Nirvana played a reunion show — or, you know, “Nirvana” played a “reunion” show. You saw that, right? A couple of weeks ago, the band’s surviving members put in a surprise appearance at FireAid, the biggest of the many recent fundraisers for victims of the Los Angeles wildfires. (They also played with Post Malone at the SNL 50th-anniversary concert, but that’s not what we’re talking about here today.) At FireAid, Nirvana played a four-song set with four different guest bandleaders. It was a cool thing to do, and I’m sure the people in the Kia Forum that night felt like they were witnessing history. But nobody was going to get elbowed in the throat when Joan Jett sang “Territorial Pissings.” If you were looking for that kind of catharsis, you would have to look elsewhere.

There have been lots of wildfire benefit shows over the past month, and that’s exactly what should be happening. The same night that the Grammy Awards made a big fuss about getting corporations to donate, a very different fundraiser happened across town. That night, a benefit show called This Is LA took over the Belasco, and the bill had some of the greatest hardcore bands to come out of Southern California in recent years: God’s Hate, Rotting Out, Xibalba, Downpresser, Zulu. When I was a kid, Strife were probably the biggest LA hardcore band in history, or at least since the days of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks. At this show, Strife were just halfway up the bill. This was a big show, and I bet it was fun as hell.

XXX pic.twitter.com/V2B1YJC62I

— God’s Hate (@GodsHate818) February 4, 2025

A few nights later, my own local hardcore scene held its own LA-wildfire benefit. It was a lot smaller than This Is LA, but it still felt like a big night. Private Hell’s Mikey Kent, a Richmond guy who I’m friendly with, put together a bill at Bandito’s, a Mexican restaurant with a side room where bands play sometimes. (I’ve been to a bunch of Bandito’s shows, and I’m only saying the name of the venue because I’ve been told that it’s OK. I’m not trying to blow up the spots of any DIY venues here.) The show was only announced a couple of weeks before it happened, and it had the kind of lineup that makes me murmur “oh, shit” out loud when the flyer pops up online — four heavyweights from across the Richmond hardcore-punk-metal spectrum, all in a room small enough that you’re going to get knocked around at least a little bit even if you’re not trying to mosh. Good cause or not, that’s the kind of show I like to see.

I’ve been booking gigs since I was 16 years old, and this is almost certainly the best thing I’ve put together pic.twitter.com/3vROMH3Toh

— Mikey Kent (@Crystalplumage_) January 21, 2025

Before Private Hell’s set started, Mikey Kent said a few words about why he put the bill together. Mikey lost his father very recently, and his father came from Southern California, just outside LA. Some of Mikey’s earliest memories were visiting family in that part of the country. While Mikey told the story, I tried to put the timeline together in my head. His father must’ve just passed away when the fires started leveling entire Los Angeles neighborhoods, and Mikey must’ve started putting the show together immediately. Mikey’s got a small child at home. Grieving a parent is the most fucking exhausting thing. So is raising a baby. Putting together hardcore shows is a lot of work. If you’re putting together a benefit like that while you’re going through two of the most intense things that people go through, then that says a lot about your character.

One of the biggest bands on the Richmond underground right now is Restrictor Plate, a proudly ignorant NASCAR-themed slam project. They do the “gentlemen, start your engines” speech at the beginning of their shows and everything. I haven’t seen Restrictor Plate yet, but people apparently go nuts for them. They’re already headlining local shows even though they basically just started. Restrictor Plate didn’t play this benefit, but that band’s main architect also plays drums in a blackened thrash group called Vigil, and they opened the show. (UPDATE: Mikey tells me that the drummer in question recently quit both Restrictor Plate and Vigil, so forget I said anything.) The members of Vigil look like metalheads — denim vests, long goatees, all that stuff. They play fast and raspy and old-school, and they’re really good. Vigil didn’t get an immediate pop from the crowd when they started, but the room got more and more active with every song, and people were flying everywhere by the end.

Private Hell are playing as a three-piece now, and the power-trio setup suits them well. Mikey Kent’s band plays all-out head-down metal-punk, the part of the field where Discharge and ’80s Metallica overlap, and I love that shit. I like how simple and direct the current lineup sounds. Now, when they slow down so that Mikey Kent has room to shred, they sometimes almost sound like stoner metal. I wasn’t expecting to get emotional while watching Private Hell, but that’s what happened. It’s hard to talk about going through serious life business at a hardcore show. Before he told us about his dad, Mikey Kent tried to get people to stop crowding in the room’s entrance so that more people could get in. After he told us about his dad, Mikey told us to beat our friends’ ass when the first song kicked in. He started one of the songs by barking out a few bars of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” in metal voice, and he didn’t have to say that it was a song that his dad loved. You could just tell.

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You could maybe say that Dimension Six were the only full-on hardcore band on that benefit bill, but Dimension Six are also the most hardcore band. Right now, there’s a wave of younger Richmond bands largely made up of kids who have fully immersed themselves in the stompy fastball attack of elder Richmond bands like Down To Nothing and Bracewar. That’s cool as hell. That’s how cities develop their own scenes and sounds organically. Dimension Six are right at the top of that heap, and they destroy. At least one of the guys in D6 is an actual grown-up who’s old enough to have Down To Nothing memories, but I think I heard that another of them is a kid who just finished high school. They play with total locked-in fury, and all of their songs are lyrical pep talks about seizing control of your life and determining your own fate. They’re so good, and they make people lose their shit. I hope they stick around and become a regional staple, like the bands that they clearly admire.

Dimension Six probably could’ve headlined the benefit, and they probably would’ve filled the room. Instead, Mikey got Enforced to play. That means we got to see a big band play a small room, which is always awesome. This was my first time seeing Enforced since they played a DC punk festival eight years ago. Back then, they were part of the Power Trip wave of hardcore bands playing ’80s-style crossover thrash. Since then, Enforced, like Power Trip before them, have fully moved into the metal world. They’re playing big tours with big bands — Obituary, Gatecreeper, Frozen Soul. They’re playing mid-afternoon slots at metal festivals where you have to have your shit completely together. They’re on the road more often than they’re home, and they’ve become an absolute machine. When you get to see that machine go to work in a tiny space, it’s something to behold.

I can’t sit here and tell you my favorite Enforced song because I don’t generally distinguish one Enforced song from another. Every Enforced song basically brings the same things — nasty-fast hard-snap riffage, blazing divebomb-heavy solos, concussive-bark vocals, all-out thrash blitzkriegs suddenly downshifting into mosh-part breakdowns, lots of cymbal-tapping. They do really, really impressive things within their lane, and those things become way more impressive in person. The band snaps off those riffs with focused authority, and they do it while practicing the kind of stereo headbanging that always looks cool as fuck. Frontman Knox Colby looks like a compact fireplug Thor, and he knows how to control a room. At one point, Colby mentioned how we were all there to help people who had lost their homes, and that was true. But by the time Enforced took the stage, it wasn’t really the focus anymore. Instead, we were all on the same page, feeling the kind of physical release that only a show like that can really offer. A surprise Nirvana reunion is cool and all, but I don’t think it can do that.

Blazing Tomb – “Visions From The Gray”

The kind of berserk magic that can only happen when bunch of hardcore people decide that if they’re going to try making some death metal, they should make some death metal. This one lasts for five minutes almost as a provocation. Like: We’re going to clank some chains, and then we’re going to play an awesome slow riff with additional shredding, and then the song can start, even if the song has no hope of being as hard as the intro. But then the song is as hard as the intro — a mouth-foaming demon-sprint that gets more violent as it keeps going. When that breakdown hits, it feels like you’re trying to sneak past a horde of zombies and you realize that the zombies just noticed you. [From Singles From The Tomb EP, out now on Creator-Destructor Records.]

Captive – “Rotting”

I don’t go to enough shows. If I didn’t write this column, I might never go to shows. This column exists mostly because I wanted to force myself out of the house, and I still stay home most nights, playing video games or falling down YouTube holes as my family sleeps. For me, hardcore and inertia are direct competitors. Here, Cleveland’s Captive come with scary riffs and gargle-growl invective about how that at-home life is no good: “Locked inside! Your flesh and your mind! They are rotting!” Well. Fuck. Yeah. [From Conditioned To Suffering EP, self-released, out now.]

Combust – “Our Own Breed” (Feat. Imposter’s Rory O’Neill]

There’s a photo from the early ’90s where Nas and Tupac are partying together in some club, probably the Tunnel, and Nas is wearing a Biohazard shirt. Combust make me think of that photo. They’re a real New York hardcore band, as in a band of hardcore guys from New York City, and they have the kind of threatening swagger that feels just as New York as it does hardcore, even when they get a British guy to come in and scream on the breakdown. Someone get Nas a Combust shirt. [From Belly Of The Beast, out 3/7 on Triple B Records.]

Defiance – “Kisses”

I have a weird thing about hardcore from Western Europe, especially from Germany and sometimes Scandinavia. There are plenty of exceptions, but for whatever reason, I feel like that stuff is a little too clean and programmatic and professional. It doesn’t have the charisma or the immediacy of the stuff that I like the best. Maybe I’m being ignorant and basing ideas on preconceptions, but it’s one of those dumb prejudices that I have a hard time shaking. But this band comes from Stuttgart, and I don’t get any of that dress-up sense at all. This shit bounces, and it sounds like it means something. If I hear any other German hardcore that sounds like this, I’ll start reconsidering my dumb ideas. For now, this band feels like a unicorn. [Stand-alone single, out now on BDHW Records.]

Doomsday – “The Outlaw”

I once got into a party conversation with a punk guy who was excited to go see MF DOOM at the Pitchfork Music Festival and then was bummed to learn that it wasn’t the UK crust band Doom. (This was in that stretch where DOOM dropped the MF.) So I think it’s pretty fun that there’s now a wild-eyed Bay Area crossover thrash band with a name that always means they show up in streaming-service results after the first MF DOOM album. We should keep this going. There should be punk bands who call themselves Madvillainy and Mm.. Food without realizing that those names are forever associated with somebody else. Also, this song slaps. [From Never Known Peace, out 3/28 on Creator-Destructor Records.]

Dose – “Full-Tilt”

I only know a few people from Iowa, and they’re some of the nicest people that you ever met in your life. I’m sure I knew that they had hardcore in Iowa because why wouldn’t they? They have hardcore everywhere. But I’m vaguely impressed that they have scary hardcore in Iowa — and not Slipknot scary, either. Dose are from Des Moines, and they sound like when you’re at a gas station at two in the morning and you start to feel like you’re about to get robbed. [From Trouble EP, self-released, out now.]

Eliminators – “B.A.S.E.”

I know Ace Stallings as a huge driving force in Richmond hardcore. Ace sings for Mutually Assured Destruction, and until recently he was probably the person most responsible for booking shows and boosting bands and generally acting as a spokesperson for a whole regional underground network. But Ace has been living in the Bay Area for a couple of years, and B.A.S.E. is the straight-edge hardcore punk band that he started specifically so that he could play shows with Fentanyl in San Francisco. Eliminators sound nothing like MAD, or for that matter like any of Ace’s other bands, but their fast, elemental stomp-around urgency hits the sweet spot. With a band like this, you want to be able to chant along with something simple and memorable, and that is exactly what they give you. [From B.A.S.E. EP, out now on Convulse Records.]

Ingrown – “Bullet”

Sometimes when I hear an Ingrown song, I get the weird, vague idea that what I’m hearing is simply not possible — that a real band cannot consistently make music this fast and hard and brutal. Ingrown aren’t making powerviolence-type stuff, where the speed is the point. They’re taking metallic stomp-around hardcore to its natural extreme, and when you think their whole thing can’t get any crazier, they speed up. They pull it off, too. If any other band tried to sound like Ingrown, I would probably hate it, but these guys speak directly to my inner goon. This might be the first Ingrown music video that doesn’t feature copious numbers of guns and four-wheelers, so I guess Ingrown are woke now. [From Idaho, out 3/7 on Closed Casket Activities.]

Siyakhal – “Evin Fire / آتیش اوین “

This Toronto band brings speed and fire better than most, and this song’s grimy jackhammer attack would probably merit a place in this column even if this song was about eating chicken fingers and playing PlayStation or something stupid like that. But it’s not about something stupid, and it’s genuinely inspiring to see someone making wrathful and pointed Farsi-language hardcore punk in the Western world today. [From Days Of Smoke And Ash / روزای دود و خاکستر, out 3/7 on Static Shock Records.]

Staticlone – “Honeycomb”

It was one thing that some former Blacklisted guys, including singer George Hirsch, were starting a new hardcore band. That was cool and unexpected. When Staticlone were putting up flexis on Bandcamp and doing basically nothing to promote them, I was into that. The music was good, too, which was unsurprising but reassuring. But now Staticlone are in album mode, working in a real studio and putting out music on a real label and everything. The lead single from their LP is a enormously dirty D-beat barrage, and it’s better than anyone had any right to expect. They don’t seem like part-timers anymore. [From Better Living Through Static Vision, out 3/7 on Relapse Records.]