You don’t want to be outside the venue when the End It set starts. Finish that cigarette quick. If you need to take a shit, take a shit early. Make sure you’re in the room when the Baltimore hardcore band first steps onstage, or else you’ll miss my favorite part of the show: Frontman Akil Godsey belting the hell out of seemingly whatever song is stuck in his head at that exact moment. The first time I saw End It, it was Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” A couple of times, he did Smiths songs. One glorious occasion, it was “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys.” The last time I saw End It, Godsey sang “Pieces Of Me” — not the Ashlee Simpson original but the Rare Essence go-go cover that was all over DC rap and R&B radio in the mid-’00s. (The intonations are just slightly different.) For a brief moment, Godsey gets to show the world that he can sing, an act that he doesn’t often get a chance to do on actual End It songs. The song is always different, but the ritual is the same. Godsey gets as far as the first chorus, and then the first riff kicks in and the mayhem begins. It’s so much fun.
If you catch End It on the right night, in the right environment, the mayhem begins before Godsey is even done singing. As soon as he starts reaching for those notes, bodies begin flying around. End It sets don’t last a long time. They are engineered to give you as much physical release as possible, in a brief little blip of time. Their songs are short, and they don’t have many of them — or they didn’t until recently, anyway. I’ve seen End It play pretty much the exact same set many times, by virtue of the fact that I go to hardcore shows and live pretty close to Baltimore. (I still haven’t seen End It in Baltimore, but they’re in Richmond all the damn time.) The End It live show is such a roiling good time that I didn’t necessarily want it to change. In the first eight years of the band’s existence, End It released one promo tape, two EPs, and one compilation track — a grand total of 23 minutes of recorded music. That was fine. It was enough. When they play selections of that discography live — I can’t imagine an End It set going as long as 23 minutes — people lose their minds. They didn’t need to make an album. They made one anyway.
When you make End It’s kind of hardcore — fast, brutal, unshowy, generally pretty orthodox — the full-length can be a real crucible. Maybe that’s why so many bands break up before album time comes around. In a lot of cases, the sheer energy that you get from short, jagged bursts of unreconstructed rage works best at EP length. How many 90-second tantrums can you string together before they lose all meaning? How do you sustain that feeling at any kind of length? There are plenty of different answers to that question. Some bands get heavier, sludgier, more evil. Others get playful, pulling in different genres and curating different vibes. Neither of these is the End It way. End It come from the same city as Turnstile, and they’ve shared plenty of stages with that band, but they are not trying to experiment with the form. Instead, End It’s answer is to blast away at the thing that they do so well, barreling through 15 songs in way less than half an hour and trusting their instincts and charisma to carry the record. They chose wisely.
There’s a formula to an End It song, and that’s only a problem if you don’t like the formula. I love it. For some idea of how that formula works, consider their 2022 banger “New Age Slavery,” still my favorite End It track. It’s fast. It’s mean. There’s a bit of thrash to the riffage and the divebomb shredding, but End It never threaten to go full metal. The lyrics are angry enough to levitate you, and they’re about a particular thing — in this case, being forced to work boring-ass, soul-sucking jobs for your entire life. It’s direct, not poetic. It’s economical, too. You get maybe one verse and one chorus before the breakdown, where the slightly slower riff comes in and you might find yourself involuntarily launching yourself off something high to Swerve Stomp through somebody’s chest. Somewhere in there, you might hear the slightest shred of melody, but it’ll never be the focus. “New Wage Slavery” isn’t on Wrong Side Of Heaven, but it’s a useful way to illustrate how these tracks work.
On Wrong Side Of Heaven, End It do the “New Wave Slavery” thing again and again, and it never loses its power. The band sounds brighter and more locked-in than they ever have, possibly because they have the luxury of recording in an actual studio with an actual producer. (The producer in question is Brian McTiernan, who led the DC hardcore band Battery as a teenager and who went on to produce extremely important records for bands like Hot Water Music and Turnstile.) End It don’t bring in other hardcore luminaries to bark over the bridges, and they don’t use badass movie samples between songs, two consistently fun tricks that many of their peers employ. Instead, End It just keep ripping away, always lean and efficient.
Akil Godsey can sing, so when he doesn’t, you know it’s a conscious decision. As good as he is at singing, he might be even better at screaming, yowling, hectoring. When Godsey is in bark mode, he conveys trembling, fire-eyed fury while actually enunciating his words clearly enough to be understood, a rarity within the genre. On Wrong Side Of Heaven, Godsey mostly sticks with tried-and-true hardcore-song subjects like the fake friends who are always stabbing you in the back and the shit-talkers who don’t want to see you succeed. Maybe his lyrics target you, personally, if you’re the type of person who sometimes goes to shows but who doesn’t live it: “It’s all cosplay! This your part time, this my everyday! On your three-year tour, it’s all about you, got no love for the core!” Is that me? That might be me. I love it anyway.
Most of the lyrical concepts on Wrong Side Of Heaven are pretty self-explanatory. “In your heart, you know you a bitch! You a try-hard, and I’m sick of it!” “I was searching for community! You’re only here for the optics!” “Aww, shit! Baltimore City hardcore in this motherfucker!” If you love hardcore, you will never get tired of hearing a band repeating those old chestnuts with this level of verve and intensity. Akil Godsey talks a lot of deeply entertaining shit onstage, and End It videos have a great time with nostalgic jokes about PlayStation games and Celebrity Deathmatch. In his lyrics, though, Godsey is not playing around. The minute-long attack “Disdain (U Mad)” is all about how End It have worked hard don’t need to hear jealous haters telling them they shouldn’t go open a couple of Blink-182 shows or whatever. (They don’t specifically mention Blink-182, but that is something they’re about to go do.) At one point, I thought I heard Godsey yell, “Subway calls, we paid our fucking dues!” As in, don’t call them sellouts if they license a song for a Subway ad. But that would’ve been too close to being funny. It turns out the real line is “Simply ’cause we paid our fucking dues.” Subway is probably not calling anyway. Neither is Taco Bell. End It don’t make that kind of hardcore.
You have definitely heard lines like this before: “We lynch the bourgeoisie right in the street!” It’s sloganeering, and it’s fun. It’s worth at least thinking about the feeling behind those lines. At an End It show a few years ago, I heard Godsey ask a rhetorical question: “Everybody’s always talking about class solidarity, but when you go out to eat, do you stack your plates?” (That’s a paraphrase. It was something like that.) I think I sometimes did stack my plates, but I didn’t really think about it. Now, I make good and sure to stack my plates, and I teach my kids the same thing. Now, I think about it all the time. It’s a small example, but it’s also a real physical act. There’s something behind that sloganeering. And when End It move on from sloganeering, they get at something deeper.
On “I Lament,” Godsey turns his fury inward, singing about how he destroyed a relationship by running around snorting coke and neglecting the support that someone else gave him: “With all due respect, I apologize! Couldn’t see my wrongs through bloodstained eyes!” It’s so striking to hear sentiments like that rendered in mosh-anthem form, but when you say those things, you should feel them with the same clarity that you bring to the lines about lynching the bourgeoisie right in the streets. That’s what Godsey does. He means it when he’s mad at himself, just like he means it when he’s mad at fake friends or bandwagon-jumpers. He might mean it more.
The biggest sonic departure on Wrong Side Of Heaven is a ridiculously fun track called “Could You Love Me?” That’s the one where Godsey finally sings on record, just as he does at the beginning of End It sets. Over a some bouncy blooz-rock party riffage, Godsey wails about how he can’t sleep at night and needs you to hold him tight. If recorded just slightly differently, that could be a hair metal song. As it turns out, though, it’s a cover of a 1996 track from the New York hardcore band Maximum Penalty. Even when End It play around with the form, they’re hard to the core.
The real departures on Wrong Side Of Heaven happen in some of the most straightforward songs. End It are not exactly a hopeful band. The name of the group is, as far as I can tell, a reference to suicide. Lots of their early tracks are about being so disgusted with your surroundings that you barely function. There’s so much reason to feel that disgust today, and End It sometimes look outside their social circles and into the larger world. “Anti-Colonial,” for instance, is an anti-genocide song with an unambiguous message, end it ends with Godsey roaring, “Rest in peace to the martyrs!” Album closer “Empire’s Demise” is about how it’s about fucking time for America to die, and I find something cleansing and righteous and even hopeful in the lines about how the hate they sowed is what they’ll reap. The album ends on this sunny note: “250 years, hoodwinked and led astray! Slow, horrible death at the end of their path!” Now, that’s something to sing about.
Wrong Side Of Heaven is out 8/29 on Flatspot.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend
• Blood Orange’s Essex Honey
• The Beths’ Straight Line Was A Lie
• The Berries’ The Berries
• Ganser’s Animal Hospital
• CMAT’s Euro-Country
• Erykah Badu & The Alchemist’s Abi & Alan
• The Hives’ The Hives Forever Forever The Hives
• The Beaches’ No Hard Feelings
• Pinkshift’s Earthkeeper
• Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin’s Ghosted III
• Pearly Drops’ The Voices Are Coming Back
• Brad Mehldau’s Ride Into The Sun
• Christian McBride’s Without Further Ado, Vol. 1
• Saul Williams, Carlos Niño, & Friends’ Saul Williams Meets Carlos Niño & Friends At TreePeople
• Runnner’s A Welcome Kind of Weakness
• Margo Price’s Hard Headed Woman
• Rodney Crowell’s Airline Highway
• Belinda Carlisle’s Once Upon A Time In California
• Marshall Crenshaw’s From The Hellhole
• Eiko Ishibashi & Jim O’Rourke’s Pareidolia
• Shannon, Krgovich, Tenniscoats’ Wao
• ShrapKnel’s Armature
• Duke Deuce’s Rebirth
• Tei Shi’s Make believe I make believe
• Slow Crush’s Thirst
• Jehnny Beth’s You Heartbreaker You
• Lathe Of Heaven’s Aurora
• Google Earth’s Mac OS X 10.11
• Nova Twins’ Parasites & Butterflies
• Flyte’s Between You And Me
• The Technicolors’ Heavy Pulp
• Guedra Guedra’s MUTANT
• quinnie’s paper doll
• Modern Nature’s The Heat Warps
• Jens Kuross’ Crooked Songs
• Zach Top’s Ain’t In It For My Health
• Braxton Cook’s Not Everyone Can Go
• 8Lucie Sue’s Battlestation
• Greta Gaines’ Bird Before Light
• Tim Carr’s Pleasure Drives
• C.R. Gillespie’s Island Of Women
• Moviola’s Earthbound
• The Casket Lottery’s Feel The Teeth
• VICIOUS RUMORS’ The Devil’s Asylum
• WUCAN’s Axioms
• herbal tea’s Hear As The Mirror Echoes
• Nate Smith’s LIVE-ACTION
• ThxSoMch’s The Sound Of You Laughin
• Big Wild’s Wild Child
• Laminate’s Kiss UnLtd.
• TTSSFU’s Blown
• Candy Whips’ MOONLIGHT
• Mélancolia’s random.access.misery
• myah’s i don’t know what i’m feeling
• Bad Self Portraits’ I Think I’m Going To Hell
• Have Mercy’s the loneliest place i’ve ever been
• SPINALL’s Èkó Groove
• KIRBY’s Miss Black America
• Che Noir & The Other Guys’ No Validation
• GYAKIE’s After Midnight
• RNIE’s FULL NEPTUNE
• IHLO’s Legacy
• Bryan Adams’ Roll With The Punches
• John Oates’ John Oates
• Colbie Caillat’s This Time Around
• IDLES’ Caught Stealing soundtrack
• Bad Bad Hats’ Psychic Reader (10th Anniversary Edition)
• Key Glock’s Glockaveli: All Eyez On Key (Deluxe)
• Riley Green’s Don’t Mind If I Do (Deluxe)
• Kacy Hill’s But Anyway, No Worries! EP
• Zion Garcia’s The New Film Star EP
• Forever★’s Second Gen Dream EP
• Kingdom Of Giants’ Burning Chrome EP
• WOOM’s To Slow You EP
• Retirement Party’s Nothing To Hear Without A Sound EP
• Sheléa’s Spirit EP
• Dylan Cotrone’s Weekend Religion EP
• Stephen Wilson Jr.’s Blankets EP
