while Kurt Cobain was too much of a pop beautician to fully do that, In Utero is still one of the most bracing and unvarnished mainstream rock albums ever made. Dave Grohl's drum sound on "Scentless Apprentice" alone is a shot to your solar plexus.

"The thing that I was really charmed most by in the whole process was just hearing how good a job the band had done the first time around," Albini told GRAMMY.com upon In Utero's 20th anniversary remix and remastering. "What struck me the most about the [remastering and reissue] process was the fact that everybody was willing to go the full nine yards for quality."

Songs: Ohia - The Magnolia Electric Co. (2003)

When almost a dozen musicians packed into Electrical Audio to make The Magnolia Electric Co., the vibe was, well, electric — prolific singer/songwriter Jason Molina was on the verge of something earth-shaking.

It's up for debate as to whether the album they made was the final Songs: Ohia record, or the first by his following project, Magnolia Electric Co. — is a tempestuous, majestic, symbolism-heavy, Crazy Horse-scaled ride through Molina's troubled psyche.

Code Orange - The Above (2023)

A health issue kept Code Orange from touring behind The Above, which is a shame for many reasons. One is that they're a world-class live band. The other is that The Above consists of their most detailed and accomplished material to date.

The band's frontman Morgan and keyboardist Eric "Shade" Balderose produced The Above, which combines hardcore, metalcore and industrial rock with concision and vision. And by capturing their onstage fire like never before on record, Albini helped glue it all together.

"It was a match made in heaven," Morgan said. And Albini made ferocity, ugliness and transgression seem heavenly all the same.

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Billy Corgan doesn't make too many guest appearances. But he readily guested with Code Orange.

Check his list of credits: generally, Corgan's behind the scenes as a co-writer. When he has appeared as a vocalist or guitarist, it's generally been for veterans — like Scorpions, New Order or Hole — or then-upstarts of modern rock, like Breaking Benjamin.

But there he is, in the delicate bridge of Code Orange's bludgeoning single "Take Shape." "Spread your wings/ Show us who you are," he sings over fingerpicked acoustic guitar, in his inimitable keen. "Spread your wings/ You'll go far."

Corgan's guest appearance has resonance far beyond name recognition, or '90s cred during the '90s wave. Because the Smashing Pumpkins were probably the most emotionally and artistically generous band of that decade.

Back then, Corgan and company gave you everything they were. Emotionally and materially, "withholding" wasn't in their DNA. And the same goes for Code Orange, who hold the odd distinction of being punk veterans by their early thirties.

Over the course of five albums, vocalist Jami Morgan, guitarists Reba Meyers and Dominic Landolina, bassist Joe Goldman, keyboardist Eric "Shade" Balderose, and drummer Max Portnoy have metamorphosed from basement hardcore to a hydra of heavy styles.

Think Pumpkins meets A Perfect Circle, with a helping of metalcore, and you're somewhere in their vicinity. For their efforts, they've garnered two GRAMMY nominations.

Across their development, Code Orange have exemplified this Pumpkinesque spirit of generosity. Their new album, The Above, out Sept. 29, is teeming and bountiful — both emotionally unsparing and all over the map stylistically.

One minute, they're mellow and openhearted, as on "Mirror." The next, they're nightmarishly twisted and alien, as on "A Drone Opting Out of the Hive." And many songs, from "Splinter the Soul" to "Snapshot," effectively marry those refractive qualities.

Whether due to their maturity as songwriters, Steve Albini's blunt-force engineering, or any number of other happy factors, Code Orange have raised the bar once more. And as per Corgan's presence and cosigning, they feel like worthy candidates for the Pumpkins' heirs.

Here's a breakdown of how Code Orange arrived at The Above — with quotes from their brazen, stage-stalking frontman, Jami Morgan.

They Declared Themselves "Out For Blood"

Code Orange's 2020 album Underneath — the one that got nominated for a GRAMMY for Best Metal Performance — was a wonderfully suffocating and immersive work of experimental metal.

The following year's single, "Out for Blood," was a hard right turn — a push into the mainstream rock sphere, ahead of a tour supporting Korn, with an ear for the airwaves

The video is hellacious; the song could soundtrack a weekend rappelling off buildings. It unabashedly flirts with nu metal. It's also just a lot of fun.

Read More: As Code Orange Wraps Up Tour With Korn, They Look Ahead To Headlining Stages & Making New Music: "We Really Want To Take A Big Swing"

"Out for Blood" was arguably Code Orange's furthest-afield single to date; those who got on the train back when they were Code Orange Kids, playing to circle pits in VFW halls, may have been a touch confused. (Or, in YouTube comments and on the hardcore Facebook group No Echo, outwardly hostile.)

But regarding their roots, Code Orange are too canny to just let go of the tether; "Out for Blood" was a brief detour, in the form of a bloody good time.

The Concept Bloomed During The Pandemic

If Underneath represented claustrophobic, subterranean depths, The Above lives in blinding, oppressive daylight: the film Midsommar transmuted to music.

"It started with this light metaphor," Morgan tells GRAMMY.com. "I was reading a lot about parasites, and how when they attach to the host, they'll take other bugs that shouldn't be exposed to light and expose them to it, so they can be consumed.

"I saw that as a cool metaphor for trying to follow the light of our outside acceptance," he continues. The songs he was writing dealt with self-acceptance, success and striving for inner peace.

The lockdown kickstarted Code Orange's writing process earlier than expected. "We started with the loose shape of this record right off the bat," he says. "When we started determining what that is — what paths we could take, that we weren't going to take."

They Embraced Hooks & Pop Structure

Nothing on The Above is quite as deliciously shameless as "Out for Blood." But The Above does share one key element with that barbarous banger: a grasp of pop structure.

"It was like a spliced reality off of the Underneath cycle," Morgan says of "Out for Blood." Over Zoom, he points to a mood board behind him, representing The Above: "To me, the band is one wall, and everything we've done fits in."

Accordingly, Code Orange applied lessons learned to their new album. "Every song, heavy or not, has some kind of hook that comes back," he says. "It's not an ABCDEFG record," like some of the songs we've made in the past."

*Code Orange. Photo: Tim Saccenti*

They Imbued The Music With Newfound Humanity

Scanning the band's discography, Morgan perceives moments where they didn't quite land where they wanted. Because of this, they opted to produce The Above themselves.

"We didn't want to take it and hand it to somebody, like we've done," Morgan says. "Because we've had problems with that."

While at the production controls, they went for a detail-oriented approach that prioritized openness, breathability and forthright emotion — while keeping the experimental torches alight.

They achieved this more organic aesthetic by making the raw band the focus. Also, Morgan rendered his diction clearer, his lyrics more understandable.

"We definitely thought, Can we make something that is experimental, that is boundary-pushing, that is pulled from the past and future," Morgan says, "but is coloring within the lines of structure a little more?"

The Above Feels Like A Bridge Into The Unknown

To Morgan, Code Orange's 15-year evolutionary arc has reached its opposite end on The Above.

As he explains, the closing track, "The Above," is meant to "visualize being on an island of self. I wanted to make a song that you could almost sit on the f—ing beach to, and feel your soul — feel the emotion, and be stoic in yourself."

In that way, The Above is a culmination of everything they've built to — and also a launching pad. "If this was the last thing we did, I will be happy with it," he says. "But I also can see so many possibilities of where to go from it."

Overall, Morgan stresses that Code Orange never existed to rock out or have fun; "It exists to fill a void that I want to see," he says. "We're trying to make statements and we're trying to make artistic pieces.

"If people want that, then we're going to be here forever," Morgan concludes. "And if they don't, then we won't."

But in the modern rock landscape, they bear a message that's difficult to ignore. And it's sung by their spiritual forebear, rock's patron saint of ambition, largesse, and generally being a lot: "Spread your wings."

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There's a part near the end of Militarie Gun's debut album that Ian Shelton wishes he could fix. But he can't.

The band's lead singer and songwriter didn't notice it until long after said album, Life Under the Gun, went to print. It's in the penultimate track, "See You Around" — a keys-and-vocals breather reminiscent of '67 Beatles.

"He doesn't sing/ He doesn't sing to me/ When it used to be/ Something I'd like to see," croons Shelton — who in Militarie Gun and his grind band Regional Justice Center, has mostly screamed and barked until his melodic breakthroughs on Life Under the Gun.

"The very last line, I keep doing the same resolve on," he tells GRAMMY.com. "I did the same resolve on every line on that verse, and I hate it. I've listened to this a thousand times. I can't believe I'm just now realizing this sucks." Right then Shelton's voice shifts; it's like his inner critic has seized the controls. 

"You f—ing idiot," he tells himself out loud, his breath quickening behind a black Zoom screen. "You thought that was good?"

Such is an interview with Shelton that clocks in at nearly two hours, with a full-band follow-up and many intense texts before and after. Talking to him at length is exactly like listening to his music — it's a hilarious, unvarnished, galvanizing, occasionally harrowing experience. But one that never feels like a put-on.

One minute, he's chewing on his wounds. "One of my main desires in life is to escape the embarrassment that I feel all the time," he says five minutes in. "For some reason, I feel like there's an invisible enemy on my heels at all times."

Another minute, he's scheming and enterprising like a young rapper — which makes a certain amount of sense, as Militarie Gun just signed with Jay-Z's Roc Nation for management, on top of landing a record deal with Loma Vista.

All this self-flagellation and slightly deranged ambition — and a whole lot more — made it into Life Under the Gun. But it's far from bluster and noise: Shelton, whose background is in face-punching hardcore, has blossomed as a singer, composer, lyricist, and performer in an incredibly short time.

On Life Under the Gun — out June 23 — Militarie Gun is filled out by guitarists Nick Cogan (also of Drug Church fame) and Will Acuña, bassist Max Epstein and drummer Vince Nguyen; the live lineup has shifted to include bassist Waylon Trim. In the co-producer's chair, alongside Shelton, was Taylor Young.

Militarie Gun is named after an inside joke that Shelton says "I'm unfortunately stuck with for the rest of my goddamn life." Their first three EPs, 2020's My Life is Over and 2021's All Roads to the Gun I and II, put them on the map as a band nominally in hardcore, but that bristled at its conventions and wore its orthodoxy like a bunchy suit.

In that sense, they're not dissimilar to Turnstile, the GRAMMY-nominated hardcore crew who augmented their sound with genre traversals and block-rocking beats.

But Militarie Gun have expanded beyond hardcore's boundaries in a much different way — via their sheer melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and emotional content. (The album that broke Turnstile into the mainstream, 2021's Glow On, didn't even exist by the time Militarie Gun completed the final demos for Life Under the Gun.)

From chord voicings to lyrics to performances and sheer attitude, advance singles "Do it Faster," "Very High," "Will Logic," and "Never F—ed Up Once" — along with inspired album tracks like "Think Less," "Big Disappointment" and "Sway Too" — are lightyears past their already appealing early material.

How did Shelton evolve so quickly, so profoundly? It happened while delivering weed.

For a solid year, Shelton — a Washington state native — drove around his adopted home of Los Angeles for eight to 12 hours a day, dropping off buds. "I was trying to put 10,000 hours into studying the blade," he says. "I was delivering weed, but the full-time job was studying music."

The artists doing spiritual work on Shelton: the Beatles, the Strokes, Gorillaz, Guided by Voices, Built to Spill… the list goes on. Between it all, he absorbed more than clever hooks or catchy melodies — he developed a knack for compositions that breathe and hold together with integrity.

"That's all just about observing the sonic real estate and going, 'Oh, that's empty,'" he says. "And then putting something there, because the instrumentals are completed before I even write a vocal part."

All this led Shelton to explore the neck of the guitar, unpacking melodies in an open and untutored manner. This jump between instruments puts Shelton in league with any number of drummers turned successful singer/songwriters, from Iggy Pop to Panda Bear to J Mascis — Brendan Yates from Turnstile, too.

One early morning — upon hitting the practice space before weed delivery — Shelton stumbled on what would become the galumphing "Will Logic." For "My Friends Are Having a Hard Time," he identified the essence of Built to Spill's "Carry the Zero" and wrote his own white-knuckled, mid-tempo ballad in response.

"A strange occurrence/ This train is on the rails," Shelton sings in his pained, raspy, yet incisive tenor. "How long until it f—s up and fails?"

In conversation, Shelton's train of thought leads to "Think Less," which happens to follow "My Friends Are Having a Hard Time" in the tracklisting. He'd cited that song earlier, in the same breath as his evocation of his "invisible enemy."

"I'm on some old-school beef," Shelton announces. "The people that I wrote [early Militarie Gun song] 'Ain't No Flowers' and 'Think Less' about, they talked s— about me to one of my friends a couple days ago and I just heard about it yesterday."

Said people are in a band Shelton won't name, but he'll allow this: "The song I wrote about them got 600,000 streams as of yesterday. More than triple anything they've ever done in their life. So, I'm like, 'We're good.'"

Despite being the most out-and-out hardcore moment on Life Under the Gun, "Think Less" is a musical marvel — from the fake-out guitar intro reminiscent of Doug Gillard-era Guided by Voices to the radiant chorus, where he's augmented with harmonies via James Goodson from the fuzz-pop band Dazy. (Mat Morand, a.k.a. Pretty Matty, also contributes backing vocals to the album.)

In stark juxtaposition, Shelton's vocal performance in the final verse sounds like he's peeling off his own skin: "List of people I f—ed over/ Do they think the same of me?" he howls. "List of people I've f—ed over/ Think less of me/ And I agree!"

"For some reason, I will believe whatever they say," Shelton says of those dispensing the haterade. "I wish that I had a really hardened ego to be like, Uh-uh. Instead, I find the kernel of truth and I stick on it."

"Seizure of Assets" is about when Shelton's car was towed by the city of Los Angeles. "I had too many parking tickets, and I literally didn't have the money to get my car back, so I just had to let them keep my car," he relates, deadpan.

With that in mind, it's clear who the "biting bastard leeches/ [that] keep suckin' on me" are. But in Life Under the Gun, those leeches are everywhere. They're most definitely in the sadistic cancel mob in "Never F—ed Up Once."

"Never F—ed Up Once" is about someone in the punk community who committed an indiscretion that went public; once the social-media bear was poked, he was summarily thrown out of his livelihood and craft.

This led to a shamelessly hooky song permeated with empathy, extending a hand to someone past the point of drowning: "When you wish you could stay, but you've been vilified/ When the bloodthirsty mob, it expects a life."

"I grew up going to AA meetings with my mom, and that fundamentally shapes the way that I see the world," Shelton says. "Which is through a lens, ultimately, of forgiveness. I've grown up around nothing but terribly flawed people. You are going to make terrible mistakes, no matter how you carry yourself."

With the album's centerpiece, "Sway Too," Shelton reached new heights of emotional and compositional complexity. What's more, he evades the binary between poppiness and extremity that tends to box in critical perception of Militarie Gun.

"I just couldn't be more proud of that song," Shelton glows, connecting it to the concept of trauma bonding. "What do you trust when your brain flips in trauma and lust?" he ponders at song's end. "What do you trust when it's love as smut?"

Accordingly, "I've never been more proud of a lyric," he says. "Sometimes, you don't even know that you're lying about things. My own brain, at least, is one that gets obsessed and tapped in on something, and then for a period of time, I feel a way and then all of a sudden it just dissipates, and it's one of my biggest flaws. And that song was really trying to take myself to task for that tendency."

If all of this sounds irreducibly heavy and ponderous, it doesn't come off that way; Life Under the Gun's sparkling melodies and production help all these bad feelings go down easy, and the first two singles distill these corrosive emotions into friendly doses.

In the power-popping "Do it Faster," Shelton drives himself up a wall waiting for word about the band being signed; in the equally sticky "Very High," he escapes a depressive spiral by getting absolutely ripped.

"Honestly I think there's something instinctual about writing truly catchy music, and whatever that is. Ian just has it," James Goodson, who sang backing vocals on the album, tells GRAMMY.com. "I also think the thing that really makes Militarie Gun click is that he's got this knack for combining the sweet with the sour. If one element is super melodic, he'll add another element that's really raw."

Life Under the Gun concludes with the triumphal, Who-like closer, "Life Under the Gun." "A life of pursuit," he summarizes, "Ends up pursuing you." After that ouroboros of a line, the song, and record, cut out right then, as if there's nothing more to add: Shelton's laid it all at your feet.

*Militarie Gun. (L-R) Vince Nguyen, Nick Cogan, Ian Shelton, Waylon Trim, Will Acuña. Photo: Noah Kentis*

Life Under the Gun can be enjoyed in two concurrent ways: it works as a voyage into Shelton's fractured emotions, maniacal aspirations and fever-pitch personality, and as a document of four or five men playing music.

"He definitely knows exactly what he wants the outcome to be," Cogan tells GRAMMY.com of Shelton. "I think he is a really good tell of people, and people being genuine, and people being honest. I'm not sure that matters to a lot of people. I think it matters a lot to Ian, which I think is the coolest thing in the world. He's just an incredibly real person."

Life Under the Gun's press cycle is Shelton's first heavy go-round in the music industry. It's been occasionally hairy, but on the main, he's happy and intact. He promises a few people are "getting destroyed" when this is all over.

It remains to be seen what will befall Shelton's adversaries — as he warned in "Will Logic," "You're standing on my neck/ For something you'll never get."

But most of Life Under the Gun deals with that disparaging voice inside — the one that underlines your unworthiness, and promises everything you love will fall apart, and soon. Each of Shelton's professional and artistic leaps and bounds seem to be in the service of proving it wrong.

"It took me a long time to shake my fear of this cool-guy sense and being jaded. And instead, being really open creatively and saying things that I might find embarrassing, and I try to stick to that," he says. "Every lyric I'm embarrassed of is the lyric people love."

All of this boils down to the grand artistic tradition of getting away with something — which is half the fun of all great rock music. "I literally walk around rubbing my hands together like a villain because it's how I feel," Shelton says.

From their stoner joke of a name to Shelton's second-to-none drunk tweeting to a Taco Bell ad to their promotional "Ooh Ooh" emoji — a play on Shelton's pet vocalization — so much of Militarie Gun's rise has been about gleefully stirring the pot.

But that's all window dressing; it'll fade, and soon, just as all press cycles do. The real impact of Militarie Gun is this: a creative, insecure, enterprising young man with a couple of screws loose took inventory of his life under the gun, opened his mouth and told the truth.

"A Joyful Burden": How Ian Shelton Of Militarie Gun & Regional Justice Center Makes Art Out Of Negativity