The Hardcore Bands At The Emo Festival

I had to see it. I didn’t want to pay to see it, wasn’t even sure that I wanted to be inside, but I had to at least look at it with my own eyes. Last year, NOFX frontman Fat Mike opened the Punk Rock Museum, an institution dedicated to the one form of music and culture that, at least theoretically, should resist the entire idea of museums in the first place. It’s in Las Vegas, and its logo is rendered in bright pink, in the Black Flag font. The weekend that your Stereogum staff got together in Vegas, you could pay $100 for guided tours from the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow or Operation Ivy’s Jesse Michaels. The Michaels tours were all sold out, but you could still get the Yow package in the morning.

The day after Best Friends Forever, I had about a 10-hour window between hotel check-out and the one direct flight back to Richmond. I spent a lot of that time wandering up and down the Strip, gawking, but I also took a Lyft ride out to the Punk Rock Museum for a different kind of gawking. The museum is on the edge of the Vegas arts district, sitting in the shadow of a giant warehouse-sized strip club on an otherwise desolate block. In the parking lot, there’s a pink limousine with a mohawk made out of giant metal studs. I made it as far as the gift shop, which looks and feels like a slightly less cluttered Hot Topic, before deciding that no way no how was I going to pay the $39 admission fee to look at some old leather jackets.

This is where we’re at. When I was in 10th grade, NOFX were one of my favorite bands. Now, Fat Mike is trying to sell me overpriced nostalgia for the shit that I loved as a kid. I am 45 years old, and I am basically a baby boomer, using my consumer dollar to wallow in a precisely curated archive of my own formative memories. That’s the cynical read on Best Friends Forever, one of two emo-centric nostalgia festivals that set up shop in Las Vegas in a two-week span this fall. Best Friends Forever is by far the smaller of the two fests, and it’s geared toward a historical moment about a half-generation older than the one memorialized at When We Were Young. At Best Friends Forever, we buy six-dollar bottled waters or $13 PBRs while celebrating the mathy, cerebral post-hardcore bands who came just before the MySpace emo explosion. We might front like we’re more discerning than the people shelling out to see My Chemical Romance and Taking Back Sunday do their own big-album playthroughs, but it’s just a slightly different flavor of nostalgia. I had a great fucking time, obviously.

It was old-man city out there. I saw people I hadn’t seen in more than 20 years, and I watched as other people ran into the first time in more than 20 years. There were so many grey beards, so many faded tattoos. The whole thing was a bright, sunny memorial to something that I still hold dear — a moment in DIY music where indie rock and emo and hardcore were all slightly different takes in the same creative impulse. This was an exceedingly non-DIY tribute to DIY music, and that’s always going to be weird. But when you’re revisiting the stuff that you loved when you were younger, weirdness is just part of it. I’d rather have this version of weirdness than whatever Fat Mike is selling at the Punk Rock Museum.

It wasn’t entirely nostalgic, which helped. The organizers of Best Friends Forever did amazing work booking the currently active acts who take clear inspiration from that moment, and that meant that the festival had a few of the best bands that could nebulously called “hardcore” in 2024. The two bands most related to circa-2024 hardcore — the two that played up on the bill at this year’s Sound And Fury — happen to be led by guys with grey in their hair, which makes its own kind of sense. Those guys are old enough to remember that moment, and they continue to make vital music today. That’s important.

This probably wasn’t the intention, but the presence of Fiddlehead on the Best Friends Forever bill went a long way toward legitimizing the festival, at least for me. I’d never seen Fiddlehead. They don’t tour much because the band members have day jobs, and they make sure every gig counts. Like virtually every band who played the festival, Fiddlehead talked about what an honor it was to share the bill with all those elders and influences, and I don’t think they were blowing smoke up anyone’s ass. Their splinter-fuzz guitar tone is a lot more Archers Of Loaf than Antidote, and they cloak lost feelings in muscular hooks, just like plenty of the reunited bands on the bill. They made sense, and they stood out.

Pat Flynn has a voice. I didn’t really get that until seeing him live, especially on a bill with plenty of bandleaders who don’t work to project. Flynn can belt, and he has presence. On Fiddlehead’s records, that voice sometimes clashes, in interesting ways, with the burning jangle of the guitars around him. Onstage, he leads the noise. Flynn, a teacher in his day-job life, knows how to speak to a big crowd in inspirational ways. At Best Friends Forever, he told a story about going to Vegas at 19 and, on a whim, marrying his high school sweetheart. Then, he said, they got divorced, started dating again, got married again, “and now we have kids!” Then the band launched straight into “Million Times,” and I felt like my heart exploded. Other genres of music, other cultures, can give me that same rush of energy, but hardcore just seems to do that more reliably than anything else.

Pat Kindlon and Pat Flynn think about the world in very different ways, and they don’t carry themselves the same. But Drug Church tapped into that same energy that Fiddlehead did. Kindlon steadfastly maintains that Drug Church are not a hardcore band, at least aesthetically. But he’s a hardcore frontman, and that makes a huge difference at a festival like Best Friends Forever. Indie rock singers don’t motivate crowds by growling one word — “Upppp!” — from the bottoms of their souls. That’s a hardcore thing.

At Best Friends Forever, the VIP section was exactly the same size as general admission, with a metal divider going right down the middle of the crowd, splitting everything up in a neat visual metaphor. Naturally, the GA section went a whole lot harder for the entire weekend, and plenty of bands pointed out the difference. (The video above is shot from the VIP side.) Nobody did that better than Kindlon: “What’s the matter? Your parents died and left you the house on Long Island, and now you don’t have to put in work in the pit?” I’m paraphrasing from memory, but that was the gist. Kindlon was never going to turn the atmosphere at BFF into that of a full-on Drug Church show, but guilt can be a powerful inducement, and they got people moving. The songs from Drug Church’s new album Prude go extremely hard in a live setting. They’ve figured something out, to the point where they can play warehouses and racetrack metal festivals, earning reactions wherever they go.

Are the Blood Brothers a hardcore band? They used to be. They used to represent a chaotic, squalling, vital part of the hardcore underground. But Blood Brothers haven’t participated in the hardcore world in decades, and their sassy, yelpy math-crunch hasn’t really left much legacy in the music, at least outside of screamo-flavored outliers like SeeYouSpaceCowboy. The Blood Brothers headlined the final night of Best Friends Forever, stepping in as last-minute replacements for Bright Eyes and playing together for the first time in a decade. By the time they took the stage, most of the crowd was gone.

The Blood Brothers worked hard up there. Their tricky, adrenaline-charged music can’t be easy to recreate live, but they did it with muscle and precision. Of the two Blood Brothers singers, Johnny Whitney is the one with the shriekier voice and the floppier hair, and he spent much of the set in the crowd, making physical contact with anyone who got close enough. But the Blood Brothers didn’t move me. Maybe it was just the time factor. Music that sounded dangerous and explosive in 2003 no longer carries that same charge, and the actual sound of it, circus music as made by rabid weasels, just isn’t all that interesting to me. I could get emotional when watching the Dismemberment Plan or Rainer Maria for the first time in a long time, but the Blood Brothers don’t hit those same notes for me. Maybe that’s the difference between a currently-active hardcore band on a smaller stage and a reunited band on a bigger stage.

La Dispute are a currently-active band, even if their tingly, sincere sound is outside of the current hardcore zeitgeist. They played with a feverish sense of devotion, and I really liked them. But the hardest songs of the entire weekend might’ve been the ones Mannequin Pussy played toward the end of their set. Mannequin Pussy aren’t a hardcore band, but they go full Bad Brains whenever they want, and that ability made for some vivid moments. Missy Dabice will strut around like Jessica Rabbit during a full mosh-part breakdown, and I didn’t realize you could do that. When I see something like that, it works as a powerful reminder that there are still new things that people can express through the medium of hardcore, new ideas that can be introduced. Everything doesn’t have to become a museum piece just yet.

Candy – “In The Feelings We Chase”

How are they still doing it? Candy are still finding newer, more inventive ways to give you that sonic-apocalypse feeling. When you see them live, it almost feels like you’re catching one of the most bugged-out and violent Japanese bands at their peak. On record, they keep making insane decisions that can’t be replicated onstage. Those decisions don’t always pay off, which really just reinforces the idea that these guys are not content to do anything safe. And when the choices do pay off, it’s like nothing else. Here, for example, jungle drum-breaks and trap hi-hats and candy-rave synths pop up in one of the hardest, evilest songs in recent memory, just increasing the urge to commit reckless acts. [From Flipping EP, out now on Triple B Records.]

ConSec – “Misanthrope”

This is the stuff. The Athens, Georgia band ConSec plays fast, like they’re afraid that they’d lose their nerve or get caught if they played any slower. They blast out all those jackhammer riffs with squalid urgency, and their records make it sound like the engineer didn’t have time to set up all the mics before the band sprinted out of the studio. But their songs still hit like anthems, and a track like “Misanthrope” lingers after it’s over, like the way a bright explosion sears your eyeball for a few seconds. [From Biohackers EP, out now on 11PM Records.]

Faze – “Célébration”

Montreal’s Faze play fast and nasty, and they put so much echo on their shit that they might as well be stuck at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Even with all that grime on the track, though, “Célébration” has these triumphant, heroic foot-on-the-monitor guitar leads that sound larger-than-life. It’s that superhero music coming from up out of the muck — real Toxic Avenger shit. [From Big Upsetter EP, out now on 11PM Records.]

Joker – “The Lie”

There’s something so beautiful about a band that comes from São Paulo and makes the most note-perfect stomp-you-out early-’90s NYHC goon music. I get it! Stomp-you-out early-’90s NYHC goon music is amazing! But even in the actual ’90s, when I was living a couple hundred miles from New York and listening to the stuff, it would’ve never occurred to me to try to make that music. Joker are a few decades and a continent removed, but they still know how to hit the weirdly bluesy melodic hook when the moment calls for it. Music is amazing. [From The EP EP, out now on Quality Control HQ.]

Natural Human Instinct – “A New Light”

What makes people hit the drums like that? You’re playing under a pretty simple stomp-riff, and you’re doing all these complicated tom rolls, making shit sound tribal and elemental. Is that a natural human instinct? What about the instinct to play watery prog-metal on your hardcore outro? Natural and human? Honestly, probably, yeah. Your body wants to do the thing that feels right, and this feels right. [From Second Stage EP, out now on Northern Unrest.]

Oaktails – “Dazzling Dress”

It’s so crazy to me that people don’t really mosh at screamo shows. I mean, I get it. Screamo is its own thing, and it attracts artier, more sensitive types who aren’t necessarily looking to go full gorilla in most contexts. Nobody wants to be the jerk who breaks protocol and elbow-smashes some poor kid’s glasses into dust while everyone else gives disapproving side-eyes. But some screamo tracks are the hardest things on the planet. For instance, the moment on this song where Tokyo’s Oaktails finish their twinkle-riff interlude and snap back into heaviness? That makes me want to pick some guy up and throw him at the sky. [From Crowning/Oaktails split, out now on Zegema Beach Records.]

Punitive Damage – “Hate Training”

British Columbia’s Punitive Damage are very serious about what they do, and bandleader Jerkova clearly means every word that she roars. Still, I hear some of these riffs, and I just bust out laughing — not because anything’s funny, but just out of pure delight. An epic bounce-crunch that leads right into a two-step thing so fast that almost sounds like polka? Come on. Best shit. [From Hate Training EP, out 10/25 on Convulse Records.]

Scarab – “Tetanus”

I don’t even know if Philly’s Scarab are an outwardly straight-edge band, but “Tetanus” sure seems to be a song about beating a drug dealer to death for inflicting too much pain on too many families. It sounds like that, too! Straight-edge is back, baby! I don’t adhere to that particular belief system, but I love the rage that it brings. More bands need to have songs like “my dad has lung cancer, and he deserves to die for smoking.” Happy Edge Day to all who celebrate. I am afraid of you. [From 3 Minute Detonator two-song single, out now on Rebirth Records.]

Thirdface – “Meander”

“Meander” is an extremely funny title for a song that screams in your face for two minutes. There’s no meandering here — just some riffs that kick you in the gut and then give you the Stone Cold Stunner and flash the double middle fingers in your face. Maybe that song title is just there to provide a false sense of security, like when Stone Cold Steve Austin would disguise himself as a security guard or something. [From Ministerial Cafeteria, out 11/1 on Exploding In Sound Records.]

Wafaq – “Second Wave”

I know absolutely nothing about the Indonesian band Wafaq, and that’s a good thing. In this case, it allows me to close my eyes and imagine the kind of spiky-punk motorcycle wasteland that could produce a sound like this. My wife used to live in Jakarta, so I know that Indonesia has nothing in common with the Mad Max vision of the apocalyptic Australian wasteland. But someone needs to book Wafaq at the Bullet Farm anyway. The Doof Warrior is dead, and we need someone to motivate the Half-Life War Boys. [From Liberation Corpse EP, out now on Extinction Burst.]