Suggestions
Suggestions
NYHC is New York hardcore, the scene and sound that grew in the city from the end of the 1970s. Its first bands played faster, more aggressive and bleaker punk than the city’s first punk wave, and the scene took off after Bad Brains moved up from Washington, D.C. in 1979. The tough sound that followed put rhythm ahead of noise, with palm-muted guitar chug, pithy lyrics that worked like rallying cries and slowed-down ‘mosh’ parts that made the pit more frantic as the tempo dropped. CBGB put on afternoon all-ages hardcore shows. In the mid-1980s Cro-Mags brought in a more metallic sound full of thrash that has dominated NYHC since, and Agnostic Front fused hardcore with thrash metal on their second album.
Brooklyn’s Confusion, early-1990s pioneers of mixing hardcore with death metal, gathered everything they recorded from 1990 to 1994 on “Storm The Walls”; bassist Michael Scondotto hears in their theme song the metallic sound that set 1990s NYHC apart from the punkier 1980s. Shutdown, formed in Brooklyn in 1994 on positive hardcore with a straight edge ethos, released “By Your Side” in 2025, their first new music since 2000. Drew Stone wrote “If The Time Is Right” with The High & The Mighty in the early 1980s and reworked it with Incendiary Device for their album “New York City”. Combust vocalist Andrew Vacante picked five under-the-radar New York hardcore bands, starting with Queens’ Bazooka, and for its 200th release Revelation Records reissued Judge’s 1989 “Chung King Can Suck It”, first pressed in only 100 copies before the band re-recorded it as “Bringin’ It Down”.