It was sometime around the end of quarantine when Laura Jane Grace started freaking out. Given the circumstances, who could blame her? She had spent the last year-and-a-half confined to her apartment, trying not to lose her mind when the outside world had become too dangerous to engage with through any other medium but a screen. Sometimes, she’d have the company of her daughter, but during the times when she was living with Grace’s ex-wife, she would be completely alone. At points, the closest thing she had to company was the bugs gnawing on her books and records.

Naturally, to fill this empty void of a time, she turned her attention to writing, surprise-dropping her debut solo album, Stay Alive, in October 2020. When there was nothing else to do, she carried on writing and followed it up less than a year later with the EP At War With The Silverfish (whose title nods to the aforementioned bugs), which arrived in the middle of the week with very little warning. That was when the freakout happened, a byproduct of being kept away from the live environment for too long, dislocated from part of her identity as a touring musician, and as part of the band Against Me!, she’d spent nearly two decades in. All she wanted to do was plug in an amp. 

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As the world opened up again, the wind blew Grace from her native Chicago — where she speaks to AP from today in a room festooned with guitars — to St. Louis to write her second solo album, Hole In My Head. She’d never been there before, but became intrigued when she heard there was a studio sitting empty on the south side of the city. Crucially, it was a studio with history, having once belonged to Jay Farrar from Son Volt, so Grace decided she would split her time between her hometown and this new city. It also represented a dive into the unknown. “I didn’t know anyone in St. Louis, and it was really scary and intimidating,” she admits. “I was out of my element.” 

St. Louis is gritty, dangerous, and notably deprived. For all those reasons, it remains a remarkably cheap place to live. Yet, in this strange new environment, songwriting remained Grace’s anchor. Even then, because she was out in the world, there was a vague familiarity about her process, with the record coming together more similarly to the music she wrote with Against Me! in a time when live music halting for over a year seemed unimaginable. 

Putting herself somewhere unfamiliar, even uncomfortable, is how she believes she’s able to write her best work. “When you make a huge change, you have to refigure out who you are, so that challenges all your preconceived notions about the way life is or the way the world should be,” she says. “You end up figuring out what is really important, like, ‘What do I need to be able to survive this situation?’ When you’re pushed out of your comfort zone, that’s when you do good work as an artist.”

Inspiration, at least, was easier to come by now that there were things to do, people to see, and new places to go. “I write impressionistically,” Grace reasons, “and then you gather those impressions, and afterwards, you figure out what they mean and what the experience meant.” When she wasn’t writing, she drifted toward St. Louis’ plethora of DIY venues — there’s even one called CBGB, which has clung onto its punk ideals stronger than the New York venue of the same name — wanting to watch shows, drink non-alcoholic beer, and “hang out and be a normal fucking person.” By that, she means that she wanted to be an ordinary giggoer, not Laura Jane Grace from Against Me!, another face in the crowd watching and nodding in the back row, who hadn’t sauntered up to the box office to get their name ticked off the guest list. “I haven’t been able to do that for about 20 years,” she says.

From those nights sprung one of Hole In My Head’s standout tracks, the warm, fuzzy “Punk Rock In Basements,” which was intended as a duet with Joan Jett if their schedules had managed to line up. Grace emphasizes the song isn’t as nostalgic as many have suggested it is. “You go out, and you’re kind of intimated by the younger scene coming up, but the ultimate realization is that they’re just doing the same thing that we did before,” she says. “It’s that cycle of rebellion. [You see] all the great things about being young, but also the naivety.” She got an even closer look at that phenomenon herself when her teenage daughter said she wanted to go and see Subhumans live. She insisted on going up to the front, but Grace wasn’t that young, eager punk anymore. “I was like, ‘Fuck no, I’m going in the back!’

“I saw them play in 1997, and they were fucking brilliant, but even then, I remember they were a classic punk band, and for lack of a better term, I’m sorry, but they’re old men!” she continues. “To see them now, I was like, ‘God, they haven’t aged.’ There’s this multigenerational thing that’s beautiful, that just expands your understanding of what punk is and what it should mean and all the possibilities there within. At its best, punk is about acceptance and celebrating differences and questioning authority, questioning everything, but then it can become terrible things, too, and there are bullshit aspects of it. Still, there’s validity to those tenets, and I’ve seen it lived, you know?” 

The spirited punk ’n’ roll of “Birds Talk Too” is similarly impressionistic, a collage of fragmented memories from a trip Grace took to Amsterdam in summer 2022 stitched together to form a song. She’d just finished a tour in the U.K., and while she was in the continent, she took a short flight over for an appointment with Japanese artists who had been tattooing her from toe to head over the last decade. There, in the Dutch capital, they shaved her head and finished the job. 

Grace lights up as she tells the story before she picks up a guitar behind her and holds it to the camera. “You have to see it to believe it!” It’s a beautiful instrument, shiny and black with intricate white lines drawn into it — a parting gift from one of the tattooists, who had painted it up himself. This was the instrument she used to write “Birds Talk Too,” which came tumbling out of her in the hotel room afterward, depicting scenes in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, hearing a burst of “I’ve Got My Mind Set On You” in the elevator, an afternoon in Rookies — Grace’s favorite weed cafe — listening to animated conversations, Red Hot Chili Peppers coming on, and someone immediately switching it off. “I was like, ‘Yes. Perfect. Fuck the Red Hot Chili Peppers,’” she recalls. 

It also briefly touches on Grace’s habit of finding solace outdoors. “One of the things I really love about Amsterdam is Vondelpark — it’s an amazing park,” she continues. “One of the things I’ve been taught to do when I’m unsettled and needing to find myself is to ground myself — go outside, sit with your feet in the grass.” The title, meanwhile, comes from her staring up at the birds circling each other in the sky while “high as fuck, because I’m in Amsterdam, right?,” wondering what on Earth they could be squawking away to each other about. 

Another significant cut from Hole In My Head is “Cuffing Season,” a sweet acoustic ballad that finds Grace readying herself to one day be vulnerable and open her heart to love again — “I wanna let myself feel the whole of you/And maybe you’ll let yourself feel it, too/And who knows? Maybe we’ll both live to regret it.” In hindsight, it might feel a little prophetic. When writing it, Grace had no idea that by the time the song saw the light of day, she would be married again, having tied the knot with comedian Paris Campbell at the tail end of 2023. 

“I think it’s less of a buildup as it’s a collapse,” she considers of the way she put her heart on the line again. “It’s less of, ‘I’ve finally got there’ as it is ‘I’m willing to let go.’ It’s the willingness to be vulnerable, because that’s what falling in love is, and it’s terrifying, right? If you’ve ever been hurt before, you don’t want to be vulnerable again, but that’s exactly what the song is about. Maybe it’s reaching a place of insanity, of losing your fucking mind, but I guess I don’t know any other way.” 

Incidentally, Grace describes the way she’s touched on her feelings about what happened when she was last involved with Against Me! in similar terms. Their last album, Shape Shift With Me, landed eight years ago now, and they haven’t played a show together since March 2020. Things splintered in a sudden, as-yet-unresolved way — they got three shows into a tour before the rapid spread of COVID-19 made continuing to play gigs in crowded spaces an unsafe prospect. It’s as if it was put to one side and just hasn’t yet been picked back up again, rather than abandoned altogether. 

“It’s like a broken heart, right?” she suggests about the way she wrote about those unresolved emotions. “That’s what it is, like writing songs to nurse a broken heart, trying to look inside yourself to understand things that are outside yourself, which is probably a fool’s errand, but it’s what you’re doing because you’re spending a lot of time looking at yourself thinking, ‘What did I do wrong? What could I have done differently?’” One day, the cogs will start spinning in the Against Me! machine again, or at least, that’s what she hopes. “When you come to a stop, it’s really hard to get going again, and I hope we get going again. I have also been trying to impress upon people that it’s not just me. I want to be out there. I’m trying to be out there. I want to play the songs, and I miss doing it with the band. I hope we can do it again, but everyone has to be in the right place.”

For now, Grace’s been wheeling Against Me! hits out while she’s been playing solo, which ended up lending itself better to touring in more fraught times what with COVID-19 circulating. If something goes wrong, or someone in the touring party tested positive, there wasn’t as much damage control required on a solo tour as much as a band tour. Then again, it’s a lonelier experience, coming offstage to find nobody there, returning to a hotel room alone, touring in a van like in the earlier days of band life rather than in a plush bus. 

Grace thinks it’s humbling, but not in a bad way. “You realize the things you’ve taken for granted, like the ability to lean on each other when something’s difficult, or through the difficult parts of being a musician,” she says. “The spirit of camaraderie when you’re traveling is so valuable. It brings you humility when you’re loading your own gear in, as opposed to having a tech loading in for you. Those are healthy things — it puts you in your place. It challenges you.” 

Even if they haven’t been active for close to a decade, Against Me! remain significant. Indeed, the 10th anniversary of their landmark album Transgender Dysphoria Blues — their first full-length since Grace came out as trans in 2012 — has been of notable attention, least of all since it arrives at a time when an emboldened collective of bigots has been rallying against trans rights in the U.S. and throughout the world, and anti-trans sentiment has been picking up not only in volume but ferocity. Frustratingly, sometimes it has felt like a slide backward, particularly in the aftermath of the Trump administration. 

Grace agrees that times were different back when that album was released, but not in a completely straightforward way. “[Dialogue about trans people] wasn’t a conversation that was being had back then,” she reasons. “It was only beginning, really. But I definitely recognize the change and things that have happened. In hindsight, some of it seems so predictable — of course after the pendulum swung this way, it would swing far to the right.” Of course, it’s also an election year, hinting at a rerun of 2020’s clash between Trump and incumbent Joe Biden and the dread of history repeating itself with the prospect of Trump being reelected for a belated second term. 

“It feels like such a hold-your-breath moment,” Grace continues. “The past couple of years in particular have seen such an attack on trans rights on a legislative level, with each state enacting these draconian laws. You don’t know where to focus. You don’t know where to get your information. You don’t know exactly how to help. You feel helpless in a lot of ways.” 

Given how critical of Trump she was as president, how worried is she about him being reelected? “There’s just a sense of mental exhaustion for everybody. I’m just like, ‘Jesus Christ, enough. Enough Trump, enough Biden, fuck off forever. I worry it translates into a general callousness towards valid suffering in the world, especially with other horrific things like the leveling of Gaza and Ukraine. Advocating for trans rights can get swept under the rug in a media context, and then with the rise of hate crimes and [anti-trans] legislation, it’s hard to get change in a positive way. I worry about the future. I have no answers on what to do about how fucked it is.”

Even with her songwriting, Grace’s natural inclination isn’t to answer such huge questions. What she’s here to do is observe. In her pandemic songwriting, she found inspiration in the granular — one song from At War With The Silverfish, “Day Old Coffee,” revolves around her habit of microwaving coffee that had been left around to go cold. The world might be sliding to a darker place, but one thing has improved. Now, she can go outside, find herself, hopefully not worry as much about airborne viruses, take in her surroundings, and create.

Alternative culture is all Shy Snider has ever known. The first concert she went to was AC/DC while she was in utero, and even as a small child, the sounds of Rob Zombie rattled her eardrums. At 7, her favorite band was System of a Down, who she learned about from her three older brothers. There was no teenage emo phase, nor that lightning bolt moment that happens when you hear “Welcome to the Black Parade” for the first time. Snider was immersed in it, even before day one. 

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When she was 11, Snider went to watch one of her brothers play in a hardcore band. “I remember it being so violent,” she recalls over Zoom from her home in LA just a few days before Thanksgiving. “Someone grabbed me and put me under a table.” Nonetheless, she loved it. As she grew older and got more invested in hardcore, however, Snider realized she felt sidelined in such an overwhelmingly masculine space. She even felt it when she went to the merch table and the only options on offer were T-shirts and hoodies sized with men in mind, which looked baggy and boxy on women’s smaller bodies. 

Sick of these identikit options, Snider started printing band logos on “slutty clothes.” “I was so tired of wearing band shirts all the time — it was just so boring,” she says. “I felt like women were so underrepresented in alternative fashion, especially in hardcore. It was all skewed towards men, but women are the prime fashion buyers. Being feminine and being hardcore [amounted to] being a poser.” It ended up being the first step toward Havoc, which she started to create a space for the “hot clothes” she was desperate to see in alternative fashion. 

“The brand blew up a lot faster than I was even prepared for,” Snider says. In just two years, Havoc has ballooned into one of modern alt fashion’s hottest prospects, but despite that, Snider’s hardcore background still shapes it to this day. Havoc has frequently collaborated with numerous bright lights from the scene, including Zulu, Pain of Truth, Koyo, Twitching Tongues, and Scowl.

“I went to one of [Scowl’s] shows. I’d never heard of them, but then I saw Kat [Moss], and she was super hot, screaming in a miniskirt, and I was like, ‘That shit rocks,’” she continues. “If that was around when I was a kid in hardcore, that would have changed the trajectory of my life because I dressed so masculine and was afraid to show my body. I ended up doing that collab with Scowl because I just wanted girls who were coming into hardcore to be like, ‘I’m welcome here.’ If you start selling stuff for girls, then subconsciously, you start feeling like this is a scene for you, too, and not just the boys.” 

To start, Snider was hand-making a lot of Havoc’s clothes to order, but its growth eventually outpaced the speed at which she could put garments together. When it became unsustainable, she got manufacturers involved but found that her mental health nosedived when she was no longer making clothes. “I was so depressed. I genuinely really enjoy making stuff,” she says. Indeed, making clothes ended up becoming a vital coping mechanism when Snider was trying to get sober — an outlet, she mentions, for her addictive personality — even to the point where she’d stay up all night creating. Nowadays, the brand encompasses both manufactured and hand-made limited-run items as a means of a happy medium between keeping business sense and Snider’s own mental state.

Hand-making has also given Havoc a suitably punk, “slow-fashion” ethos. Sometimes, handmade items don’t arrive on customers’ doorsteps till between two to four weeks after they’ve ordered them, and occasionally it’s sparked questions from buyers expecting the same delivery speeds as Amazon Prime. Not behaving like a megacorp, however, is Havoc’s MO. 

The brand prides itself on being “anti-fashion,” and a large part of that, as Snider explains, represents rejecting harmful fast-fashion practices. “Fast fashion is so big, and it’s so bad for the environment. It’s literally the second biggest polluter in the world; it’s destroying the planet. Anti-fashion, to me, is fashion that’s made in the U.S., using handmade, upcycled, or thrifted garments.” Nowadays, being anti-fashion has also meant turning away from the high-end fashion houses that, for better or worse, have ripped and appropriated alternative fashion for customers who are expected to throw thousands of dollars at it. “You have Givenchy doing a shirt that’s in fucking metal font. Balenciaga is making actual track pants. It’s insane. They’re all pulling these influences from different underground subcultures. I’m not the person ripping from the small brands.”

Despite this, Snider isn’t as critical of this practice as she used to be, especially if it means that a previously uncool mode of dressing that might have otherwise put a target on her back is now seen as trendy. “I used to really hate it, but at the same time, I do think it’s cool. I got so badly bullied that I had to be home-schooled, and I felt like such an outcast in society, so I’m happy that [alternative fashion is becoming accepted by the mainstream]. Hopefully kids like me don’t have to go through that anymore.”  

Nonetheless, it’s provided a climate in which Havoc has been able to flourish, even catching the attention of stars as huge as Doja Cat and Bring Me the Horizon’s Oli Sykes. “He just DMed me asking for clothes!” Snider recalls. “It was so cool because when I was a kid, I loved Bring Me the Horizon. It was definitely such a full-circle moment in my life, and I don’t think I even realized what a big deal [Havoc had become] until he posted the photos.” The more left-field partnership with Doja Cat, however, proved slightly more controversial. “She’s hot, and she has a punk attitude,” she says. “You can’t say no to something like that when her stylist hits you up.”

Click onto Havoc’s Instagram and the sentence “JOIN A CULT!!” screams at you from the screen. As tongue in cheek as that slogan is (it even once inspired Snider to print a shirt with “CULT LEADER” written on it, which went down a storm), it encompasses everything Snider wanted Havoc to be — bigger than just a name, or a line of clothes, or even something people only superficially engage with. “I didn’t want people to stumble across it and only buy one thing,” she explains. “I always wanted people to love the brand and know what it was about and buy multiple things. There are certain brands where I own everything they make — I wanted it to be like that.

“I want it to be something people remember,” she concludes. “I want it to be something you can feel a part of.”

The crowd at ArcTanGent Festival in the southwest of England is making noise before the Callous Daoboys do. The tent they’re playing on a Saturday afternoon is stuffed full of bodies, several of whom sail over the barriers before their opening number “Star Baby” has a chance to transition from frenetic math rock to a sudden jazz pop break in its back half. The Atlantans bring a whirlwind of chaos to the stage, and they get chaos back, but who could expect anything less from a band who pride themselves on creating music that “sounds like two songs fighting,” and who use wildly disparate songs from “Sweet Caroline” (a natural fit for an English crowd, since it’s associated with football chants) to Zedd’s “Clarity” as transitions?

Then, there’s the small matter of frontman Carson Pace’s mosh calls, wryly nodding to the country’s state-funded health service when he implores the contingent, “Show me just how free your healthcare is!” They’ve made a home just under 4,500 miles from the state they hail from. 

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Their ArcTanGent show is the last in a three-week run of dates across the U.K. and Europe — some of them headline shows, some of them festival shows, some of them support slots for Holy Fawn and Hippotraktor. These have been their first shows outside of the U.S., and for Pace, it’s his first time ever leaving the country. “I thought there would be more of a difference, but it turns out everywhere has grass and trees and buildings and stuff,” he jokes, sitting with guitarist Dan Hodson at a picnic table backstage at the festival. “No, it’s been great. I love it here. Truthfully, I think the U.K. and Budapest are my two favorite places. I love Germany, too. It’s crazy I get to come here at all, let alone play shows to a lot of people here, and we’re playing some of our best sets here.”

It’s been a “borderline DIY” operation, with Hodson effectively stepping up to tour manage as well as perform. “I’ve learned that we can handle a lot more than we think we can, and that it’s pretty easy to figure out what you’re worth,” they reflect. “Not to toot my own horn, but me and Maddie [Caffrey, guitarist] did a lot to get this thing set up and pull it together. We’ve been learning a lot about what each of us is capable of — it’s interesting to see and very rewarding to see how everyone functions like it’s just another day on the job. It really cemented that this is what we’re meant to be doing.”

The sextet — completed by violinist Amber Christman, bassist Jackie Buckalew, and drummer Marty Hague — have had more eyes on them than ever following the release of their critically adored second album, Celebrity Therapist, last year. Although everything might be coming up Daoboys now, it hasn’t always been that way, and this flush of success they’re experiencing hasn’t exactly fallen out of the sky. It’s the product of grinding away since 2016 while also going through numerous lineup changes (Hodson, for one, only joined the band last year) and all the typical emerging band road bumps. “For a little while, we were touring in this bus that was just a piece of shit. It had no AC. It broke down every seven shows. We had to replace the tires on it so many times,” Pace remembers. But, when life decided to take a break from following Murphy’s law, they’d turn to each other, and, without fail, one of them would say, “God smiles upon the Callous Daoboys.”

That in-joke ended up becoming the title of the band’s forthcoming three-track EP, a knowing, humorous wink toward their own success, as well as their enjoyment of being self-referential. Look further into its lyrics, however, and the extent to which God really has smiled on these eccentric noisemakers can be called into question. Sure, they’re closer, in Pace’s mind to “becoming the band that I see in my head,” but it’s not without its downsides — “substance abuse, breakups, [and] not really being able to be home when other things in your life are happening.” 

To confront these subjects, Pace challenged himself to be blunter and more direct with his lyrics instead of putting a wall up with complex metaphors. “I think that the biggest complaint about my lyrics is that they don’t make sense,” he considers. “They mean something to me, but this time around, I think you can probably get what I’m talking about, which is the first time I’ve been proud of that. I think previously, being honest was really hard for me, being naked in front of our audience was very difficult for me, whereas this time, I feel like I’m being as honest as I possibly can.”

Did he think, then, that he was using metaphor as a way to hide? “Definitely,” Pace confirms. “There were [times] where [I’d use] a metaphor that was an extrapolation of a metaphor that’s a reference to this thing that only I know about. I certainly don’t regret those lyrics at all. [But] the place I want to be in now is just saying everything that’s in my heart, as corny as that sounds.” 

Pace and Hodson are keen to stress that the three songs that make up God Smiles Upon The Callous Daoboys aren’t Celebrity Therapist B-sides. “It has nothing to do with that record — they were written so far apart, but it’s a little epilogue that closes the book, if you will,” Pace clarifies. On top of that, these new songs will be the band’s first to feature the musical fingerprints of their current lineup, marking Hodson and Hague’s first contributions to their sound. 

Then again, it’s easy enough to discern that Celebrity Therapist and God Smiles Upon The Callous Daoboys were written at different times, by different people, just from the sound of these new songs. They’re markedly different from Celebrity Therapist, even though they haven’t uprooted their mathcore nous and still shift styles like they’ve picked them from a grab bag. The Callous Daoboys in 2023 are just as heavy, but they’re also catchier, groovier, more immediate, and more them.

“Where I want to head going forward is having a sound that’s entirely our own,” Pace elaborates. “In a league where we’re not being compared to this band or that band. You know, I appreciate the Dillinger Escape Plan comparisons — that’s a band I saw so many times, and I love them to death. But I’m ready for it to be like, ‘What does the new Callous Daoboys song sound like? It sounds like the Callous Daoboys.’ That being said, I want to do more wild shit.” He even sees the band playing around with electronics more, having used to make it.

One of the most interesting aspects of this EP, meanwhile, is the band’s flirtation with nü metal. It’s pushed to the fore most on its standout final track, “Designer Shroud of Turin,” where their wrecking ball riffs have an indelible groove, not to mention a cackle-rousing shoutalong of “NOSTALGIA FOR THE 2000s!” and their most muscular chorus to date. Both Pace and Hodson have their own close ties to the genre — one of the first bands they ever bonded over was Korn, while Pace cites Limp Bizkit as the reason he wanted to play guitar. “I think that [influence] just happened naturally with us,” he continues. “I think, before, I was trying to resist the nü-metal elements, and now I’ve opened the floodgates. Now, I just don’t give a fuck.”

“[My gateway into] more extreme music was Korn, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, System Of A Down,” Hodson adds. “I probably wouldn’t have the sense of groove and rhythm that I do if it weren’t for those bands. That’s such an important part of nü metal; it takes so much influence from hip-hop, and it makes you move. Our drummer Marty will always say, “I play drums to make people dance.’” 

Put simply, this band’s quest, at this moment in time, is to be daring, even a little crazy, but most importantly, to be gloriously individual. “I think we’re just trying to write what we find interesting,”  Pace concludes. “This is the band that I want to hear, the band I wished existed [when I was younger]. I feel like when you do that, you’ve stumbled across something really special.”

Read more: Every blink-182 album ranked

Across their eight albums, blink’s shown that there’s a hell of a lot you can do with as many chords as you can count on one hand. Still, beyond “What’s My Age Again?,” “The Rock Show” and “I Miss You,” there’s a ton of deep cuts waiting to be played on repeat. We’ve rounded up 10 of the best of blink-182’s hidden gems.

“Emo” – Dude Ranch (1997)

Dude Ranch isn’t blink-182’s most refined album by a long shot, but their youthful scrappiness makes this deep cut endearing. Putting the emphasis on the punk aspect of pop-punk, this track chugs along at a rapid-fire pace, and while it might not sound that emo on the surface, its lyrics firmly fit into that category. Within it, Mark Hoppus asks a girl why she stays with a boyfriend who constantly cheats, even suggesting that she’s “better off sleeping on the floor” than in the bed of an unfaithful guy. As enjoyable as it is in its own right, it also offered a glimpse into the blink-182 that was to come. 

“Don’t Leave Me” – Enema Of The State (1999)

It might have arrived on the heels of Enema Of The State’s more well-known opener “Dumpweed,” but the rocket-fueled “Don’t Leave Me” definitely doesn’t belong in its shadow. With a faster pace and grittier tone than blink’s typical sound, the track represents one of blink’s moodier turns on the album It’s taken from, tapping into the wrenching feeling of desperately wanting someone to keep you around. The highlight, however, is arguably the chuckle-inducing 180 at the end of the chorus: “I said, ‘Don’t let our future be destroyed by my past’/ She said, ‘Don’t let the door hit your ass.’”

“Story Of A Lonely Guy” – Take Off Your Pants And Jacket (2001)

This endearing deep cut from Take Off Your Pants And Jacket delves into the more painful aspects of growing up. On the surface, it’s about the soul-shaking fear of romantic rejection, but underneath, the story of the titular lonely guy is a story about feeling, as all of us have felt, too awkward and self-conscious to think themself worthy of going after love. Indeed, despite its earnestness, its last line has an unexpected sting as Tom DeLonge’s protagonist, unable to make a move, chiding himself for being a “stupid, worthless boy.” 

“Roller Coaster” – Take Off Your Pants And Jacket (2001)

Growing up was the last thing on blink-182’s agenda for album four – nothing about its masturbatory album title screams “mature and sophisticated” – but they were notably beginning to sound more refined. Telling the story of a past relationship, Mark Hoppus had to keep a secret against his will. “Roller Coaster” displays more of an attention to detail beyond chunky four chord sequences. While still boasting all the hooks a blink fan could possibly want, its guitar lines are more intricate, with more space created for Travis Barker to properly flaunt his drumming talents, meaning there’s more detail to pick up on with each listen. 

“Reckless Abandon” – Take Off Your Pants And Jacket (2001)

Lyrically speaking, the playful “Reckless Abandon” feels like the edgier, slightly heavier older sibling of “What’s My Age Again?” By this point, blink’s stories of teenage rebellion had moved beyond prank calling your friend’s mom, and on to drinking to the point of throwing up, not paying for pizza and breaking windows. The most characteristically blink moment, however, is a line about someone who “took a shit in the bathroom tub and fed the dog brownie drugs,” but for all the laughs, the song ultimately holds the stupid, fun memories from adolescence close to its chest. 

“Easy Target” – Untitled (2003)

The first of two consecutive songs on the Untitled album focusing on a girl, Holly, who broke Jerry Finn’s heart, “Easy Target” shines simply because it’s one of the blink songs that sounds most like a proper sonic attack. In its opening, it feels like Travis Barker is drumming hard enough to punch a hole through the speaker, beautifully matching the track’s aggrieved sense of bitterness. And then, to top it all off, it segues smoothly into… 

“All Of This” – Untitled (2003)

Who could have expected this epic crossover between the worlds of pop punk and goth? Having been longtime fans of The Cure, Mark, Tom, and Travis enlisted Robert Smith for a distraught yet quietly cinematic ballad that somehow found an intriguing middle ground between their bands’ respective sounds. In the parallel universe where blink-182 hadn’t gone on hiatus in 2005, the quietly cinematic “All Of This” would have likely been a single, and deservedly so. 

“Teenage Satellites” – California (2016)

The Matt Skiba era might have been divisive, but there’s no denying that “Teenage Satellites” is one of the real hidden gems of blink’s first album without Tom DeLonge. It’s one of the places on California where the original members’ and Skiba’s respective styles converge the most seamlessly, especially in its lyrics. Though its subject of the teenage urge to run away and be free feels like familiar territory for blink-182, Skiba brings a softly poetic touch to its catchy chorus that makes it feel not only more mature, but more modern and relatable. 

“No Heart To Speak Of” – Nine (2019)

Perhaps because Tom returned to the band, or perhaps because Nine came out just six months before quarantine began, blink-182 have never played “No Heart To Speak Of” live. It’s unfortunate when it’s so easy to imagine it blaring from a festival stage under the baking sun. Everything about it feels stratospheric, from its opening “whoa-oh”s to Matt Skiba’s soaring vocals in its chorus, making for one of the best moments from blink’s most recent album. 

“Quarantine” (2020)

Remember 2020? Sucked, didn’t it? To keep themselves entertained when COVID-19 shut down live music, Mark and Travis teamed up for this witty track that paired rumbling guitar riffs with sharp jabs at the absurdity of being bored while shut inside. Although Mark says he’s “blessed to be so fucking bored,” he’s got some silly ideas of what he’d rather be doing — watching some magic, doing press in Germany, even getting stuck at a DMV. Though very much a product of its time, “Quarantine” offered a blast of catharsis in a time it was needed most. 

“I’ve always been a big fan of the underdog,” he says. “The vocalists in bands aren’t normally the underdog. It’s like the Batman quote where you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I didn’t want to ever see myself become the kind of person that I didn’t like.”

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A switch flipped in quarantine, which prevented Coddington from leaving his apartment in Indiana, where he’d only just moved. At his most alone, he turned to making music on TikTok to fill his days — and a hell of a lot of people wanted to listen. “The fans dragged me into [being an artist],” he explained. “Once you hear stories about people telling you that you saved their lives by the thousands, it made me feel like I had to.” 

With his jangling yet melancholic debut EP, Crying In The Shower, having come out earlier this year, there’s no better time to get to know Letdown.

You started the project in quarantine. How did that come about?

I was living in Indiana working for a music distribution gear company, and then lockdown happened, and I had just moved there. So I hadn’t made any friends yet. I think it was a week after I moved there. So I was thrown into a one-bedroom apartment in the city I’d never been to before and told I couldn’t leave — nothing was open. So I was literally the most alone I’ve ever been in my life. I downloaded TikTok and Instagram and just started posting. The very first post I made on TikTok, I think it did over a million views the first day, and I got like 200,000 followers from it. That [made me think], “Oh shit, I could probably I could probably make something out of this.” I just started posting videos on TikTok and eventually got around to releasing a couple songs on Spotify, and it just took off from there. 

Was this your first-ever proper attempt at a musical project?

I was always in bands and stuff — I did the thing most musicians do, [where] they were just in multiple bands, and nothing ever went anywhere. But I’d given up wanting to pursue an artist thing. My main passion has always been producing and engineering, and that’s what I just did for other artists. I never thought I would ever be an artist, and I didn’t really want to be, to be honest. Even after it took off, even after I signed my record deal, it still didn’t feel real, like [it was] something I shouldn’t be doing until I played my first show. It sold out, and I wasn’t expecting 10 people, let alone 1,000 to care about me. I was like, “Oh shit, I should probably keep doing this.”

You’re quite interested in music that sounds happy but then has dark lyrics. What do you find so fascinating about it?

It’s more like a reflection of me. I don’t really try to make music that sounds happy, but it just comes out. I think it has something to do with the natural way that I am always pretty cheerful, and I have a lot of fun, and I like to be around people that have fun, and it just seems all well and good, but I am fucking dying on the inside, and everything hurts. I just think it comes down to music, and I think the cool thing about that is that every single person I talk to feels the exact direct way — at least the people that listen to my music, and I think that most artists are pretty black and white. A sad song is a sad song, but we all fucking feel both [happiness and sadness] all the time. So why can’t we just have both?

What would you say your big ambitions as an artist are?

I have two modes — I don’t do something at all, or I do [it] at 1,000,000%. I want to sell out fucking stadiums. I want to be the biggest artist on the planet. I want to change the fucking game. I feel like artists get so big and then they completely disconnect, and my brain doesn’t know how to understand that the more people that love you, the less you want to connect with them. I don’t understand the disconnect at all. Because hanging out with my fans is the coolest thing on the planet. 

“I’ve been lucky enough to create with some amazing humans who have inspired me in so many different ways, from Matt Pauling, S1, Jeff Bhasker, Colin Brittain and more,” English says. “We each have our own fingerprint and perspective, and so the process with this EP was to let the story go out and be translated and see what came back. The EP is simply a showcase of many translations of the same story.”

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There’s even more of a story to dive into behind the EP, though, as English explains. 

33 has been out for nearly six months now. How do you feel about that project looking back?

33 is a reflection of myself at a very important time in my life, and I’ll always be deeply connected with the songs. Life keeps moving, perspective evolves and changes, but 33 is a beautiful moment in myself and in the world forever captured. I still find myself in these songs, and I hope others do, too.

How did the idea of making a companion EP with reimaginings of “The Circle” come about?

“The Circle” is one of those songs that seemed to write itself. From where I see it, “The Circle” feels like the story of Jagwar Twin but, in many ways, the story of all of us. Much of modern music is made with the ever-elusive algorithm in mind, but this song is the opposite of that. The mind had very little to do with it, and I just got out of the way. This song houses a story that can be told in a million different ways, and it will evolve over the years. The idea of different ways to tell the same story was at the core of making the EP.

Was “The Circle” always the obvious track to focus on for the EP? Did you contemplate focusing on other songs or incorporating multiple?

“The Circle” was definitely the not-obvious pick to make an EP around. It’s obviously not a “single,” but there is a resonance with the song that is obvious from people’s reaction to the song. I see this song being just as impactful opening at a tiny club show as headlining a sold-out stadium, and that feels special to me.

What did you hope to achieve with the reimagined versions of the song?

To me, the melody feels like a lullaby I’ve always known. Even though it’s new, it feels ancient. The music surrounding the lyrics and the melody seems to just play with the context in which the story takes place. I feel at home in many different spaces, and I have a very eclectic taste in music, but the story is always the same. I hope with the reimagined “angles” of the song that everyone can find their own “home” in one of the spaces.

Tell us more about the song’s background as a “Jagwar Twin origin story.”

If we look back through history, we can learn so much from the stories of our past and apply what those before us knew to our own world today. We are all fighting a war within, between our hearts and our minds. There is an inherent duality within each of us, and exploring that duality was the genesis of the Jagwar Twin project. I think a lot about how different a world we would live in if we truly knew ourselves, who we are, and where we came from. 

Would you ever consider giving any other songs the reimagining treatment?

There are often two sides to a feeling, and I’m trying to become more attuned to what is really driving the desire to reimagine or “improve” something. Letting go can be very difficult for an artist, for anyone. But if the reimagining is coming from a place of feeling that a song does have another side to be told, then for sure I would consider it.

What’s next for you? What do the coming months have in store for you?

I’ve been writing nonstop for the past five months, connecting with the current moment in my life, and am really excited to continue putting out new music. I’m also heading out on the road in April with Transviolet and [am] excited to connect with other humans in a live setting. There’s really nothing like the feeling of shared energy around a song in a room. 

Sum 41 grew up fast. Barely six months after dropping the final single from their goofy, ever-so-catchy debut album, All Killer No Filler, the Canadian quartet reemerged with the lead single from its follow-up, Does This Look Infected? Quite simply, “Still Waiting” signaled their move from innocence to experience. Vocalist Deryck Whibley, bassist Jason “Cone” McCaslin, guitarist Dave Baksh and then-drummer Steve Jocz were entering their 20s with 300 or so live shows and much more musical experience under their belts, but also with a far greater awareness that the world was bigger — and scarier — than it looks outside the walls of high school.

Read more: The 20 most underrated pop-punk albums from the last two decades

Does This Look Infected? marked a heavier turn for the band both sonically and lyrically, with their subject matter becoming ever more serious by touching on drugs, insomnia, HIV and the increasingly ugly state of the world. The band were coming of age in a fraught post-9/11 climate where fear and jingoism bubbled under the surface as George W. Bush launched the War On Terror — and a real war against Iraq was on its way. It led Sum 41 to turn their hand for the first time to political songwriting, birthing a song whose immortal refrain remains depressingly relevant in 2023: “So am I still waiting for this world to stop hating?”

How it started

DERYCK WHIBLEY (VOCALS): The record [Does This Look Infected?] was pretty much written. We were already in the studio making it, and for some reason, this little idea came into my head when I wasn’t even trying to write songs anymore. I thought I was done. I woke up with this chorus in my head. I went and sang it and all of a sudden had a riff right away, which became the verse riff. I knew I wanted it to have screamy, shouty verses. I’m screaming as hard as I can in those verses. It’s one of those songs that came out exactly the way I heard it in my head.

JASON “CONE” MCCASLIN (BASS): We were in Toronto doing pre-production, and we were wrapping up. It might have even been the last day. “The Hell Song” was going to be [the lead] single. “Over My Head (Better Off Dead)” was probably going to be the second single. Deryck came in with this little cassette tape, and he says: “I got this rough new song.” We all listened to it, and it was so rough and distorted, and we were like, “This is really good.” It was way different from All Killer No Filler because of the screaming, it was in a minor key. It was darker. We all agreed at that point that we had to try and fit that song in, so we took it to New York and finished it in the studio there.

WHIBLEY: There was just so much pressure in those days, from myself, from the label, from everybody involved, because we were following up a record that had sold a few million [copies]. [We] had to deliver to prove that [we] weren’t this one-album band. Right away, everyone agreed that the song, even though all I had was a verse and a chorus, was probably going to be the first single. You could tell that there was something special about it, that it was better than everything else on the record. In the first week of recording in New York City, I stayed back at the hotel every day trying to finish this song. Everybody was asking me, “Is it finished yet?” I stayed in the hotel for a week till it was done. In retrospect, it was quick, but it felt like it was taking a year because everybody was hounding me for it.

[Sum 41 pose for their AP cover in 2002 / Photo by Chapman Baehler]

The lyrics 

MCCASLIN: The Iraq War at the time was such a big thing. Even though we were Canadian, we spent a lot of time in the U.S. We were only like 22 years old at the time, but we would talk amongst ourselves, and we [all thought] it was insane that this war was actually going to happen. Even being 22 from Canada, we were really affected by it. We lived through the Gulf War, and it was following the same lines.

WHIBLEY: Traveling the world on that tour for the first time on the All Killer tour [gave us] more of a sense that there’s this world out there. It’s not just where we grew up and our friends in high school and all that stuff. So you’re starting to really pay attention to all these things that are going on in the world and all these atrocities. We thought this war was very clearly not about what George [W.] Bush and his administration were saying it was, and that’s what the song became to me. At the same time, [with] some of the lyrics, you almost don’t need to know what the song is about, especially with the chorus, because it is just relatable. It’s just the simplest lyric. I remember [producer] Greig Nori saying, “I don’t know about the lyric ‘So am I still waiting for this world to stop hating?’ It’s a little juvenile. It’s a little basic.’ I remember thinking, “I don’t know how to make it anything else other than what it is.” It may be juvenile and simple, but that’s what all this bullshit is in the world — it is all juvenile and stupid.

The music video

MARC KLASFELD (VIDEO DIRECTOR): Sum 41 exploded in 2001, but then in 2002, the scene shifted, and indie bands like the Strokes, the Hives and the White Stripes all became popular. The video ended up becoming partly a satire of that whole band movement. We took elements from one of the Strokes’ videos, some of the Hives with what they were wearing, making fun of and commenting on the hip bands of the time. It comments not only on that trend but trends in general and how trends come and go.

MCCASLIN: We were in England for Reading and Leeds, and we were staying at the same hotel as the Strokes. We went up to Julian [Casablancas’] room, and we had a couple more drinks. We said, “We have this idea for the video. We want to run it by you.” We told him the whole idea: “We want to dress up the same and have the set like you guys. You’re the new cool thing, and pop punk is getting pushed out.” He was like, “I love it. You guys have to do it.” We got his blessing at six in the morning!

KLASFELD: The guy in the beginning, Will Sasso, he’s so phenomenally talented. I just gave him a briefing of what I wanted the scene to be about, and he just adlibbed the shit out of that scene. He was just so funny, and I think the biggest problem for the guys was trying to keep a straight face during the whole thing because the dude was so funny.

MCCASLIN: The other thing that was funny about it was the trashing thing at the end. I remember the whole crew was like, “Do not touch the lights!” And I think the sign was always gonna get pushed down, but the lights behind us, the lighting people did not want them broken. And, of course, we broke them. At that point, we were just drinking a lot all the time. So as the day went on, video shoots can be 20 hours long. We were annihilated by the end, absolutely hammered. That whole trashing scene in the end. I mean, a lot of us couldn’t even walk. That’s how we did it back then.

KLASFELD: The guys have always kept a sense of humor about their stuff. In my estimation, that’s what people have always liked best. They’re really good at it.

Five thousand miles or so away from America lies an island in turmoil. In September, Queen Elizabeth II was laid to rest after a lavish state funeral watched by millions the world over, but some found the opulent pomp of it all hard to stomach when they were weeks away from facing a crippling increase in their gas and electricity bills. Coupled with soaring inflation, it’s created a cost of living crisis that’s forecast to push millions into poverty, forcing individuals, in some cases, to choose between heating their homes over the winter and putting food on the table. It’s not a problem unique to the U.K., but what is unique is the comparative lack of support its government has provided compared to other countries, sitting on its hands until begged to freeze the maximum rate energy suppliers can charge their customers. The summer also saw a wave of strikes from rail workers, barristers and postal workers, demanding a raise in pay in line with inflation so they wouldn’t be left financially worse off during the winter.

The cost of living crisis is just the tip of the iceberg. The U.K.’s political and economic climate was bleak even before energy bills and inflation started rocketing. Despite being in power for 12 years, the ruling Conservative Party has remained in a state of upheaval, with four Prime Ministers resigning in the space of six years. The latest politician to leave, Liz Truss, inspired little hope, somehow believing what the country needed was tax cuts for the rich and a removal of the limit on bankers’ bonuses. (The former policy was so unpopular it was abandoned within days). More troubling, however, is the party’s gradual slide further to the right, with Home Secretary revealing it was her “obsession” to send asylum seekers crossing the English Channel from France in dinghies on a one-way flight to Rwanda. Transphobia is rife, disguised with phrases such as “sex-based rights.” Last year, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 was introduced, curtailing the right to protest by threatening harsher punishments on those who participate in disruptive demonstrations.

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As dire as these prospects seem, they have provided fertile ground for protest punk to flourish yet again, with some of the underground’s best-loved bands enjoying a surge in attention and popularity. Bob Vylan’s second album, The Price of Life, for one, broke into the U.K. Top 20 last spring, becoming the only self-produced, self-mixed and independently released record to ever do so. The album’s accompanying tour was played to audiences of around 300-500 per venue, but they capped off the year with a headlining show at Camden’s famed Electric Ballroom, which holds 1,500 people. Elsewhere, Kid Kapichi signed a deal with Spinefarm, a major subsidiary of Universal, broke into the U.K. Top 40 with their new album Here’s What You Could Have Won and got a song about robbing the supermarket onto daytime radio. Chubby and the Gang immediately caught the attention of the U.K. music press, both mainstream and alternative, for their on-point pub-rock songs about gentrification, worker’s rights and government failure, while Nervus and Petrol Girls encountered perhaps more attention from the U.K. press than ever, with the latter’s recent album Baby also receiving a glowing review from YouTube critic Anthony Fantano. They’ve afforded angry, disenfranchised music fans an outlet for catharsis, a chance to find community among like-minded people, but most importantly, their presence is a reminder that someone gets it. 

Glitchers, made up of vocalist/guitarist Jake and drummer Sophie, bring their pro-resistance, anti-capitalist punk music to U.K. high streets and city centers, having started playing outside when COVID-19 shuttered music venues. They’ve amassed a sizeable following on TikTok and have won favor playing “after-party” gigs outside venues as the fans leave, even being invited to do so by Frank Iero when My Chemical Romance played Stadium MK in Milton Keynes. “People are just so angry and fed up,” Jake says about the political situation in the U.K. “They’re finding that the punk scene almost has some answers. It might not have all of them, but it’s got some alternatives. They can see a community that actually wants to help. I think what it’s about now is using art to show the public that we can do things differently. I spent time in politics as a local counselor and realized that unless loads of us infiltrated, you can’t change it from the inside. I was like, ‘You know what? Let’s do something from the outside instead.’”

Punk providing an alternative in this way is even more vital when there is a shortage of strong, radical left-wing voices speaking out against the Conservatives, or the Tories as they’re commonly known, in the House of Commons. The leader of the opposing Labour Party, Keir Starmer, is perceived as lacking a strong vision for the country and not putting his foot down hard enough in response to a party that’s seen as incompetent at best and dangerous at worst. “There is absolutely no opposition,” Kid Kapichi frontman Jack Wilson says. “There is no one to hold that torch for us and say, ‘This is the direction we should be moving in. This is how we should be moving forwards.’ It’s a scary time, and I think that’s why this music is really flourishing at the moment.”

Indeed, these bands are speaking about issues that mainstream politics ignores, or especially in the case of the right, dismisses as “woke nonsense” — class war, poverty, police violence, the failings of the prison system, femicide, systemic racism, the violence of borders. Many of them have proclaimed, within their music or outside it, their support for meeting the violence of oppression with violent resistance. In comparison to the more moderate ideas put forward by leftwing commentators in mainstream political discourse, these seem like radical sentiments, but in reality, it is a matter of perception.

Bob Vylan’s music speaks of anti-racist resistance and tales of the brutality of poverty, and they express their ideas in colorful, provocative and often humorous terms. The Price of Life contains lyrics about exhuming Margaret Thatcher, throwing statues of Winston Churchill in the river (echoing the moment during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests where protestors in Bristol did that very thing to a statue of slave trader Edward Colston) and the idea of cheap, unhealthy food as a weapon of class warfare. “I don’t necessarily see our perspectives as radical,” frontman Bobby Vylan asserts. “It’s just that some people have the luxury of not having those perspectives because of the lives they have lived and live.”

Neither is the punk underground getting progressively more radical, though it may seem that way when the bands that are perceived as such are becoming more visible. “People talk about resurgences of punk, but it’s never died,” Petrol Girls frontwoman Ren Aldridge reasons. “[This sort of] music breaks the surface of the mainstream in waves. It might seem like it’s gone away again, but it hasn’t.”

After all, even though the state of affairs might seem more depressing than ever, things in the U.K. haven’t exactly been rosy for a while. The Tories began their time in power in 2010 by bringing in austerity measures to make up for the level of government spending during the 2008 recession, cutting and restricting spending to the detriment of NHS, schools and youth services, while a simmering undercurrent of xenophobia led the U.K. to vote to leave the EU — colloquially known as Brexit — in 2016, making it harder for foreigners from Europe to enter and settle in the country and making imports to Europe more costly. Even before COVID-19 took a bite out of individuals’ finances, the years leading up to it were marked by slow economic growth and increasing use of food banks, thanks to a squeeze on wages.

“The thing that I always find funny is when people always seem to be like, ‘Oh man, politics right now is worse than ever,’” Chubby and the Gang frontman Charlie Manning-Walker says. “Although I think it’s fucking dogshit right now, the ’70s and ’80s were fucked as well. I don’t think people have had it really sweet, and then now it’s shit. Certain cross sections of society have had it fucking terrible for a long time. It’s always been bad.”

Em Foster of Nervus agrees. “There’s always been crap, but it’s always been crap for fewer people, and those fewer people are more marginalized people,” she explains. “Now I think there is a lot more crap for people who aren’t typically marginalized in times of, say, economic prosperity. [There’s been a] shift in the material conditions of a lot of people who maybe hadn’t been affected by those issues before as well, with COVID and with Brexit, and with the continuing Conservative policies we’ve been living with since 2010. It’s always been bad, but the amount of people who are affected by it has increased.”

This is just one reason why people have become more receptive to what these bands have to say. COVID gave them a reason to stop and think, if not because it made them face a harsher reality than they ever had done before, but because it afforded them the time to properly investigate the issues they might have previously avoided exploring. “Lockdown helped people become more open-minded to things as well as [give them time] to think and look into stuff,” Glitchers drummer Sophie reckons. “I think a lot of this stuff gets lost because there’s so much news nowadays, and people go to work or college or uni, they get home and they don’t want to hear more crap.”

COVID shutdowns also coincided with several eye-opening political movements. The first of these was the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd, but the early months of 2021 saw a huge outcry at the threat of the implementation of the aforementioned Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill, with Kill The Bill protests erupting across the country. Around the same time, a woman by the name of Sarah Everard was kidnapped, raped and murdered by Wayne Couzens, a serving police officer, while walking home at night from a friend’s house. It started vital conversations about women’s safety and gendered violence, but also the institutional corruption within the police, particularly in London. It hit home in a visceral manner when the police attacked women who were holding a peaceful vigil for Sarah in a park. An especially striking photo making the front pages afterward featured a woman, later identified as Patsy Stevenson, being pinned to the floor by four police officers.

In 2019, Nervus released their third album, Tough Crowd, which featured “They Don’t,” a song about the failures of the police to keep people safe, oftentimes doing quite the opposite. “People weren’t necessarily expecting us to be quite so direct, and I think there’s a lot of messages on there that people didn’t quite connect with at the time it came out, probably based on their experiences,” Foster recalls. “A couple of years down the line, people started to get Tough Crowd a bit more.” After Black Lives Matter and Sarah Everard, the refrain of the aforementioned song, “They don’t keep you safe,” began to resonate on a deeper level. Indeed, when Nervus released their most recent album, The Evil One, last June, it was received much more warmly. “People are more ready to hear [those messages] now.”

Time will tell how long it’ll be before things start looking up. The next General Election must happen by Jan. 23, 2025, though there are calls for it to happen earlier, and Labour have remained consistently ahead in the polls as the country grows more frustrated with the Tories. Then again, the question remains as to how much they are willing to change, and whether they can make good on their promises.

The theory goes that when there are bad times, great music comes out of it, but the situation with the U.K. music scene has proved just a little different. In this instance, when times are bad, people look up and realize that the voices expressing their frustrations, and imagining better, were right there all along. For those bands, 2022 may well have been the making of them.

When Ithaca bandleader Djamila Boden Azzouz first entered the music industry, she battled a double standard. On the one hand, she felt pressure to overly feminize and overly sexualize herself to stand a chance of being included. On the other, Boden Azzouz was made to feel as if she couldn’t be feminine if she wanted to be taken seriously. She couldn’t win. “It’s metal. It’s hardcore. You have to be one of the boys. That’s something I’ve struggled with my entire career, particularly when I was younger,” she explains.

There were other dimensions, however, to this struggle. Even as the scene has begun to warm up to women, more often than not, the ones who were first to be celebrated were white, straight and thin. Boden Azzouz is none of these things. “It’s always been really hard for me,” she confesses. While great progress has been made in starting dialogues about race and queerness, fatness has been left out of the conversation.

“People don’t want to talk about it because it’s fucking uncomfortable,” Boden Azzouz reasons. “Thin people don’t like to acknowledge thin privilege in music, particularly in metal music. Regardless of gender identity, being thin is the one constant. There is no representation for people like me in this music scene. You’ve got people like Lizzo in pop music who are breaking ground there, but heavy music is a million fucking miles away.”

Read more: Inside the next wave of British heavy metal

But now, Boden Azzouz is done with feeling beaten down: “I’ve reached a point where I just don’t care anymore.” That fury has become blazing defiance on Ithaca’s second album, They Fear Us, a record that celebrates difference and aspires to it. Brightening the metallic hardcore template with influences from new wave, ’80s power pop and ’90s industrial, they’re here to be a splash of color — quite literally, given Boden-Azzouz’s love of orange dresses — in a scene that’s a little too fond of black. 

“We were really just thinking, ‘How can we as a band write this music that we really love and pay homage to these bands that we really love and make it new and fresh and interesting?’” Boden Azzouz says. “There are so many bands out there that are just writing the same riffs. I don’t want to listen to 10 bands that sound like Botch. I’ll just listen to Botch. You really have to bring something new.” 

The same goes for visuals. “A bunch of white dudes stood in a forest? I don’t want to listen to that,” she continues. “I don’t care what the music sounds like because I’m bored looking at the photos.” The London five-piece steered as far away from the tropes of metal album artwork as possible — in fact, they hoped to create something that wouldn’t look like a metal cover at all. “We wanted something that was definitely more dramatic. We wanted the visual to match the intensity of the record.” It sees Boden-Azzouz sitting on a throne in the big orange dress that’s becoming her trademark, flanked by her bandmates — James Lewis, Will Sweet, Dom Moss and Sam Chetan-Welsh — who are all dressed in white and gray. Above their heads, the album title is written in a curly font exported from the ’70s. It looks regal as it deserves from a band who, on its title track, deliver a mosh call as powerful as “Bow before your gods.”

The cover is also designed to tap into one of the record’s key themes — what Boden Azzouz terms “divine feminine power.” As an antidote for the trappings of a patriarchal scene, Ithaca are here to demonstrate that femininity ought not to be scorned, but embraced. “A lot of people associate that word with very specific ideas, but there is no right way to look at or describe femininity,” she asserts. “One of the big things is that embracing femininity is not just for women. It’s something everyone can and should take a look at. Men think that feminism is an attack on them and they’re missing the fucking point. We all benefit from feminism. No one loses. What we’re doing is putting divine femininity and feminine power on a pedestal.”

It’s a vital exercise when Boden Azzouz finds herself constantly frustrated by what she perceives to be a constant show of performative feminism within the scene. “I find it really frustrating that bands and people love to talk about feminism and say they’re a feminist, but they don’t actually practice it. I’d rather they didn’t. I’d rather they just fucking go away. It’s easy for bands to say that they’re feminists and stuff, but then let me see your [tour] lineups. Who’s in your crew? Who do you work with? Lots of people like to attach themselves to it because it’s the thing to do, and so many people don’t want to be seen as not doing the right thing, but then they don’t actually do [anything].”

Ultimately, Ithaca want to both push open the gates to metal, inviting in people who didn’t think metal culture could be somewhere they would be welcomed. They want to look out at the crowd when they play and see a more diverse array of faces. (In fact, the more girls Boden Azzouz can see stage diving, the better). They’re just as happy to reach beyond the scene and get into the ears of people who might have ever encountered the genres in which they play. 

“By getting a bit weird with it, and putting all these different influences into the record, I do feel like it has the potential to reach people who wouldn’t call themselves a metal fan,” Boden Azzouz says. “My hope is they might hear it and realize there are other ways of doing this music, and you don’t have to stick to the confines of the genre. We really want to diversify the scene, but also diversify the music itself. Metal is for you, and there is space for you there.”