Happy 2026! No, me neither. However, as penance for opening this column with such a laughable statement, please find below excitable descriptions of some new punk and hardcore releases which induce in me a confused form of happiness, in spite of their efforts to do otherwise.
Marrowbone of Dublin first shared their debut demo three years ago; new versions of its three songs feature, alongside six more, on a self-titled cassette album released by Tapes Of Wrath. Without whom I might have bypassed this entirely, or assumed ‘Marrowbone’ was (as the name sounds like) a band of old fellows who consider Fleetwood Mac to have ended when Peter Green left. Hardly! They are in fact a trio of DIY punx playing wickedly clanging/driving gothic anarcho gear with hints of noise rock and post hardcore, and my near-total lack of background knowledge has only piqued my interest further.
Marrowbone deliver punk orthodoxy to a point, with stirring powerchord-y hooks at songs’ cores often as not, but those cores are garlanded with structurally strange segments and jarring time changes, to say nothing of vocalist Meyler’s perma-anguished siren call vocal. They also chuck in bits which don’t fit the archetype, like the ‘90s Dischord band’ style wheedling guitar on ‘The Chase, The Sweat, The Fear’ and the almost Balkan-sounding guitar melody on ‘These Hands’. In terms of recent releases (that I happened to be mad for), I reckon people who liked Sublux and Leucotome’s debut tapes would also like Marrowbone’s, but there’s some Fugazi and Drive Like Jehu in there too to make everything less routine, and also better.
If you want to look up more info on The III in this crazy sans-serif world, be aware their name is like ‘The 3’ but in Roman numerals, rather than ‘ill’ or three lower-case letter Ls – or I can give you the basic roll call. On The III’s debut EP Dig Your Own Grave, released on tape via Roachleg, they’re a trio featuring two members of Poison Ruïn – Will McAndrew, who started this as a solo project, and Mac Kennedy, who birthed Poison Ruïn in the same manner – plus drummer Pat Conaboy.
Dig Your Own Grave was probably not recorded ‘for’ Roachleg as such, but the sequencing of its five songs could function as a reverbed raspberry to anyone who checks this label for the grotty gutter hardcore it most often releases. ‘Full Speed Ahead’ and ‘Get It Where You Can’ respectively start and finish the EP with slow-burning, multi-layered guitars which continue the leaching influence of Oasis into the transatlantic punk underground. ‘Keep The Peace’ is two minutes of brooding garage rock, ‘Squeeze’ some wistful 90s college rock rumble. And at the centre there’s the title track, an absolute heater which (by McAndrew’s own admission) makes explicit Poison Ruïn’s lurking Wipers leanings but does it so well it justifies this whole venture even if The III never release anything else or play live.
Not too many oldheads in this month’s NSH, overall, but the personnel of Nightfeeder and Verdict, who have just split an LP on the Czech label Phobia, are doing heroic work cranking the average age up to a dignified number (won’t specify what I think that is). Jay Stiles, singer and guitarist in Nightfeeder, has been doing bands for something like 40 years, as has Jallo Lehto from Verdict. Doubtless there were people pledging their life to crust punk in decades past, but who knew life was this long?
Exposure to these 15 rampaging cuts (eight for Nightfeeder, seven for Verdict) might get the same sort of cultural allegiance fermenting in you. Hey, I’m sure my jeans didn’t have patches on before I pressed play! And my hair didn’t resemble a scarecrow’s. Nightfeeder, from Seattle and active throughout this current decade, are the more bombastic of the two groups, teetering on metal with the immense ‘Life’s Foul Pit’; elsewhere, they’re more rote in their pacey D-beat approach, but the dual guitars of Stiles and Brandon Jones can still dazzle. Verdict, who harbour no-messin’ Swedish hardcore royalty in their number, are more compact and feral-sounding than Nightfeeder – if anything, their brickwall barrage sounds of a piece with a newer US/UK scene that’s been weaned, in part, on Verdict members’ old bands. Circle of life baby!
To expand the above point, the second EP by Traumatizer is top drawer retromodern hardcore apocalyptica with a good four and a half decades of global dinmaking in its arteries – and they’re from the Netherlands (Haarlem near Amsterdam, to be precise), a country I feel’s punched a little below its weight in recent years when it comes to this stuff.
It’s titled Nuclear War Machine, which serves as in-group signalling of sorts – if it’s called something like this, it’ll sound something like this – but is elevated above anything generic thanks to a tangible taste for rock & roll, ‘Dead End’ in particular echoing a band like Inepsy, and Anna von Asseldonk’s howling-into-a-tornado vocals. I could go for more solo action from guitarist Randy Linskens than we get, based on ‘Echo Chamber’ and ‘Hell On Earth’, but the less-is-more principle is likewise acknowledged. Released on 7-inch by Barcelona’s Enfermos label, you can also get this on tape from Sheffield’s Icepicks At Dawn if you like to #BuyBritish for whatever reason, or from Indonesia’s The Seats Of Piss should that be the localest option.
On their second album, Orc Party (Iron Lung), 80HD do the ‘unrepresentative opening and closing tracks’ thing with cheeky aplomb. ‘Friendship Master’ is a dungeon synth-type instrumental intro, then following six dank nugs of altered-beast neo-NYHC the group’s bassist, Ysa Moreno, remixes ‘Goblin Mode’ (the last of those six songs) in effervescent bedroom techno style. I don’t anticipate a full rave pivot for 80HD on this evidence, but it’s fun without being zany, as is Orc Party’s central hardcore layer.
In fact, it really speaks highly of the quartet that this record sounds like four pals pouring a load of their favourite weird music into one vessel without the result sounding like an unfocused mess. Drummer Sasha Stroud, possibly best known for recording bands at her Artifact studio, also seems to be a major death metal/grindcore head, and brings some of that rhythmic blur to the table. Moreno and guitarist Mike Hillerson can chug stoutly enough to light up the kind of dancefloors where headcases in bandanas do illegal martial arts, but then there’ll be passages of the sort of greasy creepycrawl gear that’s defined New York ever since the Toxic State label got started. Hillerson and mononymous 80HD vocalist Hogan also play in Who Pays, whose boss EP was reviewed a few columns back.
A hexed blessing to have a release by Proprioception to lay on you! They are approximately from Newport in south Wales and are the region’s best hardcore band in years, having existed themselves for about two of those years. Mental Vacation, a fresher-still tape label from Somerset, is issuing the three-song Sexual Liberation Über Terror. With all three members credited with two or three in-studio things, this is another release where the band sound like they’re being a little audacious in seeing what might fit together, as opposed to practising genre adherence, and the result is fully invigorating and not much like anything else in the present-day UK hardcore landscape.
‘The Hunter’ starts as noisy ambient with distressed dialogue, flips over into crusty sludge metal and goes speed-demonic for its last 45 seconds, with vocals that want a bucket of holy water chucked on ‘em (Beau Moss) and gloriously repulsive ditch-metal guitar (Archie Meyer-Daniels). The other two songs each come in just under 90 seconds: ‘Self-Fulfilling Prophecy’ is as close as Proprioception get to hardcore normality, though still not very, and ‘SLÜT Stomp’ doing something like cramming Sacrilege into a proto-grindcore framework via Evie Roberts’ drumming.
I’m getting round to the self-titled demo tape by [Brick] a little late, but you can still buy a copy (from the Death Before Detransition label)… plus this Brighton five-piece are – to the best of my knowledge – the first self-identifying transfeminist hardcore band from the UK. So there’s an inherent relevance to this that overrides release dates and suchlike.
Part of a countrywide queer/trans punk scene that’s so much bigger in scope than a decade ago as to be almost unrecognisable, [Brick] are on this debut a thematic band in the same way G.L.O.S.S. (to this day the standard-bearers for trans HC) were across their brief discography. That is to say they speak of matters directly personal to their existence, in direct language: “It’s futility to wake up every day / Apply foundation / Shave your legs / And pray that they won’t stomp your head.” Conversely, though equally blunt, there’s ‘T4T Dyke Lover’ – if you’ve ever thought the first verse of ‘Sweet Leaf’ by Black Sabbath, which [Brick] lift in its entirety, could be about anything in theory, here is validation of that thought. Musically, these seven minutes are hardcore in its most embryonic form, detuned and sonically skeletal: [Brick] recorded this on a four-track, and totally make the aesthetic work for them whether it’s through choice or necessity.
Time once more to do the ‘like that? like this!’ shuffle with another self-titled cassette debut. Happy Farm are from Phoenix and the four members look to have done a few other bands, but essentially this – released on the Human Future and Suicide Of A Species labels – is a clean slate. Upon which is scribbled reams of raddled utterances in drugged-spider handwriting, as seven hits of excitingly blundering lo-fi psycho-anarcho fills the void. Produced, after a fashion and with an ideologically correct lack of finesse, by Happy Farm guitarist Elad, this is so my kinda sound.
Abrasive as hardcore but slower than your average, and not anarcho punk either if you require army-jacket ratatata rhythms to tick that box (you probably shouldn’t, but hey), Happy Farm remind me a bunch of that really cool Soakie EP from six years back, which means I can also flag up some of its stated inspirations: Good Throb, Phoenix punk OGs the Feederz and Rudimentary Peni, from whom this band take their name. Vocalist Aimée’s forceful yet desperate hoarseness is a hot fit for lyrics which mix lurid doomerism, justly seditious calls to action and shafts of light in Vantablack darkness.
Back to Brighton for the debut LP by Bodybag, but be aware we’re getting into something very different now. As It Ferments… (Hellride) is a posse of hardcore lads taking their grounding in the enduring UK beatdown scene and turning that into 20 minutes of sludgy lowbrow death metal. Serial killer documentary dialogue, some sampled chat about Haile Selassie in a weed song, guest MC spots for their pals and a thanks list running to a length I associate with 90s rap albums – that sort of business. And some fucking DEADLY riffs, then some more.
Bodybag don’t play fast very often on this album, though it’s a tonic when they do, as on the almost grindcore ‘Embodying The Sigmurethra’, and guitarist Joey Turnbull has a sick tone on his rare forays into soloing, like a Cro-Mags/Obituary fusion. ‘Harnessing The Plague’ jumps, with scant warning, from a relatively techy bout of slam death to a synth-laden swordwielder for its latter stages, and though Cooper Kryskiw’s vocals are mean and guttural, perusal of Bodybag’s lyrics reveal he is often given to injokes and matey shoutouts. As well as lots of threats to kill and maim in slasher-flick fashion, but I already told you this is basically a death metal joint.
Last and most, the complete catalogue of Tokyo’s Lip Cream, as reissued just before Christmas by Relapse and which – certainly in the eight-disc Lonely Rock Box format – represents the grandest Japanese hardcore archiving project to date. Quite silly of me to set aside three paragraphs to write about it, in hindsight. Nevertheless!
Lip Cream formed in 1984 after bassist Minoru Ogawa agreed to feature on a compilation album, the to-become-seminal Hardcore Unlawful Assembly, before having any songs or bandmates. They released two singles later that year, with debut Lonely Rock sometimes sounding (by accident or design) like a psychedelic speedfreak version of UK82, followed by a half-live/half-studio cassette whose rocker leanings culminate in a Johnny Thunders cover and foreshadow their debut LP, 1986’s Kill Ugly Pop. The title and sleeve design are (seemingly unexplained) Mothers Of Invention riffs but the music is controlled-chaos hardcore punk which stands as an Eastern-hemisphere answer to what Poison Idea were doing at the same time, not least in guitarist Naoki’s style and tone.
Mini-LP 9 Shocks Terror, from ‘87 and probably the Lip Cream critical consensus pick, is 14 exceedingly manic minutes that ramps up the Kill… tempo 10% or so and makes Minoru’s bass sound like a landslide approaching your house. Thereafter, an ambitious but strained era for the band yielded Close To The Edge and -Sin- – the final two Lip Cream albums, both packing prog-type concepts but essentially staying true to their hardcore horizons (a certain metallic gleam to the production was reflected in releases by newer late-80s peers like Death Side and Nightmare). They aren’t a band who require boning up on extensive lore to aid appreciation: you can just hop in and fry your lid to some of the highest quality product to be spawned in hardcore’s first decade.
Straight Hedge Mix January 2026 Tracklist
Marrowbone – ‘The Chase, The Sweat, The Fear’
The III – ‘Dig Your Own Grave’
Nightfeeder – ‘Life’s Foul Pit’
Verdict – ‘Narcissistic Piece Of Shit’
Traumatizer – ‘Dead End’
80HD – ‘Goblin Mode’
Proprioception – ‘The Hunter’
[Brick] – ‘Existential Switch’
Happy Farm – ‘Lesser Key’
Bodybag – ‘Cryptid Scrolls’
Lip Cream – ‘Cold Lover’
