United Blood Returns, A Beacon For The Hardcore Faithful
Kenny Savercool
“You shake my hand! Say pleased to meet you! Look my in the eye! I don’t believe you!” That’s the part. That’s where I get stuck every time. Can’t get past it. I hear that, and I’m mentally headbutting a turret off a tank. For me, Trapped Under Ice’s “Pleased To Meet You,” from the 2011 album Big Kiss Goodnight, is an absolutely perfect piece of music. Justice Tripp shouts about being nothing like you, and then you want to yell along because you, too, are nothing like you. When TUI play in a big room, everyone in that room, including you, is nothing like you. If I could shoot 10 songs up into space to teach aliens that we’re nothing like you, that would be one of them. Last weekend, I saw a couple dozen hardcore bands at Richmond’s United Blood fest, and I enjoyed all of it. But in the back of my mind, I was really just waiting for the moment that Trapped Under Ice would play “Pleased To Meet You.”
I had a lot riding on that “Pleased To Meet You” moment. Before last weekend, I’d never seen Trapped Under Ice. We’re from the same place — Baltimore, Maryland, greatest city in America — but I was completely disconnected from hardcore when TUI were on their underground rise. I caught up on their music after their influence had become this mythic thing and the other members of the band had gone on to start other projects. These days, TUI play infrequently, and they haven’t released an album in a decade. Every live set is an event. I’ve watched tons of live videos, and they always look incredible. A few months ago, I wrote a whole hardcore column about one of those live videos, but I hadn’t been in the room for one of those sets. When you mentally build something up enough, the actual experience can let you down. This experience did not let me down. That “Pleased To Meet You” riff hit early; it was the opening number of TUI’s set. In that instant, I had lightning in my blood.
United Blood wasn’t going to come back. When I first started writing my monthly hardcore column at the beginning of 2020, it was mainly as an excuse to force myself out of the house, to take advantage of the legendary Richmond scene that’s only an hour and change away from where I live. (I stopped writing the column a couple of months ago because I was worried that it was starting to feel forced.) The first night I went out to one of those shows for the column, going through the whole ritual of DM’ing the promoter so I could get the address of the DIY venue that I never could’ve found on my own, the lineup for the 2020 edition of United Blood came out. Converge and Cold World were headlining, and the lineup was full of bands I’d been wanting to see: Mindforce, Never Ending Game, Division Of Mind. I figured that UB would be the main event, the moment where I finally fully immersed myself in this culture. Fate had other plans.
Richmond’s United Blood music festival made a triumphant return to Shockoe Bottom this past weekend after a five-year hiatus.
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— WTVR CBS 6 Richmond (@CBS6) April 14, 2025
That fest obviously never happened, and the bookers decided not to bring it back when the COVID restrictions lifted. So it was a genuine shock when United Blood announced its return a few months ago. Tickets sold out in minutes. I’ve been to a few hardcore fests in the past few years, but I’d been wanting to be at this one, and this one was finally back. In the ’10s, United Blood had a reputation as the hardest of the hardcore fests, and that’s the version that returned this year. Even within this world, other fests make attempts to branch out or to switch the styles up. They’ll book shoegaze bands, or death metal bands, or rappers. That wasn’t what these guys did. Instead, it was a full weekend devoted to a particular form of stomp-around music, especially to the variations that flourished in the ’10s. From the outside, that narrow focus might look pretty boring, but it’s hard to be bored when everyone aspires to that same reckless physicality.
The same weekend as United Blood, Richmond had another, completely separate heavy music festival. Thrash overlords Municipal Waste celebrated their 25th anniversary with a big weekend of shows, and they included Public Acid and Enforced, a couple of bands from the local hardcore scene, on their bill. I don’t even think the conflict bothered too many people. Richmond isn’t that big of a city, but for whatever reason, DIY music is entangled with everyday life there. It can support two vaguely intersecting fests on the same weekend. It can support other hyper-specific underground fests, too — like Dark Days, Bright Nights, which centers on screamo and noise-rock, or LTC Fest, which happens in the same room as United Blood and which books bands from the more accessible hardcore-adjacent universe. (Fleshwater and Drug Church headlined the last one.)
At United Blood, there was no room for the adjacent. The biggest outliers on the bill were the ones that were essentially grandfathered in. New Jersey’s E-Town Concrete, once again active after their late-’90s heyday, were never that far away from rap-metal. They make AJ Soprano music, basically. Their set was the only time I saw anyone playing a seven-string bass with their fingers all weekend. Angel Du$t, meanwhile, walk a crazy line between hardcore muscle and sugary power-pop headrush melody. They’re the band that Justice Tripp started around the time that Trapped Under Ice first wound down, and they got the wild crowd reaction that they always get. But at least some of the people at the fest weren’t on board for something as playful as that. I heard one guy loudly announce that he was glad Angel Du$t were playing because that would give him a chance to go take a shit.
This year’s United Blood wasn’t just full of bands who sounded like ’00s and ’10s hardcore. It was full of bands who were ’00s and ’10s hardcore. Headliners Trapped Under Ice and Cold World mostly just play big fests these days. Plenty of others — Think I Care, RZL DZL, the Wrongside — broke up a long time ago, and they might not have any plans to play again. They were there because they meant a lot to the bookers, or to the other bands on the bill. When you’re booking a festival like that, it’s less about presenting a varied but complementary musical experience, more about getting all your people back together. If you were only looking at hardcore through the lens of United Blood, you’d get a pretty limited view of the genre and the culture. (There were very few bands that include women, for instance. I don’t think I saw any, though I might’ve missed some.) You would, however, get to see some sick shit, especially if you’re into the thing that aficionados have increasingly been describing as “regular hardcore.” That’s the stuff that isn’t really punk or metal or anything else. It can have some of that stuff, but it’s really just hardcore. You know it when you hear it.
I liked watching the reunited bands, even when I had no history with those bands. It’s beautiful to see old friends reconnecting and doing this thing that, at least when they were doing it, had no opportunities for real professional advancement. Some of those bands were tight and focused. Wilkes-Barre’s War Hungry, for instance, were an absolute fucking beast. Everybody in that band goes off extremely hard. They’ve got a thundering heavy-chug style, and their guitarist is Arthur Rizk, now an in-demand heavy-music producer and engineer, as well as the mastermind behind metal bands like Eternal Champion and Sumerlands. (He’s in Cold World, too.) He goes crazy onstage, and so does everybody else in War Hungry. Some of the other bands didn’t have that level of precision. My favorite bit of stage patter all weekend (not naming the band) was this: “Hit it, boys! [Nothing happens] I said, hit it, boys!”
But I wasn’t necessarily in it for the reactivated bands. On Friday, I couldn’t get to the Canal Club, the cavernous venue that hosts United Blood, until midway through the day, which meant that I missed all the younger bands. (I got there just in time to catch the very end of Boston’s Haywire, and the “get the fuck out of my way” breakdown at the end of their set closer “Like A Train” hit extremely hard.) I ended up missing some currently active bands I really would’ve liked to see: Scarab, Dynamite, Bad Beat, former Truth Cult singer Paris Roberts’ new group No Idols. The newer bands that I did see, some of whom are already fully established, were fucking awesome. The experience of a marathon festival really drives home how important a great bandleader is in hardcore. Singers in this music don’t just sing, or scream, or bark. They have to be the larger-than-life figures who can focus and channel the energy in the room, and someone like Combust’s Andrew Vacante does that with an unbelievable level of energy and swagger. It’s just a blast to see that in action.
Saturday ended with a nine-band rock block of some of the best things happening in the hardcore world right now. The Jersey Shore’s Blind Justice were just out of control. I saw singer Mike Botti do a couple of things I’d never seen anyone do before. A couple of times, he did somersault-cannonball stagedives — not into the crowd, but into the masses of people watching on the side of the stage. He also demanded that the band play the minute-long anthem “Shore Style” twice in a row, just because he wanted to hear it again. That guy is unhinged, and it’s beautiful. Gridiron’s instinctive rapcore has some of the nü metal energy of E-Town Concrete but more of fully-internalized style of Cold World. They come off like guys who listen to nothing but rap and hardcore, not like professional musicians trying to fuse those two things.
Never Ending Game, who share members with Gridiron and who played right after them, push their bone-crunch riffage into guttural metallic toughness that recalls Detroit forebears like Cold As Life. Richmond fixtures Division Of Mind have a ton of guttural gravitas, and they never play a bad set. They were especially amped-up on Saturday. End It never have a bad set, either, and they play Richmond all the time. Akil Godsey is one of the most truly entertaining bandleaders out there in any genre, and I love the thing where he sings some song a cappella right before the riff kicks in. This time, we got “Pieces Of Me.” I get the feeling that End It could become a big band outside of hardcore if they wanted, but they seem to prefer playing a specific type of show to a specific type of crowd, and they are so good at it.
I am working myself into an avalanche of superlatives, and at this point there’s no point in even holding myself back from gushing. I can’t name a currently active hardcore band more perfect than Mindforce. They are incredible. Their riffs crush ribcages. Their breakdowns hit at the exact right moment. Frontman Jay Peta bleats at the top of his lungs, but you never have any trouble understanding what he’s yelling, which means you never have any trouble yelling along. He is always so excited about getting moshpits moving and about dancing across the stage himself; I get fired up just thinking about it. Toronto’s No Warning are a reunited band, but they don’t play like one. I mostly know Ben Cook from his time in Fucked Up and, to a lesser extent from his indie-pop project Young Guv. But No Warning’s primal chug had a huge impact within hardcore, and that guy carries himself like he belongs there. At United Blood, he made a backwards Kangol look cool, and I don’t remember seeing anyone pull that off since, what, 1997?
It’s almost boring to talk about how good Terror are. They’ve been going, without a break, for decades, and they understand everything about getting a crowd moving and forging an emotional connection. It’s just amazing to see them do what they do. Terror ended their set, as they end probably all their sets, with “Keepers Of The Faith.” That means that I got to hear that and “Pleased To Meet You,” two no-shit hall-of-fame hardcore anthems, back to back, with maybe 15 minutes of setup time in between. And Trapped Under Ice were exactly what I wanted them to be. If you get a chance to witness them, take advantage of that.
A few days before their set, Turnstile released their new single “Never Enough” and kicked off a fresh round of hand-wringing about what’s happening with the wider culture’s embrace of hardcore. (Another round of hand-wringing broke out during United Blood weekend, when Speed played at Coachella and the pit looked goofy.) But Turnstile frontman Brendan Yates still plays drums in TUI, and he was back there on Saturday, nobody treating him like a rock star or anything. Franz Lyons was side-stage for the TUI set, and he and Paris Roberts came out to sing on on “Street Lights.” One of the cool things about United Blood was seeing all the members of different bands running out to bark out guest vocals during each other’s sets. King Nine weren’t on the bill, but their hulking frontman Dan Seely hung out all weekend and he grabbed the mic a few times during Terror’s set. Whenever anyone guested with Terror, they would put everything into it. Hardcore might be a ritual, but it’s not a routine. Those moments felt so urgent.
But the real show at United Blood wasn’t necessarily the bands. It was the crowd. People never stopped going off. Bodies kept flying. I saw some of the coolest stagedives I’ve ever seen last weekend. The Canal Club has two big wooden pillars at the sides of the stage, and people vaulted off those things in all sorts of acrobatic, creative ways, just doing Rey Mysterio shit. Even if you’re not ready to get into the warzone, it’s exciting to see a whole floor erupt at a band’s first riff, or to see people fast-marching side-to-side or hitting two-step formation. If you’re close enough to the stage, you really can’t watch the bands, since you need to be ready for someone to take your head off. (I didn’t see any big fights or bad injuries all weekend, but Cold World did have to stop late in their set when someone got knocked loopy.) For the people on the stage and on the floor, United Blood offers an opportunity to show out, to distinguish themselves. People took that seriously. I heard a lot of great music this weekend, but you don’t go to a festival like that just to hear great music. You want to feel like you’re in it. This weekend, all weekend, I felt it.
