Content Warning: This essay discusses suicide and self-harm. Please prioritize your safety, if necessary.

I.

I did not know Bo Lueders. For a little over a week last year, the two of us were on a Coheed & Cambria cruise ship together—me on board with Thursday, he with his Hardlore cohost Colin Young and the band Twitching Tongues—but aside from a couple of friendly head-nods in the cabin hallways, we didn’t actually say a word to each other. This happens in hardcore sometimes. We so often know of many people, but we never get to really know them.

Anyone who really knows me, for example, would tell you that I am not as outgoing as I appear to be on stage or online. I don’t just regularly walk up and introduce myself to strangers in real life, and even when I do, I do so with an unbearable sense of internal mortification. Which is to say I only do such things when I feel like there is simply no other choice. That week in October, while sailing in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, I chose to keep to myself. I regret that now.

The reality is, I was a fan. I was a fan of Harms Way, whose music I featured on AM Radio, and of course, I was a fan of Hardlore—perhaps the single most ubiquitous platform of hardcore media that we have. Back when Anti-Matter was in full swing, people would sometimes speak with me about Bo and Colin as if they were “competitors.” I never viewed them in that way.

In my mind, Anti-Matter is a project that centers understanding the larger hardcore community through the telling of individual stories. It’s also about clearing the assumptions we make about each other and killing a few sacred cows wherever we can. Hardlore, to me, is wildly different. Hardlore is more of a joyful demonstration of hardcore pride. It’s about celebrating our traditions of hardcore mythology—“lore” is, after all, in the name—and expressing a sincere reverence to hardcore’s legends and contemporary figures alike. Hardlore’s best episodes could make me feel like I did when I was a thirteen-year-old kid seeing Agnostic Front for the first time, when my relationship with hardcore was still fresh and blissfully uncomplicated. Whereas I may have occasionally used Anti-Matter as a platform to critique hardcore—a sort of tough love, in some cases—Bo and Colin created a platform where hardcore is almost impervious to critique. It’s all love, literally. They might squabble over whether or not Merauder made a better record than Killing Time, but this kind of “fight” is more akin to something like fighting over which facial feature you love the most about the love of your life. Eyes, nose, cheeks, whatever. You fucking love that person with your whole heart.

I did not know Bo Lueders. But I know for certain that he fucking loved hardcore with his whole heart.

II.

When I made the decision to press pause on Anti-Matter a little over a year ago, most of my reasons were practical; I outlined many of these concerns in one of the last essays I published before the hiatus. But there were other factors.

For most of my life I’ve only ever considered myself a writer. Before the internet, I looked at the act of writing as an opportunity for my mind—and for the world, on some level—to be given the grace to move at my own speed, on my own terms. I also believed in its potential to heal. Some people see writing as a practice of solitude, but I have always been more enthusiastic about the idea that once the writing becomes the written, I have engaged in a social act. It’s the reader who gives life to the written, and that point of exchange still feels like the reason why I do it. Writing has always made me feel less alone. It’s the way I choose to feel connection with the world.

The online version of Anti-Matter that I introduced in 2023 did not afford me the same kind of grace, but by the time I realized it, it was too late. To be clear, it wasn’t the workload itself that created a problem, nor was it a problem created by my audience. I was the author of my own publishing schedule and I knew the level of dedication required for this going into it. No, this emerging crisis was more subtle and unlike anything I could have predicted: As a “creator” whose “content” had become entangled with my own personal identity—and then set to a schedule of harsh deadlines—I had unwittingly created an environment of psychological and emotional repression. Because, for one thing, who would subscribe to a newsletter that bums you out? Who actually cares whether or not I questioned my self-worth that week? Who would donate five dollars a month to find out if I was up all night re-litigating my childhood trauma instead of writing about Turnstile? I knew that I wanted to make authentic and personal work, but by my own design, that expression could not be complete. This was not the place for that. And so I’d push those feelings down to get the work done, only to leave them there. Week after week, without ever having the opportunity to process them. Knowing that, one day soon, they would inevitably find their way out.

It used to be that only a few of us could choose to live our lives in public; the demand for making “content” out of your life was confined by the mediums that could dish it out, and there weren’t many. That is no longer the case. Today, seemingly almost everyone chooses to create an “online self”—on Instagram, on TikTok, on Substack, or perhaps most unfortunately, on Facebook. Just think about how twisted it is that literally millions of otherwise private people, some of whom are reading this newsletter right now, currently have a slate of personal online performance metrics that they silently monitor. Now imagine what it’s like for those of us in public and creative fields, where there is an even stronger demand for us to be chronically online, devoting days and weeks and months to watering that insatiable thirsty garden of subscription numbers, streaming milestones, social media followers, and fan engagement. All of which makes it increasingly difficult to find the appropriate amount of time to attend to our offline selves—our actual human lives with our very real psychological needs—until that severe lack of nourishment begins to show.

In the case of Anti-Matter, I only realized that something was off when I realized that writing this newsletter ten times a month meant that I was, by necessity, always on. I thought breaking down in private and crying once a week was just the cost of doing business when you cross the rubicon from “writer” to “content creator.” I thought I was getting paid to protect you, the reader, from my stubborn history with depression. That’s the thing about most internet media projects: For my work to “succeed,” I needed you to like me. And nobody likes a buzzkill.

III.

In the days since Bo’s death was announced, I’ve read countless tributes online from his friends and loved ones who were absolutely blindsided by the news. People who had just talked to him that very evening had no idea what he was about to do next. I want everyone to know: That is in no way a referendum on their relationships or on how well they knew Bo. At this point in my life, I’ve lost at least at least four friends to suicide—including Bill Kiernan, the singer for my first-ever band, Fountainhead—and each and every one of them came as a complete shock. As much as our brains demand that we make sense of the world around us, some things are and will always remain unsusceptible to “making sense.” This is one of them.

So if what I’m saying is that it’s impossible to explain this moment in some sort of meaningful way, then why, after fifteen months off the grid, am I even reviving this newsletter at all?

A little over three months ago, I posted a reel to Instagram about the Texas is the Reason song “A Jack With One Eye,” and specifically how the music to that song emerged from a mental health crisis. (I didn’t use the word in that reel, but I will tell you now that I was experiencing persistent suicidal ideation at the time.) I struggled with how I should tell that story, but more than that, I struggled with if I should tell that story. It’s not like I’ve never talked about my mental health struggles in public before, so it didn’t feel like some sort of big reveal or something. That wasn’t it. It was more that I was worried I’d already talked about mental health too much. I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me, or worse, roll their eyes at the subject. Even now, at 52 years old, I still occasionally feel the shame and stigma of having an active clinical depression diagnosis. And sometimes, that shame keeps me from doing or saying more. I fucking hate that.

Because we all need to be doing and saying more, especially in the hardcore community. I need for you to understand that none of us came to this scene because we were normal or well-adjusted or even happy. We came to this scene because we felt marginalized by the outside world, ill-equipped for a conventional life, and most likely, very pissed off. We settled into this community because it was a relief to find other fucked-up people who wanted to be good to each other and do great things together. The hardcore scene is, in fact, a lifeline. But it’s not therapy. It’s not professional help when you need it. It’s just not enough.

There are things we can and should do. The simple things still hold true: Check in on your friends. Create truly inclusive spaces. Foster personal and public dialogues that allow for vulnerability without shame. Normalize conversations about mental health and therapy. Be prepared to provide resources for anyone who acknowledges that they need more help but don’t know where to go.

On a more personal level, think about your own relationship with our community and how much of it exists online. Give our content creators and musicians and public-facing people a little bit of time and grace to take care of their offline and offstage selves—even if it means you don’t get a new episode or essay or album right away. Give each other a little more grace at the shows and in the comments sections. Treat each other as if you have no idea what the other person is going through right now, because you don’t, and you also have absolutely no idea how meaningful and life-changing one simple act of kindness can be to someone who needs it at just the right moment. Finally, give yourself a little more time and grace, because we need you, too.

If I’m being honest, that nagging feeling that I’ve already “talked too much” about mental health turned up again during the process of writing this, but I can’t be bothered with that thought anymore. When Bo died, I was reminded that the only difference between life and death in the darkness of my own worst depression was nothing but a split second. Knowing this, I have grieved for Bo in a way that I’m not sure I’ve ever grieved for a stranger before. But with this broken heart, it feels necessary to remind those of us who are still here that we belong to a community that is no stranger to struggle, and that I know I speak for thousands of us when I say that we will struggle together with you until you get to the other side of whatever it is you are going through. You are not alone. I swear it. We must let each other know this.

Because the people that we love are dying. Our community is at risk. And as long as this threat remains, it is our responsibility to show up for each other, to take care of each other, to love each other. I came back to say this because now is not the time to shut up about it.

Thank you for joining me here again, even if only for this moment.

With love and respect,
Norman

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Before we turn the lights off for a while around these parts, there are still two matters of unfinished business that I wanted to draw your attention towards. For one thing, presale orders for the last minute/last chance Anti-Matter merch drop are coming to a close on December 23. All items are being made to order and will begin shipping shortly after Christmas.

I really wasn’t planning on doing any more merch, but I received an overwhelming amount of requests from readers who wanted to show their support for the project in this way, one last time, and it felt like a good opportunity to be selfish and make a couple of things that I personally want to wear in the world. (If you know me, then you know I love a good windbreaker and snapback hat!) It would also make me extremely happy to see more people out in the world wearing a shirt that reads: “We believe that hardcore is more than music.” I hope you can be one of them, but either way, this is the last run.

In addition to that, I wanted to direct your attention to the fact that I have opened the entirety of the Anti-Matter archives to the public—for free, for now. That’s over 120 essays and interviews in all. The archives will remain open until some point in January 2025, when I’ll start making a few more decisions about the future of this project. Until then, I thought I’d give you a few places to start digging in—especially if you arrived to the party somewhat late. So, for the benefit of those of you who joined up in the last six months—or for longtime subscribers itching to catch up—I’ve pulled a handful of my favorite moments from the first twelve months of Anti-Matter below.

With thanks and gratitude, happy holidays to all of you and best wishes for a happy new year. Enjoy the work!

[My dad] was always like, “What are we gonna do with him?” because he wanted to go out at night, go to bars and shit. And then he bought a bar, so he’d be gone all weekend. He would just hand me to people, which is part of the fucking problem. One side of the family they handed me to were fucking, you know, kid-touchers. The other side, junkies. From ten years old on, I’m in this world of shit. And there was never any sympathy or anything. I’d never heard the words “I love you” until my first girlfriend. Never. It just wasn’t in the vocabulary. My father, when we were going to my mother’s funeral, told me not to cry. And then at his funeral, I fucking cried. I was like, “Joke’s on you, old man. Fuck you!” [Laughs] I just didn’t want to treat people like that. I needed to break the fucking cycle somehow. I don’t got it in me to be that. It’s like, just be good. Just be a good person. Be the way I wish somebody was with me.

I really just needed to, one, get it off my fucking chest. There was a need for me to be able to say: this is a part of me. You all know I'm Korean. I am very much Spanish. This is [who I am]. The second part of it was hoping that someone else could identify with it. There are songs that I write where I just hope that this touches someone the way other lyrics have touched me, you know? But at the same time, I also try to balance that with just writing for myself to be able to put it out there, because it almost kind of takes a weight off my shoulders. Especially with this record, that’s what I was really going for: Don’t worry about what other people are thinking and do what makes you feel good. “Your Own Means” was kind of both. It was both “let me make this declaration right here” and also, “I hope someone else can hear this.”

I think the community does give back, but who knows, if I become homeless at some point [laughs]… I still got that working class thing in me. Like, during COVID, I knew I couldn’t go out and play shows. I have my art, but it was like, man, I’m really screwed because I’ve spent 30 years in this band. I don’t have a great résumé. What does one do in two-thousand-whatever-it-was when they don’t have that? Well, one goes to work for Amazon. That’s what I did. And of course I got, “What is Kevin Seconds doing working at Amazon?” Well, give me a better idea for a job I can get. I’m fucking 60 years old, what do you want me to do? [laughs] I got a little upset at a few people because [they were acting] like I was destroying their image of their hero or something. But this is real life and I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not afraid of it. I’m going to do what I have to do to survive. I learned how to do that, and I’m never going to give up on myself or give up on having a roof over my head and keeping my shit together. If I have to be a door-greeter at a fucking Walmart because that’s the only job I got, you best believe I’ll hate it, but I’ll do it.

Being able to be this honest and speak about this stuff, that doesn’t happen. A lot of the time I’m preparing myself for what I’m going to have to say or the direction I want to take it. And sometimes, when I do get a little vulnerable in a space like this, I feel so much shame again. To be honest, those things are tied for me. That’s a Kat thing—vulnerability and shame! She’s dealing with it [laughs]. It’s just really relevant in my life right now. And I really appreciate you creating a space to do that, for me to feel comfortable to talk about that. Because I’m going to talk about it one way or another, whether it’s in lyrics, whether it’s in my art, whether I make a big fucking Instagram post about it. I focus so hard on articulating myself, and at the end of the day, I’m still constantly contradicting myself and the words I say and the things I feel—and that’s really human. Unfortunately, I can’t expect myself to be this perfectly articulate woman… I’m still discovering myself. There’s so much of my identity that I’m still figuring out. I’m still learning who in my life is safe, who will protect that identity, and who I can be vulnerable with.

If you remember, I feel like the thing a lot of Black and brown kids in the scene had in common was that we were not going to talk about being Black and brown. I don’t want to call anyone out specifically, but I don’t remember going to very many Black-fronted hardcore bands shows and hearing them talk about anything to do with race or their personal experience [as Black people]. And now I go to shows and what I’m witnessing is that the white kids in the audience who are there to see Soul Glo or Zulu or any of these bands—you have to come meet them where they are. Like, if you’re uncomfortable, that’s your bad, and that’s what’s so exciting. It’s not a novelty anymore. It’s like Los Crudos times infinity: I don’t even speak your language, but I have to come to you and listen to you scream in a language that I don’t understand. That’s what’s happening for every culture in hardcore right now.

I shouldn’t have turned in that direction. ISKCON is fucked up in every possible way. That’s the thing. The stuff that I’ve done, the music I did and the creativity I had, I’m proud of it. And I’m also embarrassed by it. Like, it’s embarrassing to say that I fell prey to a cult. I joined a cult. What the fuck did I do? And I convinced myself that it wasn’t a cult. It’s like when a person is in an abusive relationship and they convince themselves that their partner is not abusive. They’re like, “It’s OK, they’re a nice person!” I didn’t want to admit that I had gotten myself into this cult because that would have proved that I have no judgment, or that my judgment is bad. I think it’s the same thing in abusive relationships where it’s embarrassing to the person to admit their partner is a shithead because you picked this partner and you attracted this partner. I feel the same way about ISKCON.

A lot of the Trapped Under Ice music, I love it. It’s very much me. It’s not phoned in at all. It’s like too much of me; it’s a problem [laughs]. I sing about some things in my childhood, like abuse and things I never came to terms with at that point—and maybe didn’t come to terms with until the last couple of years. I acknowledge those things without ever saying it clearly, and it’s how I came to know myself. It’s kind of coming from the perspective of an insufferable, self-centered, woe-is-me, brat of a child, but everything I was saying was real. I was really hurt and all I could see was my hurt. I had to just wear the hurt and that helps you to overcome it. The lyrics I write in my thirties are a lot different now. It’s therapeutic. It’s a big part of how I’ve grown and matured as an adult, and how I’ve become better with social things, like we talked about earlier, and alienated myself less. You just keep writing things and saying your feelings until you realize, these are human feelings. I’m human. I relate to other humans. How can I be more respectful and compassionate to other humans around me and see their pain?

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Anti-Matter is ad-free, anti-algorithm, and all about hardcore. For updates on its future, please consider subscribing now. ✨

Programming Note: The last minute/last chance Anti-Matter merch drop presale is live now! Preorders will be open until December 23 and orders will begin shipping just after Christmas. If you ever wanted to show your support for this project and never had the chance—or even if you just want to pick up a little swag for the holidays—this is your final opportunity. As always, thank you all!

Eighteen months ago, when I launched this iteration of Anti-Matter, I liked to talk about how the circumstances that led to the creation of the zine in 1993 seemed to “rhyme” with many of the circumstances that led to the creation of this newsletter 30 years later. Today, as I prepare to go on an indefinite hiatus, I am realizing that many of the circumstances that led to the original zine’s end also seem to rhyme with my circumstances today. In the introduction to the final issue back then, I wrote about my “compulsive desire” to work harder without regard to my health. In different words, I actually wrote about my struggle with “being perceived.” I also even deemed it a hiatus.

“I don’t want to say that this might be the last issue that you’ll ever read,” I insisted, “because honestly, I don’t think that will be.” It only took 28 years, but I stayed true to my word and I love that.

In the same way today, I do not see this as an end. Anti-Matter will somehow persist as it always has, just like it did after that issue in the summer of 1995. Working on this iteration of the zine has been rewarding in so many ways, and I couldn’t be prouder of all of the new work I put forth into the world. But for now, it feels appropriate to press pause with a look back on 2024. To do it, I’ve invited back Ned Russin—singer/bassist for Glitterer and Title Fight, and one of the most articulate, thoughtful, and dedicated hardcore kids I know. Between the two of us, we chose six songs to tell the story of this year. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the story of Anti-Matter—and its impending sunset—finds its place in our conversation as well.

Of course, with every sunset, there is a sunrise in the future. With nothing but love and gratitude, these are the final words. For now.

Before we talk about music, I thought we could sort of take the temperature on how you feel this year went for you.

NED: I mean, it’s tough with recency bias, you know? I think things went to shit pretty quick [laughs]. Or maybe they were always going to go to shit. But yeah, I don’t know. In terms of band stuff, this is probably the best year Glitterer has ever had. It’s the most we’ve been able to tour. We put out a new record. It feels like things are going well for the band. Personally, I just feel like things are going pretty fine. Nothing too exciting in any direction, which is kind of appreciated.

How much do you think you separate how you’re feeling in your personal life from how you’re feeling in your band life? Are you able to disentangle those two things?

NED: Not entirely, no. There’s definitely a fair amount of separation now because this is the most I’ve ever been independent from playing music. But at the same time, my normal nine-to-five life is also wholly dependent on playing music—because I work at a record store. I work with my friends who I know through music. And I’m always like, “Just so you know, in six weeks I’m going to be gone for a little bit again.” There’s always just the knowledge that this is based around me playing music. So I’m doing these things that are separate from one another, but they’re still connected.

OK, then tell me this: What is your favorite non-music thing from the past year?

NED: I read this book by Mark Haber called Lesser Ruins that came out last month or the month before. It was the best non-musical thing I interacted with this year. It does have a little bit to do with music, but it’s not a music book by any means. I read it and I immediately told everyone I know that’s a reader to check it out, and I’ve gotten mostly positive responses from that as well. It makes me feel good to be so interested in something and then to recommend it and get other positive responses to it.

I suppose I can’t talk about the end of the year without talking about the end of this run of Anti-Matter, which is sad. But like I wrote about in last week’s essay, there’s also some relief there. Did you read the essay?

NED: I read it.

I’ve never actually chopped it up with you about this struggle with “being perceived.” I’ve definitely talked with a lot of band friends and other people who work in public about it, but it’s something I don’t think I’ve ever really articulated until today so I’m curious if that resonated with you at all.

NED: Well, it’s such a weird thing in hardcore because if it’s not the most important thing, it’s in the top three—this idea that there is no separation between band and audience, that there is no hierarchy within the system. That’s something I truly believe in and something that was attractive to me and to a lot of other people. But at the same time, there’s still this weird hierarchy that exists. I am not innocent of this at all! I still see people in bands where I’m like, “Wow, there’s that person in a band who I like, who changed my life, who I love and admire”—and I don’t know them, but I feel this connection to them. And yet, to be on the receiving end of that can be very strange. I don’t know. I’ve seen things on the internet where people are talking about their interactions with me, which makes me feel very uncomfortable, because it might be like, “Oh, Ned seemed a little tired at this time” or “Ned seemed a little annoying” [laughs]. I don’t know if people are perceiving a smaller interaction to be a whole representation of myself.

Brother Ben is amazing at interacting with people and being very familiar and easygoing. But I am the opposite because I like talking to people very seriously. So I’m difficult because I don’t really want to just have an insignificant interaction, you know? Understanding that people are thinking about you in a certain context is difficult for me to grapple with. It doesn’t make it impossible for me to talk to people by any means, but it adds a level of discomfort to things that I wish was not there.

OK, before we get to the music, one more thing: What do you think was your top feeling of 2024?

NED: Well, I just got back from a trip to Japan. The band did a tour in Japan and Southeast Asia, and then I vacationed in Japan afterwards. My girlfriend and I went to a temple in Kyoto. It was fall foliage season, so they opened up a lot of these temples at night for people to come and look at the foliage under the lights as a special occasion. They only do nighttime visits a couple of times a year.

We went to this one temple where they did small tours, but they didn’t say what these tours were, and if they did say, it was in Japanese, so we couldn’t understand anyway. So we paid 100 yen to go into this building. We didn’t know what it was. They just said, “Hold onto the railing.” You walk into the basement and it’s pitch black and we’re walking through his hallway. It was so astounding to me because I had no idea what I was doing; I only knew it was the darkest darkness I’d ever seen in my life. But then the person behind us took their phone out and turned their flashlight on and my girlfriend and I turned around and started to yell at this person semi-politely [laughs]. We were like, “Hey, you’re ruining this experience for us.” Two seconds later, we turned a corner and there was this stone with a dim light shining on it and something inscribed in it that I couldn’t read. And that was the end of the thing. Right after that, there were stairs back up to the outside.

We discussed this moment a lot, the moment being in that pitch black and then the moment of being angry at that person with the cell phone. That feeling of profound unknown and then the feeling of being taken out of it. I said afterwards, “I wonder if that was the test, if this was some sort of Buddhist test for enlightenment.”

Well, I’m glad that you are not too enlightened to talk about hardcore now.

NED: Maybe if we hadn’t gotten angry, if we’d just moved on, we would have went up the stairs as different people [laughs]. There’s no way to know.

Ned Russin’s No. 3 Song of 2024:
EVERYBODY TAKES ONE “The Call” (Demo)

OK. Let’s start with your number three, which is by Everybody Takes One from Minnesota. What did you love about it?

NED: This was a demo that was sent to me by a friend knowing that this was a shared interest, straight-edge hardcore, and specifically youth crew hardcore played by actual young people. I listened to it, and I was just like… This is what I like [laughs]. It felt so relatable. It felt like they were doing the thing that I think has been lost for the last decade or so…

How would you describe that thing?

NED: It’s not in opposition to your [end-of-year] picks, but it’s a nice counterpoint. I’m trying to pick the right words here to not sound like I’m being condescending or passing judgment on this, but basically, it’s not “professional.” It is wholly amateurish in a way that I find moving. To return to the idea of there being no separation between band and audience, that also means that people who are new to their instruments, who are new writing music, who are new to the scene in general can do the same thing that people have been doing for 10, 20, or 30 years. It seems like they’re actually young people playing music that is made originally by young people for young people. It’s not recorded perfectly and the execution is not perfect, but whatever. To me, that is so necessary to the things that I want. These people are trying to capture something that seems important to them. There’s urgency behind this thing. It doesn’t matter if the tempo wavers a little bit or if the guitars are a little out of tune or something. The feeling is there and that resonates with me.

This song was brand new to me, and what’s interesting to me is that I am of two minds with it. The first mind was basically exactly what you just said. My first listen through I remember feeling like it sort of reminds me of the Side by Side demo—not the 7-inch, but the demo, when Sammy [Siegler] was barely as big as his sticks [laughs]. And I love that. It’s visceral, it’s raw, it’s fun, it reminds me of youth, and that’s killer. But the more I listened I started to have questions that I don’t have the answers to. Like, I started to wonder how much of this was actually just following an aesthetic? Because one minute it sounds super raw, but then a guitar solo comes out, and I’m like, “Hey, wait a minute!”

NED: [Laughs] Right. I mean, the thing is, the tradition of hardcore is so interesting because it’s like, the “original” bands of hardcore always break up, and then a year later they’re doing something different. And then this new group of kids come up and they’re like, “No. This is what hardcore is. We are going to keep doing this thing that you all gave up on.” So immediately you have this split of thinking of hardcore having these aesthetic values and hardcore being this kind of ethical thing. But there’s a lot of overlap.

I’d make the argument that Youth of Today were the most important hardcore band of all time because they were the ones who codified the [early] hardcore aesthetic. They said, “This is what it’s supposed to be” and they brought it back around. I know there’s a lot of other bands that are just as significant, but Youth of Today were the ones who, in my opinion, kept that whole tradition alive.

And also, I should say that this thought of mine was more of a curiosity than a judgment. If the band was being intentional in their aesthetic, I respect that, honestly!

NED: I don’t know if you remember this, but we got dinner in what must have been 2015 or 2016 at this spot in Union Square that’s no longer there—I think it was called V Burger or something—but at that dinner you said something about originality not being that important, and that was really important for me to hear at that point in my life. I’ve thought a lot about it since. I feel like there is a school of thought where you need to be growing, evolving, and changing all the time, which I do agree with. But that doesn’t leave room for this kind of thing. This is a thing that’s been done for over 30 years now. So we can ask, Do we really need another straight-edge hardcore song that is following the same template that has been in place since the dawn of the genre? But then I hear this and I’m like, Yeah, we do. Because these kids need to play it and their friends need to hear it. That is really inspiring to me as a person who’s been doing this for as long as I’ve been doing it.

Anti-Matter’s No. 3 Song of 2024:
DRUG CHURCH “Demolition Man” (Pure Noise)

Interestingly enough, originality was a huge part of why I chose “Demolition Man” to be in my top three [laughs]. That originality thing is this: I have often said that almost everything under the sun has been sung. Our job is to find new ways of saying old things. That’s sort of the goal of a lyric to me: How can we find a new and interesting way of saying something we’ve heard before? But in the case of this song, honestly, I can’t think of another song that says what this song says. And that’s fucking wild to me. The lyrics to this song have spent more time in my brain than any other song this year.

I think my history and my past excursions show that I’ve often tried to find out if there’s a “purpose” in life—which I now realize is a very Cro-Mags thing to say [laughs]. But the lyrics to this song really speak to that. It starts with a guy who is watching a video of working dogs and marveling over how happy they seem to do what they’re tasked to do. And that’s very true! Every dog breed has a thing that they instinctively do, and if you keep them from doing it, they will be unhappy. So then he applies that to mankind, and the line that sticks out is: “Picture being built for one thing / And when that thing is done, you feel free.” That’s actually kind of profound to me. Because I’ve never had that one thing, in all honesty. The song is also a jam, but those lyrics are so provocative.

NED: Something about this song, like the way you talk about the lyrics, I find very exciting in a way because those things are on my mind, too. Pat Kindlon has a way of being provocative a lot of times, but this song is way more… I don’t want to say introspective, as if the other stuff isn’t introspective, but it’s much more internally focused, you know?

But these are introspective questions, for sure. Philosophical, even. 

NED: Definitely. Another thing I find interesting about Drug Church is that I feel like every time they put out a new record somebody around them will always say, “Oh, they finally got Pat to sing on this record, you won’t believe it” [laughs]—which I think is a funny thing to say. But there’s this simple use of melody in this song; it’s only three notes that he sings, but it’s really effective. I find it similar to the way that Minor Threat uses melody, which is like two or three notes, moving back and forth. But just that little movement can have a big effect on a song. I’m honestly a melody-over-lyric person. I hear a melody first and I latch onto it first. And often I will remember that way more than I remember a lyric. So it’s a good choice. It makes the song better, in my opinion, to have that little vocal movement.

Ned Russin’s No. 2 Song of 2024:
POSICIÓN UNIDA “Pensar Positivo” (Demo)

Your number two pick is provocative for me in a couple of ways. For one thing, the first thing I thought when I heard it was that Posición Unida must be a Latin American band, but apparently, they’re from D.C.?

NED: Yeah.

Which is actually awesome because I can’t think of very many bands from America—and definitely not straight-edge or posi-core bands—that sing in a non-English language. You could say that’s brave, on some level, because they’re going to be playing to a majority English-speaking audience. But at the same time, singing in Spanish communicates something to me. Like that straight-edge trope of “being proud of who I am”—singing in Spanish shows me that. They don’t need to tell me. What has been your experience with the song?

NED: I have a friend Hannah, from England, and we were talking about European hardcore bands a long time ago. I remember this very well. She said, “We love these bands, but why do they feel that they have to sing in English just so they could be understood by us when I feel like they should be singing in their native languages? Because that’s how you’re going to be the most expressive and the most authentic to your emotions.” That’s kind of how I feel about this demo.

These are, again, young kids from D.C., who have been playing in bands for a little bit now. I’ve met them over the last year or so, and they’re just really excited about hardcore. They’re excited about just being involved in the scene and doing all this stuff. I missed their first show because they played a show on the Fourth of July and I was working. But they sold some dubbed cassettes with no artwork, and they numbered them all. I think they only made like six of them or something. My girlfriend booked the show, so she got a copy—it’s labeled “Demo #3”—and when we listened to it, I was just like, I don’t know these kids that well but this is kind of the future of D.C. It’s young kids who get what I think needs to be gotten, who are doing it in a way that’s really admirable. But the musical part, too, I just think these songs are well done. I feel like this song is the best representation of the band and what I think their potential is: It has a good intro, a good mosh part, a singable chorus—even if the lyrics are not in English. All these things are the marks of an effective hardcore song.

I’ve also been trying to imagine how you and I hear the song differently, with me as a native Spanish speaker. She might as well be singing in English to me. So it’s like, am I experiencing a different band than you are?

NED: That’s a good point! I don’t know. I can’t answer that.

Because there is no answer [laughs]. But it’s obviously easy to think about Los Crudos here, because whenever I hear Los Crudos, I just hear a band—whether it’s in English or Spanish, I am fully internalizing the language part.

NED: Crudos is a great band, and it’s interesting to see how the politics have changed because, at that time, Crudos singing in Spanish was a very political action. Whereas in 2024, it’s not this big ideological decision. This is a person who is from Guatemala choosing to sing in Spanish because that is the most effective way she has to communicate. It’s not presented as this thing of representing an under-represented group of people. This is just a person in hardcore choosing to sing a song. And I find that to be a very hopeful trajectory. The goal has always been to make these things normal, so nobody has to feel like they are an outsider in this situation. Because the idea of everyone being welcome was not always true—in the world at large, but also within hardcore.

Anti-Matter’s No. 2 Song of 2024:
J. ROBBINS “Deception Island” (Dischord)

My number two song is also from D.C., so we’re doing great with segues here [laughs]. One of the things we’ve been talking about in your first two picks is this notion of young people making music for young people. But I’ve been thinking about my own work a lot this year, and specifically, I’ve been wondering: Can my best work be ahead? And when you’ve previously connected with people in a way that many have already crowned as your highest achievement, will anybody even recognize it as such?

Obviously, J. Robbins is a friend, but he’s also a huge influence. If he talked to you today, he’d say, “Oh, Norman is a peer”—but I am not a peer as far as I am concerned [laughs]. He is somebody I look up to as a musician, as a songwriter, as a producer. And I remember getting this record and this song specifically just punched me in the face because I thought, fuck. This is absolutely one of the best songs he has ever written. This is greater to me than a vast majority of Jawbox songs. It just is. And I think the difference is that this is the record where J. really tried to stop coding everything into metaphor and really just tried to capture how he was feeling. He said as much in our interview. So maybe like Drug Church, this was J.’s introspective record. But more than that, this song really also made me feel justified in my continued existence as a songwriter and a musician. This song made me feel like, yes, my best work can be ahead. Absolutely.

NED: Yeah, I mean, I feel similar to you in a lot of ways in that regard. The way in which we talk about older musicians is terrifying to me, because it’s like, nobody wants to be the person that is unaware that they’ve lost it, you know? As a person who is just obviously ceaselessly getting older, but also refusing to stop playing music, how do you know when that’s the thing? The conclusion that I’ve come to is that you just have to continue to engage and challenge yourself and just be involved in this thing and actually care. And I think J. is a great example of somebody who has never really stopped doing that. He’s always been working.

I really enjoyed listening to this song. Especially compared to Jawbox, who I kind of look at as this band that’s almost, like, haphazard, this song almost feels simple in a way: It has a really nice verse, a really nice chorus, a beautiful melody over the top. That’s all you need. And it’s like, wow. It’s kind of cool to sit there and see that this is a guy who is continuing to write music and he’s doing it in a different way than he’s done before—and he’s still doing it well. It shouldn’t be surprising!

It’s funny because I think J. might call Jawbox haphazard in a way [laughs]. He does feel, as I do, that when you’re young and you’re writing, you kind of have the temptation to overcomplicate things.

NED: Uhh, yeah! [laughs]

We try to make things tricky or quirky or “challenging,” but sometimes just holding back is a good thing. And I feel like this song is a really great example of that. There are no real tricks to it. These are just really great fucking melodies. These are really cool guitar parts. It just does the job. And had he done anything to complicate it, I’m not sure it would have been a better song.

NED: I mean, I feel like there is a level of antagonism in this song, but not in the way that Jawbox is antagonistic.

Right. Because a J. Robbins song is never going to be smooth. It’s just smooth relative to other J. Robbins songs [laughs].

NED: And maybe that’s why this song stands out. It’s not something that’s supposed to go down completely smooth.

Ned Russin’s No. 1 Song of 2024:
STRAW MAN ARMY “Spiral” (La Vida Es Un Mus Discos)

Now for your number-one song, which I have never heard despite the fact that this band is from New York City [laughs]. In my defense, though, they have also never played a show! So where did you stumble onto Straw Man Army?

NED: I got into them on their last record. My friend recommended them to me at the record store. It was just one of those things that you put on and instantly go, “I like it.” It’s this kind of weird English post-punky single-guitar-note kind of stuff with an obvious anarcho-punk influence. It’s simplistic, but it’s effective and very thought-provoking. I think at this point it might be my favorite record of theirs.

Like you said, they don’t play any shows, but they’re also not this studio-only band. They’re not treating the studio like this kind of big instrument. It’s not like the Beatles being like, “We’re only going to make records and not play so we can really expand on all these ideas and go the furthest we can possibly go.” These records aren’t showing this insane growth, they’re not [showing] these really intricate arrangements or whatever. I think a lot of it is about synthesizing this really political ideology and making the lyrics as effective as possible, and I think it really works.

It’s funny because in the same way that I thought Posición Unida was Latin American, I thought Straw Man Army was British. It wasn’t until they started singing about New York that I was like, “Yo! Are you talking about New York?!” [laughs]

NED: Yeah, it is pretty instantly British sounding. Like, there are a couple of songs where in the intros I can’t find the one. I can’t find the downbeat.

It would be super English if they played their one on the two, like in reggae.

NED: Yeah. I was Googling them recently, and I think Stereogum said that there was a lot of Fugazi influence in it. I was wondering if they were trying to say that there’s a dub influence in it. I don’t feel like there’s a lot of dub going on there. The rhythms will kind of coalesce into this unified movement when they need to, but there’s a moment when it feels like everything is kind of a mess to me. And I don't know if that’s just my brain desiring this sort of structure that I expect from Western music, but I think it’s really cool and kind of challenging. It’s challenging to listen to and challenging to play.

One of the first things I found when I Googled them was a Maximum Rock’n’Roll review for their last record that ends: “EDIT: I sent this to my brother and he said it sounded like Parquet Courts, but I don't know what that means” [laughs]. How would you respond to that?

NED: As a fan of Parquet Courts, I don’t know if that’s wholly accurate, but I feel like I understand what they’re saying. Parquet Courts has a lot of British stuff going on, but they’re also kind of Wire-y—and I mean that in terms of the adjective, and also referring to Wire, the band. This feels like it’s kind of in a different realm. The whole package, the presentation, the fact that they don’t play shows, it’s all very interesting to me.

Do you need to play shows to be “legitimate?”

NED: To me, personally, playing live is the epitome of music. But looking at this, I’m like, Maybe this is a new way to do it. To put the songs first and the ideas first and let that be the example of what the music is—to actually put the music first. It’s like, “You can engage with our art [in this way] and that is an experience that you can have.” And maybe that’s all you need, you know?

Anti-Matter’s No. 1 Song of 2024:
STATE POWER “Gates of Hell” (White Russian)

My number-one song is also political, but it does it very differently [laughs]. When I first approached you with this idea, I already knew that this was absolutely the hardcore song that I have listened to the most this year, bar none. I’ve played it for friends. I’ve played it for bandmates. There’s just something about this song that excites me, still, and I think there are a couple of reasons for that.

For one thing, I think State Power really crams in so many styles of hardcore into one song. It’s political. There’s a beatdown element to it. There’s a melodic chorus. There’s a bridge that kind of turns into a Leeway-style crossover song with guitar solos in it. And it’s all executed at a really high level. But the other part—and this might sound really crazy—but I fucking love hardcore songs with well-executed curse words. This chorus leads in with someone screaming, “Listen up, motherfucker, you’re on top of the list,” and I want to clear the pit every time I hear it [laughs]. That amps me up! Obviously, the political messaging is great—it’s a critique of the aristocratic, billionaire class—but it’s done in this kind of man-on-the-street way. Like, Straw Man Army… I don’t want to say that it’s academic, but I feel like those guys went to college.

NED: There’s a Straw Man Army meme where it says, “Straw Man Army Pit Be Like,” and it’s people playing chess [laughs].

Right! The vibe I get from them is that they read books. The vibe I get from State Power is that they fuck shit up [laughs]. I guess what I’m trying to say is that my favorite hardcore songs are visceral. They grab me in a place of feeling, not thinking. This song does that for me.

NED: Yeah. My thoughts when I first listened to it were like, I don’t know if this is the logical conclusion of Turnstile, but I think this is a logical conclusion of Turnstile. Because when the song kicked in and it was like a beatdown part, I was like, “OK. I’ve come to expect this hardcore in 2024.” That’s not surprising. But when it switched to that key change and an almost alt-rock chorus—that was unexpected to me. I think a precedent stands for people trying to write catchy choruses and being a heavy hardcore band. But I’ve never heard a band do a beatdown part into that. Like, Turnstile, they have these like extremely heavy ignorant parts. And they also have these beautiful melodic moments. But I can’t think of a song where they’re like, “OK, we got the ass-beater into the key change-melodic-memorable chorus thing” [laughs]. This is the new era. We’re really going to extremes in both directions.

One of the other things about this song that I think was also part of the allure was that, for the longest time, this was the only song they had. Since then, an EP has come out and I’ve heard more songs, and now I’m like, OK. State Power is a great band. But I love the idea that for a long time, this song felt like a secret to me. Most people reading this have probably still never heard this song. But I’m just so happy to have had a little bit of a secret moment with the band because I just feel like that experience is really rare in hardcore right now.

NED: A band who feels like they’re not “going for it”—I feel like they should almost be applauded more. It’s like, “Yeah. We have one song. We don’t have this professionally packaged EP with the IG Reel rollout and all this stuff to show you. This is a song.” I applaud that. I like people just playing music because they like to play music.

OK, I suppose we need to address the fact that these may be the last words in Anti-Matter for however long this hiatus lasts.

NED: That’s heavy. The last potential Anti-Matter words.

It is! Because right now when I think about the state of hardcore in 2024, it’s difficult for me to separate it from my experience with Anti-Matter this year. And I think that if I’ve learned anything from this experience it’s definitely that it’s just important to support the things you love while they’re there. Bands, fanzines, venues, whatever. And that’s not me throwing shade: I get it. We all have tons of subscriptions at this point. We’re all stretched. I am grateful for everyone who made it a point to support this project. But this experience also made me think more about how we spend our money as a community. Are we doing whatever we can to support the things we want to see in this world? This goes for me, too. How can I support and elevate the independent artists and writers and businesses that I love so that they can continue to exist? Because we are living in a culture right now where there really is an everything-should-be-free mentality, and there are going to be unintended consequences from that.

NED: Yeah, I mean, that’s the first thing that comes to mind when you start talking about this. It’s really challenging because, obviously, everybody loves that you can listen to all the music that you want in the entire world for however many dollars a month, and you can watch all these movies for the same price. But what does that do to the system that supports these things? I find myself to be highly critical of these things that try to make ease of access the number-one thing when the information that you’re trying to access is not being treated as the important thing.

So yeah, it feels boring and clichéd to say that we should support the bands on tour, support the record labels that you like, and do all this stuff. But when we live in a culture that’s trying to say these things aren’t worth money, it’s important to know that the thing that is important to these companies is you and your information. They want to be able to sell you things better. That’s why this is cheap. This is all to say that when we put art last, then art becomes harder to access.

If you want to make it so that there’s a place where the things that you care about exist, you can do that; you just have to put in the work. That’s what DIY actually means. It used to be a completely involved ecosystem of bands, labels, distributors, record stores, fanzines, college radio stations, all these things working together towards a common goal. And as that was slowly broken apart and compartmentalized, and then built back up in this fucked up way, we’ve lost that. And it’s really hard to think of a way to do that in the current era, because everything is so far apart. We have to distribute the information through Instagram, who is going to sell our data. We send it to Spotify, where they’re also going to sell your data and charge you for it. And it’s like, all that stuff is meaningless. We have to stop caring about that. We have to put the things that we value first. And to me, that’s the community, the music, the people, the whole system that this exists in. I don’t know how it can be done. But the conversation should be started about how we can circumnavigate these things that are in place that we don't need. That's my goal for next year, and the year after that. I want to continue to figure out how to go around what we are told is necessary and required—because I don’t think it is.

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I.

This is it. This is the official “final week” for what has been an incredible eighteen months of Anti-Matter. I could not have predicted in 1993, when I was only nineteen years old, that the voice I was trying to develop back then would be—or even could be—relevant enough to thrive in a 21st century version of the hardcore scene. I certainly could never have predicted that I would still be playing in a band and publishing a fanzine at the age of 50. But these things came to pass, and in spite of the indefinite hiatus that will follow this week, I will always consider this phase of the greater Anti-Matter project to have been an enormous success.

A few weeks ago, when I first announced the hiatus, I underscored a few of the places where this project fell short. Realism is important, even when the overall picture is a win. It’s my intention now, however, to balance the scales. Because I believe that what I did here is something truly unique: Anti-Matter is now a considerable body of work, composed and compiled by one person, that spans over 30 years and explores the contours of what we call “hardcore” through the stories of its participants from each and every generation of this community’s 50-year history. This is special.

This is a body of work that includes conversations with pioneers like Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi), Kevin Seconds (7 Seconds), Keith Burkhardt (Cause For Alarm), Vinnie Stigma (Agnostic Front), and Ray Cappo (Youth of Today) as much as it includes interviews with today’s brightest bands—from Anxious to Turnstile, Koyo to Knocked Loose, One Step Closer to Fiddlehead—and everything in between. This is also a body of work that has made it a point to feature a diverse group of voices, centering the stories of some of our community’s most brilliant women, people of color, and queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming folks in the process. As a queer person of color myself, this has been particularly important to me. In addition, whenever possible, I have attempted to include  a few non-American points of view (with thanks to Speed, Frank Turner, Refused, and Phantom Bay!), but admittedly, I didn’t get a chance to fully expand on that objective as much as I would have liked. Either way, I still believe that this vast collection of thoroughly in-depth hardcore conversation is completely unprecedented in its scope (and style) and I am immensely proud of what we have accomplished here—so far.

To celebrate, I have decided to end this year in the spirit of the holidays with the gift of giving.

II.

In the last few weeks, I have received literally dozens of DMs, emails, and comments from several readers who came with either one or two questions, enough of which to call a trend. The first question was some version of, “Now that you’ve turned off paid subscriptions, how can I support you and/or send you some sort of financial compensation as a thank you for all the work that you’ve been doing?” Occasionally, this question was coupled with an inquiry about gaining access to the archives. With the exception of one reader who pulled my arm into giving him my Venmo information, I have abstained from accepting gifts of this sort. However, when enough people began asking that second question—“I missed your previous merch drops; any chance you can do one last one?”—I realized there was, indeed, a way to fill every cup.

So first of all: As of today, I have made the archives freely available to everyone—free of charge. That’s over 120 essays and interviews in all. I will likely keep this open through into the new year, when I’m able to make some other decisions about the future of Anti-Matter. But for at least the next three or four weeks, it’s yours to explore and discover, beginning with Mike Judge and ending with Pete Wentz. That trajectory alone implies an incredible range of hardcore history, regional differences, musical diversity, and varied experience. I am grateful to have been a steward for it.

Secondly, I have also decided to do a small but final holiday merch drop, which will go live this week. I tried (and failed) to get it launched this morning, but it could go up as soon as Wednesday. So if you missed either of the two previous drops in 2023 and earlier this summer, now will be the last time to grab some classic designs and a few new configurations that, truth be told, I wanted for my own closet. (Cue the windbreakers and snapback hats, among other things!) And if you were, in fact, serious about wanting to send some sort of financial support for this project and the work that I’ve put out there, buying a little merch is the best way to do that—because I still get to give you something more in return. Check the Anti-Matter Instagram for updates on the launch (or check for the site when it’s live), and thank you all for the support you’ve given since the announcement.

III.

Coming this Thursday, I have invited back one of my most popular conversation partners, Ned Russin from Glitterer and Title Fight, to join me for a Year-in-Review special. We discuss our lives over the past year in general, we each pick our top three hardcore songs of 2024, I get to somehow explain the joy of a well-executed curse word in a hardcore song, and of course, we discuss the end of this iteration of Anti-Matter and the state of the hardcore scene as we approach 2025. Ned is one of the smartest and most dedicated hardcore kids I’ve ever met, and I’m so happy he agreed to join me for one last go around.

Simone Weil famously said, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” As a lifelong writer and a musician, I know this to be true. When I restarted Anti-Matter in this format, I sincerely wondered whether or not this project would merit your attention, and I have been grateful to discover that so many of you have been willing to give me such a rare and pure gift. As of today, Anti-Matter has over 9,000 subscribers via email and Substack—which is an astonishing number for this kind of thing. I hope that I earned your generosity over the last eighteen months.

To be clear, I am calling this a “hiatus” for a reason. Anti-Matter, to me, is much bigger than a fanzine or a newsletter. It’s an idea. It’s not something I can just end. And the more I think about it, the more I feel like maybe I can take a page from the way we’ve been doing things in Thursday lately: We don’t have a record label—by design—so we aren’t really trying to follow the “traditional” ways of releasing music, either. We’ve been writing and recording when we are inspired by the music, and we’ve been releasing music one song at a time, when it feels right. We just released a new song last week called “White Bikes,” basically by surprise. It felt more like a treat (or a gift, if we’re using the lexicon of the holiday spirit), but most importantly, it felt good. I could see a version of Anti-Matter where you never know when the next conversation will drop, and you’ll smile when you see it in your inbox.

I’m also interested in finally getting to reissue the first volume of the Anti-Matter book and working on a possible reissue of the compilation. Now that I’ll be regaining such an enormous amount of creative bandwidth, so much more seems possible. As new projects develop, I will keep you up to date with this newsletter—so please keep your subscriptions current for that.

The name Anti-Matter was conceived in 1993, in part, as a verb. I was a young adult with a deeply anti-materialistic bent and a whole lot of idealism. But the name really stuck for its qualities as a noun. It means something to me because I realized that all of the things that I held to be important were immaterial: You can’t touch music. You can’t touch language. You can’t touch human connection. You can’t touch community. It’s all sound and it’s all feeling. In every iteration, Anti-Matter has always been about making the invisible things visible. When I say that I believe hardcore is more than music, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you.

Thank you all. x

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: The Best Songs of 2024 with Ned Russin of Glitterer and Title Fight.

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Before Fall Out Boy broke into the mainstream consciousness, I’d only ever met Pete Wentz once. I was living in Chicago in the late nineties, right after Texas is the Reason broke up, and I’d befriended a group of hardcore kids who all seemed to know each other from growing up in the suburbs. I went to see a band at the Metro with a couple of them, and then afterwards, we wandered into Pick Me Up—a nearby vegan café that seconded as a hangout for wayward straight-edge kids. Pete was already sitting in a booth. I slid in and said hello, but we didn’t really talk that much. No one in the scene at that time would have called Pete shy in the ‘90s—if anything, his membership in bands like Firstborn, Extinction, Birthright, Racetraitor, and Arma Angelus, to name a few, made him almost ubiquitous—but for some reason we both kept to ourselves that night.

Over the next decade, of course, Pete would go on to become the bassist, lyricist, and oftentimes mouthpiece for Fall Out Boy, a 30-million-album-selling stadium act. But behind the trappings of notoriety and fame, almost everyone I knew who had known Pete as a hardcore kid still talked about Pete as a hardcore kid. Mike D.C., who sang for Damnation A.D., told me about taking his kid to see Fall Out Boy just a couple of months ago and hanging out with Pete. My friend D.J. Rose, who was a significant player in building the Syracuse hardcore scene in the ‘90s, told me how Pete really came through for him as a friend not too long ago, at a time when he was going through a rough patch. Overwhelmingly, there was a portrait painted of a person who never lost sight of his friends and of the community that made him who he is—regardless of his life’s many twists and turns. This, too, is hardcore.

The other thing I kept hearing from mutual friends for months is that Pete loved reading Anti-Matter. So 25 years after our first and only meeting, Pete Wentz and I finally managed to get together for a long overdue conversation. “I would feel weird even calling this a fanzine, you know?” he tells me. “To me, it was making our thing real. It was making this thing where kids who were playing on a four-inch stage playing songs where there was no melody to the vocal—this thing that was magical and temporary—very real.”

I wasn’t planning to start this way, but this question literally just crossed my mind. When was the last time you actually did an interview with a hardcore fanzine?

PETE: That’s a good question! I’m not even sure I ever really have. Maybe when I was doing Arma Angelus there was something, but I don’t have a specific memory of it. Early Fall Out Boy days we probably did a couple. But for me, in the heyday of ‘90s zines, any time I was in bands at the time, I was definitely not the mouthpiece of the band at all. So I wouldn’t have been the person answering any questions—thankfully [laughs].

Talking to you now, I’m thinking that you seem like the kind of person who would have done a zine.

PETE: Yeah. I did do a zine. I did multiple zines. The one that I remember the most was called XDarkSideX. And I only really remember it because our drummer, Andy [Hurley], showed me this thing where I apparently did a “Death of a Zine / Rebirth of a Zine” thing for all my readership [laughs]. More often than not, though, I would always do joke zines with the guys from Kill the Slave Master. We would do zines for stuff that we thought was funny, but it was so specific and so niche that I don’t even know who would read it. Those are the ones I liked the most.

OK. Getting serious now, this is going to be the last “normal” interview I’m going to be doing for Anti-Matter for the moment…

PETE: Death and rebirth! If you need any help on it, I’ve done a zine!

I might need the insight! [laughs] Anyway, one of the reasons why I chose to do this interview with you specifically is because exactly one year ago, Pitchfork did a feature on Anti-Matter, and… Well, I’ll just read you the excerpt:

[Brannon] embraces finding the connective tissue between the various pockets of the community, and keeps an open mind about which members’ perspectives deserve to be celebrated. That extends to the people he chooses to feature in Anti-Matter, and when asked who’s currently at the top of his interview wishlist, he delivers an answer that’s sure to rile up purists: Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy.

He goes on to quote me calling you “a dyed-in-the-wool hardcore kid,” which I qualified by saying specifically that I believe being a hardcore kid is “very much a way of being—I can’t define that for anybody else, but I know it when I see it.” So I wanted to start here by asking you if that premise is something you’d agree with.

PETE: I totally ascribe to that. There are definitely things that you could look at—about the ethics [of something] or the way something looks or how it looks not like other things—and you know: That’s hardcore.

I think a lot about when I was most in the daily life of hardcore, in the nineties when that was all I thought about. There was something within this pre-internet—or at least early stages of the internet—version of the culture, where there was a true DIY quality to it, but not in terms of the way I think people use “DIY” now. I think people sometimes use DIY now [to suggest something] looks shitty because it was “doing it yourself.” But in the nineties, in hardcore, I think it was quite the opposite. It was just like, “Well, I’ll start a record label” or “I’ll learn how to tour manage a band” or “I’ll make the cover glossy” or “I’ll learn Photoshop.” It was aspirational! It was like, we’ll just make our own thing; we don’t need this other thing. That was a heavy takeaway from that period to me, mentally. It felt like Boy Scouts in the woods learning how to make a campfire. The hardcore equivalent to that was Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life. You could figure it out. And that has paved the way for everything for our band—and even for the way I look at other [hardcore] people: “These things all fed into what you became.” I don’t know if that’s really the answer to your question, but that’s kind of the way I look at it.

I mean, that actually really resonates with Anti-Matter, specifically. I do think the physical zine got a lot of attention in 1993 because people thought it looked “pro.” But in reality, it was me and my friend at his father’s office in the middle of the night trying to figure out how to use QuarkXPress [laughs]. Apparently we did a good job. But part of it was that we were not getting validation anywhere else, so it was like: Make your own validation. I was trying to make the zine look a certain way aesthetically because I thought that maybe if it looked more quote-unquote “pro,” it would get taken more seriously—and by extension, that maybe the bands I was interviewing would also get taken seriously.

PETE: Totally. And, I mean, this was serious to me. These bands were serious and important to me—and important to all of us. And I wanted the world to take that seriously. I wanted that when my parents saw an Earth Crisis shirt on me, that they’d know this band was important to me and we could talk about it.

Also, I would personally be looking at Anti-Matter or Second Nature or something like that, and I was like, These look like magazines. I would feel weird even calling this a fanzine because they looked like real magazines, you know? To me, that was so cool because it was making our thing real. It was making this thing where kids who were playing on a four-inch stage playing songs where there was no melody to the vocal—this thing that was magical and temporary—very real.

Since this is the last proper interview before end-of-year stuff and then the hiatus, I also wanted to bring back a couple of questions that I think really defined this iteration of Anti-Matter for me, and this one is near and dear to my heart. It started early on when I asked Crystal [Pak] from Initiate this question, but it seems to have resonated with people. I told her about how when I first started going to shows in the eighties, and how when I started meeting kids for the first time, I found myself frequently asking them, “So, what fucked you up to be here?”—and there was always an answer. You and I only met for a minute in the late ‘90s, but had we gone into a real discussion and I’d asked you that, how do you think you would have answered it?

PETE: This is something me and Patrick [Stump] and the band have talked about on a bigger level, but for me, specifically, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. The Breakfast Club was my high school; it was literally the high school I went to. Every one of those movies took place in that town. Also, I am mixed race. My mom’s parents are from Jamaica and my dad’s white, and they were super liberal and we were in a pretty conservative area. So I think I just didn’t really know where I fit in. I kind of didn’t really feel like I fit in anywhere.

At one point I got really into death metal. I had a friend with an older brother who had the Metallica mixtape—it was always the older brother’s mixtape, right?—and in that skate-metal culture, it was like, “What’s the most extreme version of all of it?” So that [mixtape] led to Cannibal Corpse and Sepultura and all that. One day I was in a freshman class, I can’t remember what class it was, and I was wearing a Sepultura shirt and this kid was like, “Yeah, but can you do a hardcore growl?” [laughs]. I was like, “I don’t know what that is!” So we went to a show that was in a garage in Kenworth [Illinois]. I think it was this band Everlast. I just remember people singing into the mic instead of the singer, grabbing the mic, and it just felt like, “What is this?” It felt like this deep thing that I knew nothing about. It was like peering inside of an ant colony or something. There’s like all these levels to it and none of it makes sense to me.

From there I think I realized that in Chicago, in that scene specifically, there were so many different kinds of people that it felt like, OK, maybe you didn’t fit in, but maybe we could all not fit in—in the same place. So I guess it wasn’t a specific trauma, but it was the feeling of not knowing my place and then having a place. And having a place where you can hear discourse and be a part of discourse. To me, there was nothing like nineties hardcore in that there was so much discourse and there were so many ideas. There were so many good ones and so many bad ones and they were all clashing around rooms. But it was a place where you could feel like you fit in and you could talk. It all felt really thoughtful.

I kind of want to go back to the point you made about being biracial, but first I need to know, did you read the essay I wrote for Amy Madden’s book [Negatives]?

PETE: I don’t think I did.

You’re kind of the star of it in some ways [laughs].

PETE: Oh damn, OK!

The book is really well done. I’ll try to quickly summarize it, but essentially, I wrote an essay about the erasure of people of color, women, and queer people in second- and third-wave emo, which is the focus of the book. I try to stress how much we’ve all contributed to not just the second- and third-wave, but also the first wave. And I book-ended the essay with two stories: The first story talks about how I met a magazine editor once, who was cool, but who later posted a blog about meeting me where he said, “I never knew Norm wasn’t caucasian!”—and how that was the first time I really started to understand that making this kind of music can often come with the assumption of whiteness. And I talked about how that made me feel. In the second story, I talk about that time in 2020, when you started trending on Twitter after Fall Out Boy did a [Black Lives Matter] post and it seemed like everyone had just discovered you were biracial and it felt like this huge shock. Again, they were suffering from the assumption of whiteness. I was like, “I feel you, Pete!” [laughs] Have you ever struggled with knowing how you’ve been misperceived?

PETE: This is an interesting question for me. It’s so complex for me. I think it’s a specific thing with being biracial that I just didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere. Like, never white enough, never Black enough, never Jamaican enough, you know?

I think I get what you’re trying to say. Like, my complexity is that my family were immigrants and obsessed with the American Dream. They forbid me to speak Spanish, for example. So there are pieces of my culture that I feel disconnected from because they didn’t allow it. They wanted me to be American. But does that make me “less” Latino? No. I don’t think so.

PETE: Growing up, I think my family was the “weird” family that would go get Ethiopian food and then go to a musical. And I was like, “I just want to go to McDonald’s and do the normal things” [laughs]. But now I appreciate it. I have that appreciation. At the time, I didn’t want to stand out. I just wanted the basic things that the people on either side of my house were doing.

In some ways, one of the things I love—and I know I keep going back to nineties hardcore, and it’s probably in a nostalgic way—but I feel like in Chicago especially, shows had ska bands and punk bands and pop-punk bands and hardcore bands. There were political ones and not-political ones. There were all kinds of different people and cultures. But I do agree that if you were not white, then theoretically you probably weren’t going to find somebody of the exact same archetype as you. But there were other “others.” And that was one of the things I loved about it. At those shows I didn’t really think about it. Maybe I would think about it when you’re filling out a standardized test and they’re like, “What race are you?” And I’m like, “I don’t know! What do you want me to be?” [laughs]

I’ve struggled with that question on forms as well.

PETE: Right?

This is related in the sense that, as I’ve been thinking about winding down this zine for now, I’ve also been thinking a lot about what I call “being perceived.” And one of things that I am feeling a little bit relieved about is that I’ve realized that doing this public-facing thing every week makes me feel kind of exposed at times. I’ve just realized over the last 30 years that I’m not actually very good at receiving attention. I might be simultaneously attention-seeking in some ways and then also cringing at the attention. I’ve never been able to reconcile the two.

PETE: Yeah, totally.

So if I’m being honest, having had friends become famous, I always knew: I didn’t want that. What would you say your initial response was to that high level of being perceived?

PETE: I know it probably doesn’t feel like it, but there was a gradualness to it in the sense that first we would tour and there would literally be no one at any of the shows. No one. And then there would be the local band watching us. And then people were singing the words. And it wasn’t until we’d play shows and every time we played the fire marshal would come and shut the show down that it was like, “Oh. That’s a thing.” But I think that the summer of 2005, when we were on Warped Tour with My Chemical Romance, that was a time when there was a void of boy-bands within pop culture. And it was almost like we filled in that void for that summer, or for a couple of years. That was the time that I remember going from being able to go to catering and it being whatever to stepping off the bus and there’s just people. That was that explosive moment.

On one level, there was this feeling of validation—of believing in the thing that you’re doing so much that you’re dropping out of college, and you’re putting all your chips on this thing. There’s a validation that someone else sees it; it wasn’t just this crazy pipe dream. We worked so hard and so counter-intuitively, and we were told no by so many people, that we felt validated. All my memories are so compressed because we did so much, but it was maybe that next year where it started: You couldn’t leave your hotel. And you would [have to] go in through the kitchen. That level? That was the closest level our band would have to a boy-band or something like that. That level, I was like, “I don’t like that.” I have an appreciation for the love that people have for the art, but to get to the point where it’s like, I don’t leave my hotel room… When you don’t leave your hotel room, there’s a lot of loneliness.

Talking beyond the art—because that’s the most important part of it to me—but being at the level where you can just call a restaurant and get a reservation, that’s a great level. Anything beyond that is excessive. What you gain is not worth what you miss out on.

There was a time in 2009 when I think Fall Out Boy went on hiatus. And I remember you had a famous line from that time where you said something like, “I think the world needs a little less Pete Wentz right now”—a brilliant line, by the way [laughs]. You retreated for some time after that. How did you use that time? Did you do some personal work to address everything that had happened to you in the previous decade?

PETE: I did so much work. I’ll be honest. My whole life just kind of blew up at the same time. I had a divorce, I had a kid. You’ve been in a lot of bands, and I don’t know if you’ve had this experience—maybe you had this experience with the zine—but so much of who you are is built up in the thing that people know you from, so if that thing goes away, it’s like, what am I? What even am I? I put so much time and thought into this that I don’t even really know. Am even a separate entity from the thing?

It was a little heartbreaking for me in the way that the perception of me had become bigger than the band. And I think it hurt the band. Like, I think Patrick’s musicality is really off the charts. And I think it was damaging to have it be reduced to this tabloid culture kind of thing. For me, also, I don’t really know how to explain how much you atrophy in things. Like, I didn’t know how to go through the airport. I followed a backpack through the airport. I literally didn’t know to go check-in and put your bag in and then see your gate. There would just be a backpack in front of me with the security guy and I would literally just follow it through the airport. So I think having a kid and kind of losing that part of my identity forced me to go and be like: Now you’ve got to be an adult. A real adult. There’s no backpack to follow through the airport anymore. You need to raise a child and that’s not going to work with all these atrophied qualities. So that was super important to me.

And then I think being in a band—you know this—it’s so hard to describe to people what it’s like. Because it’s like being with your siblings at Thanksgiving forever. But it’s also like being on a submarine with them at Thanksgiving, right? And you can only go to the other end of the submarine when you fight or something. You push each other’s buttons, but they’re the only other people that have shared this specific life experience with you, so you’ve got to talk about it. Going back and doing it again, we wanted to do it in a healthy way—where we talk to each other and we don’t push each other’s buttons and we do it more adult-ish. The great thing about saying “the world needs a little less of this” is that the world does move on. Time does move on. And to me the second era of Fall Out Boy was way more focused on the songs and the art of it—as it was in the beginning, too. That was always the goal of the band.

Do you think growing up with hardcore idealism complicated the way you experienced that?

PETE: That’s a good question. I loved hardcore so much. In the nineties, it was so formative. But I think around [the time of] the formation of the band, the spirit of it changed to me. This is such a bigger conversation that it will feel weird to widdle it down, but hardcore is like a microcosm of the bigger culture: sometimes it’s rebelling against it and sometimes it’s flowing with it. But when it became less idea-driven [in the early 2000s], I didn’t love it. That’s why we wanted to do the melodic band. It was fun. It wasn’t fun when we would go to shows and every band kind of said a similar thing and it was always about moshing or whatever. That’s in the inception of [Fall Out Boy]: We were like, let’s do something fun that’s not that.

It always fascinated me how Arma Angelus somehow morphed into Fall Out Boy like that.

PETE: On the [Arma Angelus] album, we did this melodic… Cheap Trick cover. And it was like, “Oh, this is kind of fun. If there was somebody that could actually sing it, this would be really fun.”

That version sounds like Negative Approach to me. I don’t know if anyone has ever said that to you.

PETE: No! That’s cool [laughs]. It was just something that was a lark. I just remembered this, actually, but you know how sometimes after band practice where people switch instruments and you’re like, “Let’s play Rancid covers,” or whatever it is? That’s kind of what Fall Out Boy was initially. It was the after-band. But it’s like the thing we talked about earlier: The two biggest influences for us, basically, were that do-it-yourself Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life, and then I would look at bands like the ones that you [and your peers] were in. I was like, these guys play at the Metro. They have choruses. You know what I mean? These are real bands. It made such an impression on us.

I was trying to think of how to define what the Chicago hardcore scene was for me at the time, and it was a little bit like those mix-and-match kids’ books—where you can put a lion head on a giraffe body with rhinoceros legs. There just weren’t enough shows for there to be only a hardcore show, usually. So you would have the Blue Meanies around and then Damnation [A.D.] would play with Lifetime, you know? And what I took away from that is that there doesn’t really need to be genres. The world hadn’t started trending that way yet, but it would start trending that way. And we just had the advantage of doing that while the world trended that way at the same time. To me, it was just so influential to know that all these different types of music could coexist.

Early on you called Fall Out Boy “hardcore kids that are writing pop music.” Do you still feel like hardcore somehow creeps into your approach?

PETE: I totally think it does. I think more so in the way that we discuss things with each other, whether it be the music itself or the ideas around the stuff. We’re mining what we’ve watched our friends do within the hardcore scene when we’re talking about it. To me, with our band, there are certain things we agree on music-wise, and a lot of that stuff is really trapped within those formative years—and that time of hardcore. Like, Patrick… This is so ridiculous, but he is always referencing hardcore-band snare [drums]. He’s like, “We need the Snapcase snare!” Or like, “We need the Chokehold snare on the ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ cover, but recorded better!” And I’m like, no one else knows these references! [laughs]

One of the reasons I think that it’s harder to pin down a documentary from that time is because everyone mixed and matched [their version of hardcore] based on the region they lived in, and also because the internet wasn’t so prevalent. So sometimes you would go to the record store and they would only have the Insight 7-inch. Or it would be like, “You like Frail and I like Honeywell” [laughs]. Everyone’s version and perspective is so specific to them, and that’s what it’s like for our band at least. We talk about all those references.

OK, I wanted to end this with a question that I’ve actually asked a few people, but so far I’ve only ever actually published the answer from one person. The only person who did this question right was Ned [Russin] from Title Fight. But I feel like you’re the kind of guy who is going to do this right.

PETE: OK, we’ll see! [laughs]

I want you to tell me something very banal about yourself that you believe says the most about who you are.

PETE: Oh. This is a good question… [Pauses] OK, I’ll tell you. This is just true. The other day I was speaking to [my partner] Meagan, and I was telling her that the times that I feel the most zen are when I’m driving our kids to school. She was like, “There is no way that’s the case. Because you are sitting in traffic, and then you’re rushing to feed them, and then you wait in line to drop them off, and then you go to the next activity—and they don’t want to go to the next activity—and you’re sitting in traffic in Los Angeles the whole time. It’s literally the least zen.”

But for me, it’s just the most normal thing that I do. I’m not thinking about whether or not the pulley that pulls me up on the stage is going to break, and then I’m going to be stuck 30 feet in the air. I’m not thinking, “This is the time I need to go to sleep because lobby call is at that time and if I don’t get enough sleep, then…” No. I’m just sitting in traffic, listening to Taylor Swift, driving my kids. She just doesn’t believe it, but it’s the most zen I could ever feel. And I think that’s really definitive of who I am as a person.

It makes sense to me because you’re basically saying that’s the time when you are in the most controlled situation where you have no control. You just have to sit there. That’s all you have to do.

PETE: You only have to sit there and get your passenger to the place they need to go. And I think most of my life is spent doing the opposite. I am the passenger and someone else is doing that for me. But in this situation, I’m like, No. I’m the person. I’m driving you. And there’s something I truly love about that.

That’s perfect, thank you.

PETE: I also want to say real quick: Nineties hardcore t-shirts are peaking right now. The fabric is as good as they could ever be [laughs].

I have noticed your t-shirt game on Instagram lately and I should admit that I have had conversations with people where we’re like, “Does he really love Mean Season and Billingsgate?”

PETE: I love Mean Season! That’s what I’m talking about! People are always like, “There’s no way anyone likes that music! You don’t like Brothers Keeper!” But dude. I love Brothers Keeper.

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I.

Back in the first few months of Anti-Matter, I ran a short-lived interview series called Unlikely Sources. If you weren’t there for it, it was a special feature where I invited hardcore kids who wound up in ostensibly “non-hardcore” places to choose and discuss three songs from our community that still have personal meaning to them. Friendly Fires frontman Ed Macfarlane chose to chop it up about Youth of Today, Kiss it Goodbye, and Amebix. Celebrity chef and TV personality Graham Elliot joined me to talk about Christie Front Drive, The Promise Ring, and Texas is the Reason. I did not receive an ounce of ire from speaking with either of them. But in September of 2023, when I brought on Max Bernstein—a New York hardcore kid, much-loved in our local scene, whose current job has taken him around the world as the guitarist for Taylor Swift—one anonymous reader left a comment that has been somewhat stuck in my craw ever since.

“What the fuck is this, honestly?” he asked. “The Eras Tour is an abomination that has highlighted how disconnected musicians and touring are from your average music fan. I was so excited for [Anti-Matter], but this isn’t it.”

I let it go at the time because, obviously, we are all entitled to our opinions. But whether or not I simply disagreed with the premise of his objection isn’t what actually bothered me. It was just how far this reader missed the point. So what the fuck is this, honestly? I thought I should tell you.

For one thing, I didn’t ask Max about his day job. Just like I didn’t ask Ned Russin from Glitterer to go deep inside the retail jobs he uses to make ends meet or how I didn’t ask Andrew Kline from Strife to wax poetic about his career in real estate. There are certainly moments when I will choose to talk about a person’s job in an interview, but most of the time, a job in and of itself is not really the most interesting part of a person’s story to me. In Max’s case, simply presenting the fact that he plays guitar for Taylor Swift felt like enough. And that fact was only salient in this context because I have always been fascinated by the way our lives in hardcore have a tendency to bring us to wildly different places, and Max’s trip is one of the most extreme I’ve ever seen. Our conversation was not about the destination, then, but the journey. (His journey just also happened to include a love for Nausea and Dag Nasty.) So if you’re going to tell me that you read the original print version of Anti-Matter, and that it made you “so excited” for this iteration, then I’d have a hard time understanding how you could have missed the fact that these are the kinds of stories that I have consistently aspired to tell. My version of hardcore has always been in its capacity to be a zero-fucks instigator for adventure, not an impediment to experience. When all is said and done, I’d like to believe that people will remember this work for being about tracing these experiences, wherever they go, and sharing these stories to provide a more human understanding of hardcore culture and each other.

It’s for this reason, I suppose, that I have always been so radically inclusive in my view of hardcore, and it is only because I am writing this now that I realize how this particular example fits into that view: At some point, whenever someone from our community reaches a certain level of notoriety or proximity to fame, we have a tendency to disconnect that person from their ability to feel. We somehow lose empathy for them. We talk about them as if they didn’t grow up with the same hardcore ways of being that we did, as if hardcore’s ways of being are factually incapable of moving our lives in more than one direction. Max only bore the brunt of this tendency in a single stray comment, but it still left me agitated. Because gatekeeping, to me, is as much bullshit when you’re trying to kick people out as it is when you think that you personally wield the power to decide who gets in.

II.

I’ve always suspected that my readers were intuitive, but when I announced Anti-Matter’s upcoming hiatus, I was surprised by how many of you understood that there was also a mental health component to this decision—in spite of the fact that I never actually mentioned one. Out of quite literally hundreds of comments, DMs, and emails that I received from well-wishing readers, I’d estimate that a good 40 percent of them included some reference to the importance of “taking care of myself.” It was heartening because it showed that we are, in fact, capable of empathy for people who are in, what I’d call, at least a semi-public position. Your kindness to me did not go unnoticed.

I have always struggled with a fact of my life that I call “being perceived,” on some days more than others. Interestingly, I’ve noticed more recently that other people have begun using this phrase—Kat Moss from Scowl was the first to use it here, in a conversation with me last year—but my first brush with “being perceived,” as an idea, came from my exposure to the work of 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley. In Berkeley’s view, “being perceived” is, on one hand, proof of existence. “To be is to be perceived,” he famously said. At the same time, Berkeley also suggested that perception itself is inherently flawed. This is because “being perceived” only demonstrates the existence of something; it does not pledge to accurately describe it.

I am not “famous.” But to the extent that I live in public—by playing music, by existing on social media, by publishing Anti-Matter and reminding you that I exist at least twice a week—I open myself up to constant perception, accurate or not, and I have felt the accumulating results of these perceptions for my entire adult life now. Whether or not these perceptions are positive (“he’s a legend” or, God forbid, “he’s a role model”) or negative (“he’s a narcissist” or “he’s a navel-gazing prick”) bear no weight on the overall effect of how it feels. The reality is, sometimes, I get overwhelmed. And I do need to protect myself from that. Almost everyone I know in a similar position that I’ve ever talked to about this understands that feeling. It’s visceral and it affects you and we all respond to it in our own ways. Whether it’s someone in a hardcore band acting out and/or saying something regrettable, whether it’s someone going above and beyond to do something good, or whether it’s someone (as has been the case with me) who just seems to disappear for years on end, what you are seeing is at least in part the result of that weight of perception being pressing down.

There were moments early in my life where I was able to spend time with friends from the hardcore scene who had become legitimately famous for one reason or another, and even with a second-hand experience of their lives, I knew I didn’t want that for myself. They struggle with a kind of unrelenting perception that can truly alter your sense of self in ways that I could never handle. I know that. But there has never been a time when I’ve wanted to tell them they “asked for it” or that “this never would have happened… if.” Life doesn’t work that way. The substance of our lives today is the result of dozens, if not hundreds of small decisions—and there are at least as many possible outcomes. Some of the hardcore kids I grew up with became doctors. Some became construction workers. Others run businesses or crunch numbers. A few of them became world-famous. It would be easy to forget that we all come from the same place, but I’ve made it a point to remember because I don’t believe that empathy is an optional feature of our culture.

III.

Imagine, if you will, this perfectly feasible scenario: As a kid in the ‘90s, you came up in your local straight-edge hardcore scene. You loved this community more than anything, because it gave you an opportunity to be heard and to feel seen. You contributed by going to every show, making fanzines, and eventually, playing in as many bands that would let you play with them—bands with names like Extinction, Racetraitor, and Firstborn (often stylized as “XFIRSTBORNX” because, again, it’s the ‘90s). You played bass, you played guitar, you sang. You did what needed to be done.

As the decade came to an end, you decided to start a new band for fun. Something less apocalyptic and more melodic. In the early 2000s, there was nothing more fun than pop-punk, so you found a bunch of like-minded hardcore kids and went in that direction. And it was fun. You named your band after a Simpsons character and wrote songs with titles like “Sending Postcards from a Plane Crash (Wish You Were Here).” You still played all your local venues—basements and bowling alleys—and it was all business as usual, until one day, it wasn’t. Month after month, the band gets bigger, until the fire marshals start shutting down more shows than they don’t. The pace continues until you find yourself on the radio, on TV, and, at its peak, in the tabloids. You are still only in your twenties when your life becomes unrecognizable. There’s a lot more to this story, but this all happened to Pete Wentz and Fall Out Boy.

“On one level, we worked so hard and so counter-intuitively, and we were told no by so many people, that we felt validated,” Pete tells me about the experience, in a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “All my memories are so compressed because we did so much, but it was maybe that next year where it started: You couldn’t leave your hotel. You would [have to] go in through the kitchen. That level? That was the closest level our band would have to a boy-band or something like that. That level, I was like, I don’t like that. I have an appreciation for the love that people have for the art. But to get to the point where it’s like, I don’t leave my hotel room… When you don’t leave your hotel room, there’s a lot of loneliness.”

While so many of us can relate to the first half of Pete’s story—some of us, perhaps, even frighteningly so—the second half is an experience that the majority of us will never have. Bringing those two pieces of his life together into one cohesive narrative is one of the reasons why I felt compelled to speak with Pete. I wanted to understand how growing up as a hardcore kid prepares you—or leaves you unprepared—for being perceived at such a high level. 

“Being at the level where you can just call a restaurant and get a reservation, that’s a great level,” he laughs, but then adds, “Anything beyond that is excessive. What you gain is not worth what you miss out on.”

IV.

In full transparency, I am sad about the impending (and quite possibly indefinite) hiatus of Anti-Matter, but I am also already feeling a sense of relief. As many of you suspected, the kind of constant exposure and vulnerability that this project demands of me isn’t always the best thing for my mental health. Working with these demands for as long as I did, however, did help me understand how much I need to reclaim a certain amount of time for myself—for composing songs you’ll never hear, writing journals you’ll never read, and building relationships you’ll never know about. It’s been so long since I did something just to do it, and that’s what I’m looking forward to most of all.

Back in 2009, when Fall Out Boy went on a hiatus, Pete famously said, “I think the world needs a little less Pete Wentz.” There’s a certain amount of self-awareness in that statement that I always appreciated, and I think that, especially in the scope of everything that had happened to him in that first decade, simply disappearing seemed like an incredibly hardcore thing to do. I imagine some people thought he was crazy for pulling the brakes on one of the most popular bands of the 2000s—as there have been people who have challenged my decision to pull the brakes on this. But endings are often about reconnecting with your own sense of self and rediscovering who you are outside of the strange realities we are often thrust into. They’re about remembering we’re only human. Whether you’re a Fall Out Boy or a fanzine editor, sometimes we all need the same things—and we’re all better off when we see ourselves in each other. That’s what the fuck this is.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy.

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We’re on the verge of a hiatus here, but I did want to slide in with another edition of AM Radio—largely because November was a pretty great month for new releases and it felt like a great way to go into my upcoming Anti-Matter Year-End special. Bittersweet, no doubt. But 2024 has still been an incredible year to be publishing.

There are 20 new songs in all with this month’s update: From Anti-Matter alum like Koyo, Snapcase, Touché Amore, Quicksand, and Hot Water Music, to scene vets like Fucked Up (feat. High Vis) and No Escape, to incredible upstarts like Whispers, Squint, Gridiron, and a top-tier track from Spark of Life. And that’s only the half of it.

My usual disclaimer is still true, even if this is the last playlist update for the foreseeable future: AM Radio is not a running list of every new release, but a selection of personally handpicked music that reflects only those songs that personally excite me—with no outside influence or interference ever.

As for what’s next, I am currently working on at least two more weeks of publishing before the holidays—to wind down the year, and this project, properly. What exactly this “hiatus” means is still to be determined, but whatever it is, you’ll always be in the know as long as you’re still subscribed.

In the meantime, have an incredible Thanksgiving holiday (at least here in the U.S.), and please do know that I am and will continue to be thankful for you all.

FOLLOW & LISTEN TO AM RADIO: Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music

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When The Wonder Years released their debut album in 2007, there was really no way anyone could have predicted everything that’s happened since. The record was called Get Stoked on It!, for one thing. There were songs called "Bout to Get Fruit Punched, Homie" on it, for another. The band’s singer, Dan Campbell, has since famously called it an “unmitigated disaster,” and has conceded that they probably should have changed their name at some point. But personally, I’m glad they didn’t. The Wonder Years are a testament to the way change necessitates growth, and how growth is a hardcore value. The band they became? We need them.

As I begin to think about what I am leaving behind with this iteration of Anti-Matter, our conversation seemed to have arrived at exactly the right time. Dan is quite possibly one of the most thoughtful and considered people I’ve ever interviewed, and this conversation barely starts before he begins thinking about the existential value of his band and the ways in which living a life like ours is truly “worth it.” It’s an echo of his work as a lyricist: On The Wonder Years’ newest album, The Hum Goes On Forever, Dan is frequently imagining alternate histories and disparate futures for himself. Becoming a parent will do that to you. “I don’t know how you grew up, but for me, it’s poor-kid mentality,” he tells me. “It’s like I gotta have a backup plan to my backup plan to my backup plan… The big thing for me, though, is just making sure that my family feels OK and secure. Whatever is best for them is best for me. Whatever makes my kids’ lives the happiest and the least stressful they can be is what I want to be doing. And right now, that’s playing in a band.”

Back in 2018, when Sister Cities came out, you kind of put out the impression that this could be the last record—or at the very least, that you wanted to pull the reins on the band quite a bit. To say things like that out loud, it feels like these ideas must have been very present in your consciousness. So I wanted to start there. What was happening for you at that point?

DAN: I think it was twofold. First, there’s a sense that I feel where every record we make could be our last record—because I am completely competitive and self-competitive. So if I don’t feel like the thing we’re making is going to “beat” the last one in some way. Mostly, it has to be valuable.

But also, I think a lot about our band and the space that we take up. Like, I truly do not believe in music to be a zero-sum game. I think there’s room for a lot of people to succeed in a lot of different lanes. At the same time, I understand that resources are finite, right? So even resources like clubs: If we want to play a city on a certain night, that means that club is occupied and we’re the ones playing it—and that takes up space that other people could have. When I think in terms of making a record, if you’re working with a record label—especially indie labels—they only have so much money to put out records that year. And if they’re dedicating a certain amount of resources to your band, those are resources they can’t use for other bands. Even the actual physical properties of a vinyl record and the time it takes at the plant. It’s taking up space. And I want to be wary of using our space well. There are a lot of exciting young new bands. So if I feel like we’re not making something that has a real tangible value, then we should get out of the way and let the other new bands make it. I try to think about it in a pragmatic way and make sure I’m not taking more space than I’ve earned.

This is truly interesting to me and it’s something I think about a lot: How do you measure these things? What are the metrics? I think that’s something that every artist does. It’s something I have to do with Anti-Matter, even. Like, do I think I am doing something valuable? Yes, no doubt. But how do I reconcile the work with the numbers? It’s really fucking hard to say. What do you pay attention to?

DAN: How loud the crowd is when we play the new song [laughs]. As simple as that. Do they still want to come see the show? And when we play the new songs, do people sing them as loud as the old songs? Do I see them viscerally reacting to them?

As far as the internet or streaming goes, it’s not about the play count for me. I mean, that shit is driven by so many factors. I’m more worried about when our fans post about it. Are they saying, “It’s cool to have new Wonder Years music,” or are they saying, “This song shifted my perspective.” When we put out The Hum Goes On Forever, the amount of comments that I saw that were like, you know, “I was also dealing with postpartum anxiety or postpartum depression and this was really useful for me to hear”—that matters so much more to me. That means we did something that was actually tangibly useful in someone’s life. I’ll call that a success.

But to jump back, I just wanted to finish up on your other question because I think I’m kind of spinning in different directions. The other thing with Sister Cities is that, at that time frame, I think we felt—as a band—really lonely. All of the bands that we came up with and that we were playing with or that we started in basements with, all of them had broken up. And so suddenly, when we were getting ready to go on tour, we’d be like, “Who do we tour with? I don’t know any of these people.” And we’d bring them, and a lot of these bands were great—they were really great people and I like them—but it was just different. They’re not the close friends that you build relationships with when all four bands ended up staying at someone’s one-bedroom apartment and slept like sardines together. All that shit was gone. So we started to feel like an island. We started to feel really lonely out there. And I think that was kind of getting to me mentally.

I mean, that’s a really universal scenario. That’s definitely how I felt in the early 2000s on tour with New End Original. All the bands that Texas [is the Reason] came up with were gone. I was friends with bands like Saves the Day or the other bands that were coming up at the time, but it just felt like we were never exactly in the same place mentally.

DAN: And I just missed Polar Bear Club. I missed Fireworks. I missed Hostage Calm. It was just a little different. In recent years, it feels like we have found almost a different role where I’m friends with all the bands we bring on tour now—like Anxious and Sweet Pill and Hot Mulligan. Everybody we’ve brought out in the past couple of years have been wonderful people. But I think we almost fall into an uncle role, or a big brother role to a lot of them. I’m starting to really relish that, and the opportunities to hopefully pass some stuff along and just be a support system or a soundboard for a lot of those bands.

That’s a very ideal example of community to me. What we need is to have these different varying levels of experience and ages interacting with each other and creating this wider body of knowledge where we learn from each other—and I’m sure you’ve learned things from the younger bands, too.

DAN: Yeah, for sure.

Actually, hang on. This is making me think of an Instagram Reel I saw last night that blew my mind. It was one of those “advice to younger artists” reels, and this guy was talking about how he believed every new piece of music that you put out should arrive with at least 30 different pieces of content. I mean, that’s fucking wild. You will put more work into doing that than you probably did into the song. You guys came up at a time before “content” dominated the conversation, but I have to imagine you’re not immune from that conversation either.

DAN: It just burns things up really quickly. This is a bad metaphor, but it’s one that I was just thinking about this weekend with my kid’s clothing: Like, sometimes you get a gift and it’s made out of some type of material, and I can’t possibly figure out what it is, but it’s not cotton! [laughs] And you know it’s a tinderbox. That thing would burn up so fucking fast. I think making so much content around songs just makes the song a burn moment—where it’s like, you hear it so many times so quickly that you just burn out on it.

At the same time, I love people being creative. I love ingenuity. I love the fact that young artists have said, “This is the world we’re in and we just have to succeed within it.” It’s not like you get to set the parameters. So there’s no part of me that would shame any of these bands for doing what they need to do to have their art heard. It’s just a different time. For us, when we started we’d literally go to the mall before a show with a bunch of CD players and headphones and we would walk up to every kid that looked like a punk and be like, “Hey, listen to this. We’re playing the VFW down the street tonight and we’d love to have you come out.” That’s how we had to do it because there wasn't another option. So this is what they have to do now. If you go to a mall with a CD player now all you’re going to find are a couple of elderly people taking a walk [laughs]. You just have to meet people where they are.

Unfortunately, we’re not good at the internet. Like, we actually paid for a video to get made from our New Years Eve show last year and just fucking forgot to post it [laughs]. And then we did it again. We paid Michael Herrick to do a really beautiful four-camera live recording of “You’re the Reason I Don’t Want the World to End” and we forgot to post it for eighteen months. We pay for photos all the time and never put them up on the internet because I just don’t think about it. I’m never thinking about Instagram. That’s not what I’m thinking about during my day. We are just not focused on that.

That’s sort of the point. Earlier you were talking about resources, and how these resources are finite. But human beings also have finite resources, right? If I want to put my resources into learning my instrument, becoming a good player, finding my unique voice, writing a great song—how can I do that when I have to square away a certain amount of resources to also learn how to be a good digital marketer? You only have so much.

DAN: And especially now. I’m 38. I have two kids. It was just Halloween week. I was locked in on them all week. We had a field trip, we went trick or treating. When I was younger, before I had kids, I could have definitely spent some more time “digitally marketing” [laughs]. But at this stage of my life, you have to split things differently. You have to split your time and your energy differently. But, you know, I do want to be better at it. I don’t want to be a band that’s bad on the internet because I think we write really good songs and I want people to hear them. And when we write shit that could be really useful, I want people to hear it.

That thing about doing “valuable” or “useful” things is a theme with a lot of ex-teachers, so before I say anything else I should probably welcome you into the club of Anti-Matter Teachers and Former Educators…

DAN: [Laughs] Thank you, thank you.

There are truly so many of us. You and I actually have the same degree [a B.A. in English and Secondary Education]. One of your first records had a lyric like, “Lately I’ve been thinking about being a teacher or a doctor,” so this has really been in your head since the beginning.

DAN: At that time, when I wrote that lyric, I was just about to start going to Temple [University] full-time, and I picked Secondary Ed as a major.

A lot of that lyric seems to be asking, “What am I ‘seriously’ going to do?” The idea that you wanted to do something important is baked into that.

DAN: Yeah, I mean, the lyric is right there. It says, “I just want to be somebody that changes something.” I just wanted to do something with my life that actually helps people. And also I knew that I really did not mind standing up in front of a group of people and talking. It’s actually when I feel the most confident, usually. So I felt pretty suited for teaching. I thought I could do a good job there.

What’s funny is that I don’t consider myself to be extroverted by any stretch. I don’t consider it a natural impulse of mine to want to walk out in front of people—whether it be as part of a band or as a teacher. And yet for some reason, the underlying reasons that make me want to do those things compel me to put myself in positions that are uncomfortable to me, like standing in front of people or talking in front of people. You don't seem to have that problem.

DAN: I’m better like that. If you put me at a party with a bunch of people, I can entertain a group of them for a while, but I have a lot of trouble being put into different combinations. Eventually I will burn out—and pretty quickly—and end up hiding in the corner or something. If I’m in front of the group, though, it’s a totally different mindset for me. And I have no idea why. Maybe it’s just that I’ve always felt like if I’m in control of a situation, if I’m the one with the microphone, if I’m the one at the lectern or whatever it is, I just feel extremely competent.

I had a therapist that I didn’t have very long because she didn’t seem to understand this. I was going to her because I am really uncomfortable with being consistently in the spotlight. And I didn’t mean on stage, I meant in life. I felt like everything that I do is super analyzed and every interaction that I had was, like, who knows who is a fan and who is not a fan or who loves the band and who hates the band. It just felt like everywhere I was in the world, I felt so exposed and uncomfortable. So I was trying to talk to her about that. And every time I would come back in, she’d say, “So how is your stage fright?” And I was like, “I don’t fucking have that!” [laughs] And then, “Have you tried any power poses?” And I’m like, “I never feel better than when I am in front of a room with the microphone. It’s moving through the world otherwise that’s getting me.”

That really resonates with me. There have been so many moments in the internet era where I’ve just wanted to shut everything down and be like, why can’t I just exist with no one looking at me?

DAN: I mean, yeah! None of my friends have to deal with this [laughs]. And I really truly do not mind meeting fans in real life and talking to people when they come up to me—I never mind that. But the constant thought that someone is watching is just so strange that you can never really feel at ease.

In some ways, I think that my move into education was a little based on that feeling. The years that I was going to school or teaching were the years I felt the most unseen. And I still crave that sometimes. Didn’t you just get an MBA?

DAN: I did. I got an MBA because of the pandemic, mostly. I just didn’t know when they were going to ever let us back in venues. My wife was pregnant with our younger son, Jack, and I was like, “Oh my God. I don’t know how I’m going to pay the mortgage. These kids are going to have this kind of anxious life that I don’t want them to have. That’s not what I want to give them. I want them to feel secure, that their house would always be their house, and that we’d never lose it.” I just started spiraling. So I started calling a lot of people in my life, people who have fucking normal jobs, and asking: “What do you think I’m good at? I wear so many hats for the band, but is there anything that you think that I particularly shine in?” And it’s funny because we talked about being bad at the internet, but everyone was like, “Well, I think that your marketing ideas are phenomenal. Sometimes you don’t think enough to execute them, but the ideas are phenomenal” [laughs]. So I said to one friend, “If I go to a company and say, ‘I would like to work in your marketing department, here is my resume,’ and it says, ‘Singer of Punk Rock Band: 15 years,” are they going to hire me?” And she said, “Well, if they talk to you, I think so. But if you want to get through the filters, you could just go get a master’s [degree].” So I just thought, OK. Fuck it. Let’s go. So I got a master’s degree—partially from my house during the pandemic, and partially from the back lounge of the tour bus when we were back.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always struggled with the idea of marrying myself to playing music completely because it just seemed like a tenuous position to be in. I’ve always asked myself: What else can I do?

DAN: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know how you grew up, but for me, it’s poor-kid mentality. It’s like I gotta have a backup plan to my backup plan to my backup plan. I gotta be ready for anything. This might be the imposter syndrome that every artist deals with, but I’ve always felt like tomorrow I’m going to wake up and everyone that likes my band is going to say, “Actually, this shit sucks and I’m only into free jazz now” [laughs]. I’ve expected that since the day we first had any success.

The big thing for me, though, is just making sure that my family feels OK and secure. Whatever is best for them is best for me. Whatever makes my kids’ lives the happiest and the least stressful they can be is what I want to be doing. And right now, that’s playing in a band. You know, I get to offer them a lot of opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have. Like, they were playing tag in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame after closing a couple of days ago. They live these cool, charmed little lives. But if, at some point, it’s not right for them or it’s detrimental to them, I want to have the ability to pivot. Because I’ve gotten to do it. It’s the coolest job in the fucking world and I’ve had it for decades now. So I can go do the most boring, tedious shit on Earth knowing that I am giving them the life that I want them to have.

I wanted to talk about melancholy, which to me has always been a defining characteristic of The Wonder Years. In the beginning, I felt like you expressed a sadness that was cloaked in optimism, though. It was almost like you didn’t want to be “a bum-out.”

DAN: Well, it’s almost like I didn’t want to do that to myself. It’s a mixture of that line from High Fidelity—what came first, the music or the misery?—and also posi-hardcore. It’s this confluence of asking, “Is the reason I’m so sad all the time because all I’m listening to is so defeated?” It felt like everything I was listening to was sad and hopeless. And I felt sad and hopeless. So I thought, what if I try to make something that is sad and hopeful? I was basically stuck in this idea that I was perpetuating my own sadness, and that the way out was effort. The way out was trying. So I wanted to write a record, The Upsides, about that idea.

Which is sort of interesting when you juxtapose that with The Hum Goes On Forever, where there’s almost this sense of resignation to it. There’s this idea that we’re all just floating alongside sadness and it’s not so much about “making it to the other side” anymore.

DAN: Yeah, I think it’s about recognizing that it’s always there and it will be quieter and it will be louder at different points in my life, depending on what’s happening. But the throughline is that quitting isn’t an option. With Hum, I think I got to a point in the postpartum months where it was like, OK. The things I’ve been doing before aren’t working. The PMA or whatever else isn’t working. So let’s try therapy. Let’s try an SSRI. Let’s be better for your son. Let’s get your shit together here. It almost runs parallel, which is to say that there will always be an undercurrent of sadness. I think that’s even recognized on The Upsides, maybe even implicitly. But with work, we can see brightness as well.

I don’t know what you know about me, but I’ve had a lifelong struggle with depression. It’s something I’ve been living with for so long that I can’t actually pinpoint the beginning. I’m open about that, but I find that people are still tempted to talk to me with this language that I am “overcoming depression,” and I’m always so careful to say that I think “overcoming depression” is a weird, mythy narrative that I don’t want to perpetuate. Like, right now I’m doing fine. But I don’t believe I’ve made it to some mythical “other side.”

DAN: After The Upsides, people were talking to me after shows and they’d ask, “How did you cure your depression?” And I would be like, “I am deeply depressed right now. Right now. Things are bad for me at this exact moment” [laughs]. That’s where that line in “Local Man [Ruins Everything]” comes from: “I’m not a self-help book / I’m just a fucked-up kid.” It’s to say I don’t have the answers. All I can tell you is that you need to try. I can give you some techniques I’ve used, I could tell you that I am not a professional and you could maybe seek some therapy, but I don’t have this magic bullet for it. It’s just going to be about effort and consistency and accepting that there will be low days.

One of the things on Hum that you’re really good at expressing is this fear, both in a general sense and also with a lot of the fears that come with parenthood. It’s almost this ambient anxiety that you’re going to miss things and you won’t always be able to be there for your kids. Did writing about that help you through it or does that get in the way?

DAN: I think it’s both. It’s always going to do both. I think there are times where you are so paralyzed by the depression and the fear that you’re incapable of creating. And then there are times when you’re having days where, through creating, you are alleviating it and processing it and understanding things better. I think that’s true of any record you make or whatever subject you’re writing about.

When I say, “I don’t want to die” on that record, I think that’s almost entirely about suicidal ideation. Because it wasn’t just about postpartum depression, it was about pandemic depression and lockdown depression and all of these anxieties from looking at the world as a whole. It was the first time in my life where I was like, “What if I just fucking drove my care into a river”—and it wasn’t just a fleeting thought. It was a real one. There are times with postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety or any of those things where you think things like, I’m so fucked up that my child’s life will be better if I was never in it. The process of making this record helped in my understanding of that being an intrusive thought, that it’s not rooted in reality. And also—this is kind of my competitive nature coming in—that’s quitter talk. What’s real is going out there and doing the work to be the parent that they need you to be. It’s not just saying, “I can’t do it,” and stopping. So a lot of that record was me realizing that this is going to take a lot of work. Just like everything else in life, if you’re not good at something, that doesn’t mean you stop doing it. That means you practice. Writing the songs helped me zero in on that idea.

With Aaron West [and the Roaring Twenties] you write from a fictional voice, and often about things you haven’t personally experienced—like alcoholism or abuse. I’m wondering what kind of ethics you try to keep about that kind of storytelling.

DAN: I think that if everyone only wrote their lived experience, we wouldn’t have most of the greatest art on Earth. What’s important is that you’re honoring the experiences, and the way I try to do that with Aaron West is by interviewing friends that have had them and trying to really understand. You know, not just writing about something because “it’s part of the story.”

Like, there’s a song on the newest Aaron West record about Aaron going to rehab. I’ve been straight-edge my whole life. So I called a friend of mine, Bobby—I put his name into the song as a wink to him—and I spent a couple of hours with him trying to understand not only the machinations of a day [in rehab], but I wanted to understand how he felt in all those phases of those days and how he felt overall. How did the change happen throughout his time there? What made you go in the first place? What was the decision like? Did you almost back out? How did you get your courage up? And how did your understanding of your own disease progress through your time there? And when I’m done with it and I feel like I have a song, I want to go back to that persona and say, “Do you feel this accurately captures what’s happening here? Do you think I did it justice? Do you think I honored your experience?” If it’s a no, then it’s more work. And if it’s a yes, then I feel confident that I did the right thing and I can put it out.

OK, I wanted to end things with this. The last time we saw each other was at the When We Were Young festival, which is where I tore a calf muscle on stage, on the first day, and essentially couldn’t walk for two weeks after that. So I’ve been off my feet since then, and I’ve had some time to feel this kind of push/pull between being grateful that I’ve been able to do it for this long at this level, while also acknowledging that the injuries are coming more frequently with age.

DAN: For sure. I very much feel that.

And that gives me anxiety about the future. So I wanted to talk about where you’re at. How are you holding up as an aging band person?

DAN: It hurts a lot more, for sure. We’ve always played in a way that hurt. I think it was kind of that way from the beginning. And my body is… Well, I played that entire [last] tour with a hernia-support band on. I have to get this umbilical hernia fixed right after some shows I had this month. I’ve had it for a long time and I got it from singing really hard and it just is what it is.

I really didn’t know you could do that from singing.

DAN: That’s what the doctor thinks because it’s right at my belly-button, right at the place where I put all the pressure when I’m singing to kind of support the notes. I think the thing I realized is… Man, how do I say this gently? I look at a lot of older-generation bands and I think they’ve been doing the same thing the same way with somewhat diminishing returns on how they’re able to perform. And I know there is an inevitability there, but I think what I realized is that, just like everything else, working harder can help prevent that.

I used to just go on tour and fucking sing, man. That’s my job as the singer. I just show up and sing. That shit doesn’t work anymore. Now before a tour I get on the Peloton. I’ve long since canceled the subscription, but you don’t need the subscription to ride the bike. I set the resistance to 80 and ride at a 20-mile-an-hour pace and I sing the set—while out of breath. I’m building those muscles. I’m conditioning myself to do the thing when I’m on tour. It’s really nice to see the comments from people who have been coming to see us for ten years, going, “Somehow they’re even better now.” That’s what I want. I really take seriously the covenant of: You paid for your ticket and I’m going to give you everything I fucking have tonight. It almost comes full circle to what we were talking about at the beginning of this whole thing: If I can’t put on the show that I think you deserve, then I am taking up space that I do not deserve to take up and I better get out of the fucking way.

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I.

The last month has been weighing heavy on my mind for a number of converging reasons that have all but seemed to lead to one desperately unwanted conclusion. So for the sake of just taking the Band-Aid off, I should probably just say it now and say it out loud: At the end of this year, Anti-Matter will be going on an indefinite hiatus.

I want to be as transparent as I can be about this, because on some level, I’ve always viewed this as a community experiment—one where the question has always been: Can a community-based readership for this kind of thing grow into a position of objective sustainability? When I first conceived the idea of bringing Anti-Matter back into the world, I set out to resolve that question for myself by using metrics both subjective and objective. I want to walk you through how I thought about this because I think it’s important for the future of every like-minded community project to understand where other initiatives succeeded wildly and where some of them fell just short of the sustainability level, too.

The objective metrics for this iteration of Anti-Matter—what we’ll call “the numbers”—were always going to be about three things to me. The first number, of course, was going to be the sheer number of subscribers. In other words, how many people want to receive this work in the first place? The good news: Over 8,000 at last count, which might not seem like an egregiously huge number, but it becomes more significant when you consider that this means over 8,000 people have invited me into their inboxes twice a week. (Over 13,000 people follow Anti-Matter on Instagram, which shows, to me, that not everyone wants email. This is something I certainly expected.) Being allowed into your inbox is something I never took for granted, something I very much tried to honor and respect. It’s an intimate invitation, and up until this point, it was an unknown for me. No one else in the hardcore scene had ever really attempted to do something of this scale via email. In my mind, then, this was already a success.

The second number adds to this assessment: If you are an email publication of any kind, your open rate is another crucial factor. An open rate, quite simply, is the percentage of email recipients who open an email. There are also direct views, which measure the amount of people who read Anti-Matter from the website. Between the two, Anti-Matter had a clear average of almost 7,000 readers with every email. If you know anything about newsletters or email marketing, you’d be hard-pressed to call an 85% readership anything but a massive win. These first two numbers are really what kept me going.

The third number, however, is the one that nagged me—and to be frank, it’s something I still have trouble reconciling with. When I first conceived this project eighteen months ago, it was always my suspicion that a hardcore audience should outperform the average Substack paid-to-free subscriber ratio. All of the platform documentation set out a basic expectation: The overwhelming majority of Substack newsletters, I discovered, net a ten percent paid-to-free subscriber ratio, regardless of the amount of total subscribers. Maybe it was “support the scene” idealism on my part—or maybe it was hubris—but I believed that the work I would be doing would be unique enough, and hopefully valuable enough, to run closer to the fifteen-to-twenty percent mark. I didn’t think that was so ambitious, and truthfully, I still don’t.

The ratio of paid-to-free subscribers did, at first, outperform the Substack average. But as the profile of Anti-Matter grew, so too did the number of overall subscribers—and sooner than later, the pace of paid subscribers began to hit the Substack average, where it stayed. In and of itself, this number can certainly be viewed as “successful” by many: I managed to earn a net income that certainly allowed me to dedicate time to this work while also playing in Thursday, and despite essentially having two full-time jobs, I enjoyed that work. But I also knew that the “sustainability” of this ratio only worked as long as I had two jobs—and sadly, having two jobs is not actually sustainable for me longterm. I cannot stress enough how much psychological and administrative work goes into Anti-Matter, and even when people told me I needed to work less on it (and many people did!), I was just too committed to maintaining a level of quality that required the attention I gave it. Perhaps that’s on me.

The thing is, it wasn’t actually the revenue that nagged me. While I certainly believe in the economic value of work—and I’ve said as much on multiple occasions—it was the ratio itself, combined with the average number of active readers, that made me question continuing the most. If you applied that ratio to almost any other project, it wouldn’t make sense. For example, imagine hosting a donation-only basement show where only one out of every ten kids took the Chock Full O’Nuts can and pitched in. For lack of a better word, that would just feel weird. As someone who grew up without a lot of money, I’ve always accounted for financial hardship, and I chose the reader-supported model because I believed that we could all help support the project and each other in an equitable way. When I conceived this iteration of Anti-Matter, I believed that I could achieve this goal in the first eighteen months. When I made the decision two weeks ago that Anti-Matter would have to go on hiatus, eighteen months later, I had to admit that things weren’t going in the direction I’d hoped. I just couldn’t find a likely scenario where the scales might suddenly tip the other way, where the coffee can would come back around the room with different results. It started to feel weird.

II.

Pieces of my life have always spilled into the interviews I do. The subject matter is often a reflection of my own preoccupations at that moment, which I then project onto my conversation partner, trying to expand my own understanding of the things that are on my mind. But when I sat down with Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t have predicted how quickly we would begin talking about how we attempt to consider what makes doing something valuable—and what makes something valuable in the first place.

“I think a lot about our band and the space that we take up,” Dan told me, literally in the first sixty seconds of our conversation, which will be published in full on Thursday. “I truly do not believe in music to be a zero-sum game. I think there’s room for a lot of people to succeed in a lot of different lanes. At the same time, I understand that resources are finite, right? Even resources like clubs: If we want to play a city on a certain night, that means that club is occupied and we’re the ones playing it—and that takes up space that other people could have. When I think in terms of making a record, if you’re working with a record label—especially indie labels—they only have so much money to put out records that year. And if they’re dedicating a certain amount of resources to your band, those are resources they can’t use for other bands. Even the actual physical properties of a vinyl record and the time it takes at the plant. It’s taking up space. And I want to be wary of using our space well. There are a lot of exciting young new bands. So if I feel like we’re not making something that has a real tangible value, then we should get out of the way and let the other new bands make it.”

But how exactly do you measure it? I replied, almost as if I were “asking for a friend.”

“How loud the crowd is when we play the new song,” he laughed. “As simple as that. Do they still want to come see the show? And when we play the new songs, do people sing them as loud as the old songs? Do I see them viscerally reacting to them?”

For as much as we’d like to have wholly creative reasons for doing anything, there are always going to be subjective personal considerations that underlie the motive. Dan and I, for one thing, are both former educators. That he measures his own value in “taking up space” by units of enthusiasm, participation, and overall usefulness is not surprising, then; as a college lecturer, I often gauged my own performance by these very same things. Becoming a teacher is never going to be a decision that’s motivated by money—there is none, of course!—so the value of our work must be an intangible mix of, dare I say, vibes. When I talk about “the numbers,” I only care about them insomuch as they give me insight into the vibes. Do they point towards enthusiasm? Are they indicative of momentum? Does the lopsided ratio mean that thousands of readers love what I do, but only if it’s free?

Unfortunately, there is no perfect way to answer any of these questions. There is only experience and instinct and the trust you have in yourself to make the call.

III.

Before I say anything else: To everyone who became a paid subscriber, in any capacity, I cannot thank you enough. It was your generosity and commitment to this idea that allowed me to create a body of work that I am inestimably proud to have put forth into the world. It was your enthusiasm and participation and visceral reaction that made me feel like something like this was even possible. I am greatly indebted to you. You took a chance on me, and I can only hope you feel I delivered.

Some of you may have noticed that I quietly disabled paid subscriptions last week, before the Knocked Loose interview went live. If you have a paid or recurring subscription, you shouldn’t be charged again. The question remains, then: What happens next?

First of all, please don’t unsubscribe! In the immediate future, I have a couple of “issues” planned for December that are works in progress, but will hopefully round the year out on a strong note. I will also use this list (sparingly, I promise!) to announce any new developments on Anti-Matter’s future.

Indeed, as far as a more distant future goes, I am calling it a “hiatus” in the same way that it was a hiatus when Anti-Matter fanzine became a compilation record. And then again when that compilation record became an Anti-Matter column in Punk Planet. And then again when that column morphed into an anthology book. And then again when that book turned into this. Anti-Matter has always been an idea and a way of thinking about hardcore for me, and I will continue to find new forms for it. If anything, keeping this iteration as an eighteen-month capsule collection inspires new ideas in and of itself. Maybe this all belongs in print. Maybe there’s a way to merge thirty years into a bookended capsule of its own. I am considering all of it.

But in the end, how I measure sustainability for this project is ultimately a personal decision. It’s not anyone’s “fault” and there isn’t a truly objective way to measure it in totality. We accomplished something together, you and I, dear reader, and now we are following its inevitable transformation. As a wise young punk poet once said, “Drink deep. It’s just a taste. And it might not come this way again.”

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years.

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There’s a part in our conversation where Bryan Garris begins to speak in the hypothetical about the rumor that Knocked Loose were about to get a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance, and the way he talks about this is telling. “I do not expect a Grammy nomination at all,” he insists, and yet even as he was saying it, there was still a sense of knowing between us that we both felt it was coming—and that nomination did, in fact, come down just last week. But the thing I want you to know about Bryan is that this was not an example of false modesty. You know that when you see it. This was an authentic lack of entitlement on his part. There is a massive difference.

Where most other hardcore bands who have crossed over in some way have polished their sound or softened their edges, Knocked Loose have only gotten more extreme. Unhinged, even. This year’s You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To literally begins with full-on blast beats and barely relents over its 28 minutes; there is hardly a melodic element in earshot, much less a commercial radio hit. In terms of mainstream conventions, a band that sounds like Knocked Loose simply shouldn’t be this big.

The thing that’s connecting with people, then, is more than just music. It’s in the way that Bryan and Knocked Loose have gone to great lengths to maintain their integrity—and their integrity is palpable. It’s the way they know who they are, and instead of chasing trends, have only ever approached each successive record by asking, What does the best version of Knocked Loose sound like now? They also know where they come from, and Bryan’s ongoing relationship with hardcore is clearly a way of being at this point. That, too, is more than music to him. “I just know that we liked everything and we went to hardcore shows, so it was this smorgasbord of personal taste mixed with the ethics and approach that we learned from going to DIY hardcore shows,” he tells me. “We just tried to take that with us wherever we went.”

My first real exposure to Louisville hardcore was in 1992, when I went out on my first tour ever. The tour was very DIY and—like most tours from that time—it was probably booked as poorly as a tour could be booked. So basically, we had four or five days where we were just stranded with no place to go. The guys in Endpoint invited us to stay with them, and that was my first experience with the city. It was my first experience with Bardstown Road and Ear X-Tacy. It was the first time I’d ever heard Slint, it was the first time I’d ever really heard about a lot of history of Louisville punk—Malignant Growth, Kinghorse, even Squirrel Bait. Everyone I met had this real sense of pride in their city. I was wondering how aware you were of all of that history by the time you discovered hardcore.

BRYAN: It’s funny that you were there the first time in 1992, because I was born in ‘93 [laughs]. So I definitely missed that wave, but I do take pride in Louisville; I think that’s a great way to say it. And I’ve definitely done my research, so I’m very familiar with the Louisville scene in the early nineties and even going into the early 2000s. I probably started coming around in 2007, but going to shows back then, the lines between what was an actual hardcore show and what was a metal show were kind of blurred. There were a lot of mixed bills—especially in a place like Louisville that’s on the smaller side of things. Like, everybody goes to every show, you know what I mean? It’s a very all-hands-on-deck kind of city. But through that, I found actual DIY shows happening. And once I started making friends that were already in the scene before I started coming around, I started to learn the community side of things: Oh, this is the guy that books. This is the guy that does sound… It’s the same guys every time that keep it going. I immediately dove headfirst into that. I really liked that vibe. And seeing people my age doing it was so inspiring, knowing that it doesn’t have to be this massive thing. It kind of shaped me and my band members and it helped us take that mentality onto the road.

Endpoint recently asked me to write the liner notes for an upcoming reissue, and as I was writing it, I had this realization—which is that “the Louisville sound” is that there is no sound. Louisville didn’t have the same kind of identity or pressure to conform that New York or L.A. or even D.C. had. Louisville was able to take a little bit of everything and create something that was its own. Do you think that’s still how it was by the time you came around?

BRYAN: I definitely do. And I think a perfect example of that is my favorite [band] from that wave of Louisville, Guilt. They have three records where every record is different. They’ve got the 7-inch that’s a little bit more straightforward hardcore. There’s Bardstown Ugly Box, which is a little bit weirder. And then their last record, Further, is just fully weird [laughs]. But I thought that was so cool. It pulled me in because you didn’t really know what to expect from them. And I think that definitely still exists in Louisville because you have people coming from all corners of the music spectrum to be a part of this small scene. There’s room for everybody’s taste.

When we started as a band, we knew that we weren’t a traditional hardcore band. We loved the traditional hardcore bands in Louisville at that time—bands like Another Mistake and Written Off and Damaged Goods. Those were our local bands, but we knew that they were straight up hardcore bands and we were not. So we put “Oldham County Hardcore” on our shirts because we thought Louisville Hardcore wouldn’t like us [laughs]. It’s funny because to this day, you know how Bane has “the Bane hoodie?” Ours is the Oldham hoodie; we still make hoodies that just say “Oldham.” All that stemmed from us being self-conscious that the traditional Louisville hardcore bands wouldn’t accept us, but as soon as we started playing shows, we came to find out that they accepted us with open arms. Because like I said, there’s room for everybody’s taste.

I’m interested in this idea that you came into the scene knowing you weren’t a so-called “traditional” hardcore band. If you knew that’s what you weren’t, did you have any sense of an idea of who you were?

BRYAN: I don’t think so. We wrote for well over a year before we ever played a show because it felt like we liked everything. Truly, in every corner of heavy music, I can find something that I like. There are old Knocked Loose demos on Isaac [Hale]’s computer somewhere from 2011 or 2012 that are just straight-up punk. There was a time period where it was super melodic like Champion, Have Heart, Defeater, and stuff like that. And there was a time period where it was fully like Deathwish or Closed Casket—“dark hardcore,” or whatever you want to call it. It wasn’t until we got to the point where we were itching to play a show that we kind of zoomed in on it and thought, “What direction do we want to go in?” Listening back to our first EP, I don’t even really know what it was that we wanted to do. I just know that we liked everything and we went to hardcore shows, so it was this smorgasbord of personal taste mixed with the ethics and approach that we learned from going to DIY hardcore shows. We just tried to take that with us wherever we went.

From what I can gather, you come from a very musical family.

BRYAN: My grandpa—I call him my Pop—he played my whole life. My mom’s dad was a bass player in jazz and blues bands for my whole life. He toured, he got to tour internationally, it’s how he made a living. And then my grandma on my dad’s side was a country singer. I grew up seeing her perform to hundreds of people. My uncle on my dad’s side was a hair-metal drummer. My uncle on my mom’s side, his son was a guitar player in local metal bands. So it was everywhere, you know? It was truly all around me.

My parents have always had a deep, deep love for music, too, but surprisingly, growing up it was mainly hip-hop [in my house]. It’s still something I carry with me to this day, a deep admiration for early nineties and early 2000s hip-hop. Like, I remember coming home from school and finding my dad sitting at the kitchen table with a boombox, and he’s playing Eric B. & Rakim, and he’s writing the lyrics down on a notepad so that he won’t forget them. Picture it: I walk in from school and it’s so loud that you can’t even really talk. My mom’s got the windows open, she’s cleaning. My dad’s at the table blaring rap music.

I love that you’re telling me this because I was listening to something on the first EP the other day where I thought to myself, “This cadence is completely hip-hop.” It sounded very legit to me.

BRYAN: It’s funny that you say that because there is a song on that EP called “Separate” where the first verse is the exact cadence of “Warning” by Biggie. The way that his verse starts, it’s the same exact flow that I chose to use and I did do that intentionally.

I read once that you learned how to sing from watching YouTube videos, and that just really captured my imagination. Walk me through that for a second. Like, what were your search terms? [laughs]

BRYAN: I had a friend named Jared—he’s been my best friend since eighth grade and I’m still friends with him—and he’s a drummer. I became friends with him strictly because he had a mohawk and I thought we have to like the same things [laughs]. I used to just sit on his bed and watch him play the drums. No backing track, just the sound of his drums. I would sit there and watch him play Blink-182 songs. Eventually, he started jamming with some guys in our school that were older than me, and he was like, “You should come jam with us. You could sing!” And I was like, “I can’t sing! I have literally never tried that.” And he said, “It’s just screaming. Everybody can do it.” So I went, and I just winged it, and it was my first time ever playing with a group of people. It was my first time where it felt like 30 seconds ago we had nothing, but 30 seconds later we have music. It might be terrible, but it was the first time that I experienced creating something from the ground up and I fell in love. It changed my life.

From there, I started trying to take it a little more seriously, so I started looking it up on YouTube. A lot of it was just covers. I would watch people cover songs that I thought were crazy. This is like MySpace era, so it was a lot of deathcore and extreme vocals—bands like Whitechapel or Suicide Silence. I would just watch their mouth-shape or watch the way they were breathing. I would even sometimes search “how to scream,” but, like, anybody can upload that video, you know what I mean? [laughs] There weren't a lot of super credible sources. But the thing that changed how I approached it entirely was when my first little garage band played a show and somebody came up to our guitar player and was like, “Hey, your band is pretty good, but your singer is singing wrong. He’s going to fuck up his voice forever. He’s got to use his diaphragm. He’s going to mess up his throat.” I didn’t even know that. I was just forcing this distortion by damaging my throat. So from there I started looking into how to scream through my diaphragm and how to practice better vocal health.

I never really lose my voice, but I know that if I lose my voice to the point where it affects my talking voice, something is wrong. A year ago, we played a show in Europe and I woke up the next day and I couldn’t talk. We had to play Reading and Leeds [Festival], so I thought, “Great. We’re playing with Post Malone and my voice is more embarrassing than it ever is” [laughs]. I played this terrible, terrible set. After that, I messaged our manager and I was like, “Something’s wrong. I think that thing everybody is always commenting about on YouTube is finally happening. My voice is gone.” So he set me up with an ENT, and when I got to the office, they put me in a waiting room—this was when they had to give a COVID test. So they give me the test, and after a while the ENT pokes his head in, and he’s like, “There’s nothing wrong with your voice. You have COVID.” And he leaves.

Damn, I was not expecting that plot twist!

BRYAN: I came back ten days later and they put the camera down my throat and he was like, “You have great vocal health. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.” It was so relieving because I had no technique. I was just screaming like when you’re mad at somebody. But since then I’ve become a freak about taking care of my voice. If I wake up and it’s sore, I’m drinking tea. I’m warming up every day. I used to not do that. I used to just go for it.

OK, I want to switch gears here. I wanted to talk about church camp [laughs]. You’ve talked about this experience you had as a kid before, and how that experience inspired “The Gospel”—and I think of “Blinding Faith” as a sister song to that one. The way you’ve described that camp, it sounds Pentecostal to me. Is that right?

BRYAN: I’m not sure! I was pretty young and I had an aunt who worked for the camp, so I got to go for free. That’s the only way. I grew up lower class, definitely. There’s no sugar-coating it, really. [We were] very blue collar. So I looked at it like a vacation. The first time I went, I was just like, this is so fun. I was around kids my age, it was two weeks, we’re swimming, we’re doing all kinds of stuff. Like, yeah, we have to go to church three times a day, but everything else is fun. I wasn’t there for the religious aspect of it all; it was just something social to do.

However, the next year I got offered to go again, and my cousin—who was one year older than me—she was able to go, too. But when she went, she took it very seriously, and that kind of inspired me to take it more seriously. So I started to kind of lean into it, and that’s how you get that line in “The Gospel” where I say, “Love like that must cost an arm and a leg / Because my tongue won’t move no matter how hard I beg.” That sounds super poetic and metaphorical, but it’s pretty straightforward: Every single night they would do a church service to cap off the day, and those church services just felt heavier. That’s when they would be like, “If you’re ready to give yourself to God—and I don’t think any of you are ready—but if you’re actually ready to give yourself to God, come down to the altar and God will speak through you. You will speak in tongues.” So I tried. I prayed. I went down there. I did what everybody around me was doing and it just never happened. Nothing happened. And then my cousin did it and it worked. She spoke in tongues. At the time I was like, “Why is that not happening to me?” So from then on, I just had to have it. People would leave and I would stay. I would pray and pray and pray and it just never happened. That lyric is very literal, and it definitely made me resent it. I walked away like, “Well, that didn’t work.” And that closed the door on religion for me until I was well into high school when I kind of reapproached the question, so to speak.

What inspired you to do that?

BRYAN: Well, one thing I will say is that I definitely believe there is something. I don’t know what. Obviously, I don’t follow any sort of religion, but there are things that have happened in my life where I feel like it’s just undeniable, and one thing that I think is constantly shown to me is that people come into your life for a reason. I was in a band in high school with two brothers who were extremely religious—church every Sunday, raised in a Christian home. And then another one of the members of the band was going through this period of discovery. So we had [the brothers] to lean on. At the same time, my grandma, who is the only religious influence in my family, was evicted from where she lived and she had to move in with us. So I started noticing it, noticing that I was surrounded by it, and I kind of started to open up and be a little more accepting of the idea. I had these two dudes that I was in a band with, peers that I could lean on, and then I would go home and I would have another influence to lean on—which is my grandma. So I started going to church again. I started diving in because I wanted to, not because I had any expectations.

But then, full transparency, in 2009 my best friend was killed by a drunk driver. The drunk driver went to my school; they were roommates. She went to pick him up from work, but he had to work late so she popped into the passenger seat and went to sleep. He’s a bartender and he was drinking all day at work. He gets off work, sees her asleep, and decides that he’ll drive the car. He crashes, she passes away, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t do a day in jail. A week before, the three of us hung out and I actually got out of the car because he was drinking. I told her, “I don’t feel comfortable being here”—so I left that night, and they got into a wreck. They were both OK, but a week later, this happened. So I hated him. I still hate him.

I was going to church every Sunday. One day I’m walking up the steps to leave church and I get a pat on my shoulder. I look up and it’s him. He was a scumbag, always dressed like shit, always dirty, and there he was, wearing a full church outfit with tucked-in shirt, tie, pants. I couldn’t say anything. I was just in shock. I walked past him and I was like, I’m never coming back here. I don’t want to be a part of something that accepts him. That was the last time I ever went to church.

It feels like there’s more openness about this question among your generation of hardcore kids in the sense that, even if you look back at the nineties, it felt like things were very black and white. People were either hardcore atheists or religious monks [laughs]. But it feels like even in that story, as deeply as you were affected, you are still leaving room for ambiguity. You were able to walk away and not be completely binary in your response.

BRYAN: It’s a massive question that no one will ever know the answer to. In different periods of my life, it has weighed on me heavy and I’ve always just tried to take that for what it is and not just shut it out based off past experiences. From that experience I just learned that maybe organized religion isn’t for me, and if I’m going to have belief in something, I need to find my own path and not follow rules that are given to me. It’s something I write about a lot in Knocked Loose.

It’s funny that you said “Blinding Faith” was kind of a sequel, because there’s a song on our first album called “The Rain” that is kind of a direct response to “The Gospel.” Every record kind of has “the God song” on it, you know what I mean? It’s gotten a little more edgier with every record—and with “Blinding Faith” being the edgiest, paired with our new album art, it’s just become this huge talking point for us in the past year. But in reality, I’d say it all stems from a genuine curiosity rather than disdain.

I also wanted to ask you about the story behind the album title for a minute. It’s well established that you were on an airplane, that you were experiencing anxiety, and that you wound up spending the entire flight talking to the woman next to you, who eventually said, “You won’t go before you’re supposed to.” But what you didn’t say in this story is more interesting to me: What did you actually spend an entire flight talking about with a total stranger?

BRYAN: Well, it started as we were speeding down the runway. That part, to me, is my least favorite part of a flight—the takeoff. That’s the part that makes me lose sleep. It literally makes me throw up. So as we were speeding down, she’s like, “Where are you headed?” And I just remember being in my seat, going so fast, and in my head I’m like, Why are you talking to me?

What a lot of people don’t know about that story—because I’ve never really talked about it—is that I was going to a funeral. It was an emergency flight. I was really going through it. I was dealing with both the fear of flying as well as the shock of a passing. So at first I just lied to her. I told her I was going to Florida for work. But then I asked, “What are you going to Florida for?” She told me how she was going to a family reunion and how she lives in the Bahamas and hasn’t seen a lot of her family in years. We talked about how she runs a nonprofit for young women in Nassau who want to establish their own independence and find their worth in things that they can do in a professional field. It’s a really uplifting nonprofit. We talked about that for a long time. I was very inspired by it. Eventually, I told her I was a musician and that snowballed into me saying, “Yeah, I have to take like 300 flights a year.” That’s when I told her I was terrified of flying. We talked about food for a long time—I’m very passionate about food—and she told me she was the cook in her family and that if I ever found myself back in the Bahamas I had to find her so she’d cook for me. We exchanged Facebook information…

…OK, wait, does that mean she knows this record exists?

BRYAN: I don’t think so. I’ve thought about this a lot. I have never, in Knocked Loose’s entire career, set expectations. I love every opportunity that we get, and I never want to walk into anything like I am owed something. However, there’s all this talk going around about the band getting nominated for a Grammy. Like, “You’re being considered for Best Metal Performance” or whatever. I do not expect a Grammy nomination at all. However, if it happens, I want to send her something. I mean, she doesn’t know this kind of music. It means nothing to her that this weird little dude that you sat next to in a flight named his album after something you said. But if it becomes a thing where I can say, “This album is nominated for a Grammy and it was inspired by you and you changed my life”—I have thought about that day and if it comes.

Early on, I remember you making a real point about how you wanted to separate your personal life from your musical life, and I’m curious if you’ve held onto that idea or if you actually think that’s even possible anymore.

BRYAN: We’ve been touring for over ten years now. In my time of doing interviews, I think I’ve gotten better at learning how to navigate these conversations and how to share without oversharing. There are still things in my life that I want to be private, you know what I mean? So much of me is accessible. I want to be extremely vulnerable in my lyrics. I can’t help that. I also need it. And a lot of it centers around loss. Like, just now, telling the story about the flight, I revealed to you that it was for a funeral. However, I am not going to be comfortable going into whose funeral. I had to learn how to have these conversations.

Early on, I think I was rubbed the wrong way—and I’m trying to figure out how to say this safely because I don’t want to offend anybody—but we were on Warped Tour, and I did press every day. It was like my job. I would go to the office and be like, “What do I have today?” And they’d tell me where to go. So I went and I did this interview, and I sat down with these two guys, and they were like, “Do you know what we do?” I didn’t. They said, “We let artists talk about their depression and their anxiety so that people who listen to it can relate.” And I said, “Oh, no, I’m not doing that.” They were very shocked. But I was like, “Look, I think what you guys are doing is really great, and I think there’s definitely a place for that to exist, and I’m sure a lot of people really value this thing that you’re doing, but I am not the one to do that. I don’t feel comfortable sitting here and talking about how sad I am. That’s not going to be what I’m known for.” They were pretty bummed, and they tried to reason with me, but I said, “I appreciate the offer, but no, I’m going to pass.”

I struggled a lot with that. Because it’s tricky to talk about mental health—especially on a stage like Warped Tour, where the crowd is so young, and these kids have a very new outlook on what anxiety is or what depression is. So if you have the platform to speak about those things, you have to be careful. I’ve seen people give speeches on stage about depression where I’m like, “What are you talking about? Don’t tell a little kid that they’re going to be fucked forever.” I didn’t like that, so I strayed away from it, and until now, I’ve been learning how I want to talk about it.

That makes complete sense. And I don’t need to know the nooks and crannies of your struggles, even though I do think it’s fair to say that you’ve made those acknowledgements in your music, right? Like, I don’t know if you’ll agree with me here if I say that when I listen to Knocked Loose, there’s a part of me that’s thinking, “OK, Bryan might be going through some shit right now.”

BRYAN: [Laughs] Yeah, yeah, definitely. That style of writing helps me so much. And the more I realized that, the more I also had to acknowledge that I’m going to have to talk about this. And I want to, to an extent. I think that now—with who I am right now—I could probably do that interview on Warped Tour and know how I wanted to speak about this and how I wanted to carry myself. But I was younger back then. I was trying to figure out how I wanted the world to see me. It was the first time ever that people were coming up to me and calling me by my first name and not just as “the singer of Knocked Loose.” It was this growing period of me not really understanding that kind of attention.

But I’ve always tried to nail home the idea that my lyrics are always going to be 100 percent honest, and they’re always going to be transparent. On this album, it’s the song “Sit & Mourn.” That is such an important song to me. I remember getting done with writing it and being like, “I need to get out of the house.” I had to go on a drive. And I drove around just crying. I mean, in that moment it hurts, but it’s so rewarding to get that off [your chest]. The funny part is that I write these kinds of songs and then I do my first interview for the album and they’re like, “So that’s pretty sad.” And I’m like, Oh shit. Now I have to talk about it [laughs]. When I write I am obviously not thinking that I’m gonna have to answer for this later. I spend the entire record cycle figuring out how to answer for this new piece of myself that I’ve shared.

Does that ever bring a self-censoring editor into the writing at all?

BRYAN: No, definitely not, and I really hope that it never does. I would rather stutter through months of interviews figuring out how I want to answer for honest lyrics than censor myself. Because those are always the songs that I feel like need to be written, you know? “Sit & Mourn” tackles watching somebody you love go through something traumatic and painful that is also traumatic and painful for you, but you have to put it on the backburner to take care of the person you love. So it’s like, when do you get to deal with it? How do you deal with it once the time has passed? Do you ever deal with it because you have to be that anchor for the person you love? It’s a very heavy song. And when I write that way, there are several moments where I’m shown that being that honest is the only way to be.

We did release shows for the album, which was the first time we ever played that song. And it’s already hard to sing, but then I looked at the barricade and there’s this girl singing every word, but she’s sobbing. As soon as I saw that, it just destroyed me. It hit me like a truck. I looked to her and I pointed at her and she just lost it, like she couldn’t sing anymore she was crying so much. So I jumped off the stage and I got on the barricade and I held her head to my stomach and I felt her cry and I just kept singing. I got off stage and then I just cried. I just fully, fully lost it. That is something I’ll never forget. Being vulnerable in my lyrics, it comes in waves—reminding me that’s the only way I can be.

OK, I wanted to end with something that came up kind of recently with Jeremy [Bolm] from Touché Amoré. He was talking about how he can get self-conscious when he writes sometimes because he feels like someone, somewhere, is going to be like, “Bro. How have you not figured this out yet?” You made a very similar point once. You said, “I understand that idea of feeling like a broken record here, and asking: How many more songs can I write about being pissed off or bummed out?” Do you think that you’ve broken through that wall yet?

BRYAN: I think I did with this record. It definitely touches on things that I’ve never written about. Like, I have this stupid problem where I constantly romanticize anywhere I’m not. It’s like, the world shut down, and I was in Louisville, and I was like, “I have to get out of here.” So I moved to California. The second I moved to California, I was like, “Oh my God, I miss Louisville.” My partner went to college in Cincinnati, and there are days when I’ll talk to her and be like, “We should move back to Cincinnati.” She’s like, “No we shouldn’t. You did not like Cincinnati!” Why did I miss Cincinnati? [laughs] I wrote about that with the song “Moss Covers All.” It’s like anywhere I’m at feels like it’s trying to swallow me whole and I’m just trying to get out.

I also think there will never be a shortage of things to be pissed off about, so those songs will always be there. If anything, I wrote some of our angriest songs for the new record. But really, I want to get better as a writer, and exploring new topics is important. I think I’m finally at a point now where I can actually give that an honest try.

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I.

I was barely sixteen years old the first time I interviewed anyone. Agnostic Front’s Roger Miret had been arrested in 1987 for trafficking cocaine and had just been released after serving 20 months in prison for it, so in my mind, interviewing him exactly at that moment seemed like a great idea. In retrospect, it was. Roger could have been jaded or hardened by the experience, but instead, he was immensely kind—and his experience with doing interviews grossly compensated for my naiveté. It wasn’t a great interview, but I’ve read worse.

Since then—between Anti-Matter, writing for magazines like Alternative Press and VIBE, an untold number of press bios, a short-lived stint as host for a gay pop-culture show on Here!TV, and some behind-the-scenes work for film—I can say that I have interviewed literally hundreds of people. I have also been the subject of interviews, for my work as a musician and a writer, at least an equal number of times. This is a unique vantage point to have, and perhaps even a singular one. Just talking to people has essentially been my currency in life for the last 35 years.

So I can’t exactly pinpoint why I was taken aback last month when, during my interview with Craig Wedren from Shudder to Think, a long story about the mental and physical unraveling that he went through after the release of Pony Express Record was preceded by an unpublished note that many of my conversational partners have implied over the years, but few have ever verbally articulated: “I am not sure if this is all appropriate to print, but I'm just going to share it all with you,” Craig told me. “I trust you. I trust that, if anything seems weird to you, you’ll know what to leave out.”

The quality of every single conversation you have, whether it’s on the phone with a friend or on-the-record for an interview, is determined by a base level of trust; it is predicated on an acknowledgment of responsibility to and for each other. This is especially true on a community level. For most of my life as a writer, I’ve tried my best to do no harm. So when Craig explicitly handed his trust over to me—whenever anyone trusts me with their story—I take that responsibility seriously. Because none of the interviews you read, week after week, are really my stories to tell. I treat them with care because they are being willingly put on loan, for the benefit of our collective understanding and growth.

II.

It would be easy to blame it on our persistent need for online clicks, impressions, and likes, but the reality is that there have been instances of interview malpractice in every medium and throughout every era. In an outtake from my recent conversation with Touché Amoré’s Jeremy Bolm, for example, we talked about one interview he did that morphed into something else entirely. At the tail end of a conversation with OC Weekly in 2013, Jeremy was asked something about the band possibly playing Warped Tour in the future. It was a throwaway question, he figured, so Jeremy gave what he thought was a throwaway answer: “No way, not at all,” he said. Jeremy then praised his friends’ bands on Warped, bands like Title Fight or Defeater, who were doing something positive by exposing kids to this community, as opposed to “a world with misogyny and ignorance and nothing to offer anybody, which is 95 percent of what Warped Tour is”—and with that the interview came to a close. Much to his surprise (and dismay), when the piece came out, that final quip became the centerpiece of the entire story. OC Weekly led with “Touché Amoré Tell Us Why They’ll Never Play Warped Tour,” while dozens of online sites followed suit, rehashing different versions of the same headline for clicks.

Later, when I asked Jeremy if he felt like an oversharer, he said, “I don’t think I would have gone into as much detail as I just did if I was not talking to you.”

Again, it’s about trust.

In another example, of course, there is the famous pre-internet story that Inside Out and Rage Against the Machine singer Zack de la Rocha told me in 1993, about the time a journalist from Melody Maker asked him to speak about his father, Beto de la Rocha of the Chicano art collective Los Four, specifically off the record.

“I told him that as long as he didn’t print anything I fucking said about my father that I’d talk to him about it,” Zack recalled. “So he swore to me that he wouldn’t, and then asked what my dad was doing now. My dad had a nervous breakdown in 1983 and has been mentally ill since then… He was someone I had looked up to tremendously and still do… So anyway, [the writer] was bugged. He had a wire, and he printed everything I said. Everything… He printed all this stuff I would’ve never told anyone. I don’t mind talking to you. I’ve known you for a while, and we’ve experienced a lot of the same things. But this was Melody Maker. And I read it in an airport on the way home. I cried uncontrollably for at least a couple of days. If I see him now, he’s dead.”

Again, trust.

To be perfectly honest, there are things I could have done here in the last eighteen months that would have probably garnered more clicks, seduced more eyeballs, maybe even compelled more subscribers. I could have chosen to leave in certain potentially “juicy” things in interviews that I instead chose to take out because they felt misleading or ill-phrased to me. I could have tried to draw disproportionate attention to a few casual but provocative excerpts that I did leave in the interviews—much like the OC Weekly did—as a way to inspire cheap discourse. Maybe my failure to do so is “bad business.” But when we talk about ethics in hardcore, as we so often do, have we ever truly mapped out the ethics of how we share our stories or even who we share them with?

III.

“In my time of doing interviews, I think I’ve gotten better at learning how to navigate these conversations and how to share without oversharing. But there are still things in my life that I want to be private, you know what I mean?”

This is Bryan Garris, singer for the wildly popular Knocked Loose, speaking a couple of weeks ago about the lines that we draw on both sides of the interview table. Bryan, for his part, has given this a lot of thought. But what really captures my imagination is the way he puts himself ethically on the hook. For Bryan, there is a moral obligation to give interviews in a way that also does no harm.

“When we were on Warped Tour, I did press every day. It was like my job. I would go to the office and be like, ‘What do I have today?’ And they’d tell me where to go,” he explains, in a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “So I went and I sat down with these two guys, and they were like, ‘Do you know what we do?’ I didn’t. They said, ‘We let artists talk about their depression and their anxiety so that people who listen to it can relate.’ And I said, ‘Oh, no, I’m not doing that.’ They were very shocked. But I was like, ‘Look, I think what you guys are doing is really great, and I think there’s definitely a place for that to exist, and I’m sure a lot of people really value this thing that you’re doing, but I am not the one to do that. I don’t feel comfortable sitting here and talking about how sad I am. That’s not going to be what I’m known for.’ They were pretty bummed, and they tried to reason with me, but I said, ‘I appreciate the offer, but no, I’m going to pass.’

“I struggled a lot with that,” he says, looking back in retrospect. “Because it’s tricky to talk about mental health—especially on a stage like Warped Tour, where the crowd is so young, and these kids have a very new outlook on what anxiety is or what depression is. So if you have the platform to speak about those things, you have to be careful. I’ve seen people give speeches on stage about depression where I’m like, ‘What are you talking about? Don’t tell a little kid that they’re going to be fucked forever.’ I didn’t like that, so I strayed away from it, and until now, I’ve been learning how I want to talk about it.”

This is, once again, an issue of trust. But from Bryan’s perspective, it’s also about the trust he wants to honor between his band and the people who love his band. There is a responsibility on his part, he says, to speak in a way that is constructive—not destructive. So when Bryan speaks with me, we are operating with a shared responsibility to tell his story with a level of care and intent. Without knowing it, he added a necessary dimension to my own understanding of ethical interviewing.

IV.

If I could go back and do over one interview completely, it would be the one I did with Mark Holcomb from Undertow in the summer of 1994. I had been working on Issue 5 of Anti-Matter, and frankly, the praise I had been receiving for the previous two issues was going to my head. I was starting to believe, unreasonably so, that every interview could—and should—reach the same level of emotional resonance or social relevance, but I was also still only 20 years old and I hadn’t quite figured out how to connect with a diverse collection of voices and personalities yet. So when Mark and I began our conversation and it felt somewhat “basic,” I panicked.

I stopped the interview and asked if he was feeling self-conscious. He said he was. We decided to keep walking and talking, putting things on pause. And then, without saying anything, I surreptitiously hit record on my tape recorder again.

After fifteen minutes, I admitted to Mark that I had begun recording again. It wasn’t exactly a parallel to Zack’s story—and Mark, in fact, laughed about it, knowing he hadn’t said anything too personal in that window of recording—but almost immediately, I felt horrible about it. I had lost sight of the only condition that matters in an authentic conversation. For the first and only time, I forgot about trust.

Thirty years later, I still beat myself up over it. Because in the end, I didn’t really get what I thought I wanted anyway. The interview was fine, but it lacked the thing I cherish the most from my conversations today: the opportunity to get to know someone in real time and the slow unfolding of trust that allows someone to truly show you who they are. There is no shortcut for this, nor should there ever be. I, too, have had lessons I needed to learn.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Bryan Garris of Knocked Loose.

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There’s a very particular claim that Agnostic Front singer Roger Miret has made, repeatedly and in different ways, over the years: “There’s no ill will in Vinnie Stigma, there’s nothing mean,” he says of his lifelong friend and bandmate in the foreword to Stigma’s recent memoir. “He wants everybody to be happy, he wants everybody to get along… I’ve never met anybody who lives like Vinnie; never a worry or concern, it’s amazing.” It stands out because, in 2024, there are very few people who can claim to live worry-free. And much like the name of Stigma’s memoir, The Most Interesting Man in the World, I always assumed this claim—as persistent as it is—was still just a little bit of friendly hyperbole.

This is, after all, Vinnie Stigma that we’re talking about here. He was there at the dawn of punk and he was there at the birth of hardcore. He founded Agnostic Front in 1980, when he was 25 years old, and he somehow continues to play with the band today—less than one month shy of his 69th birthday. His tattooed body and trademark scowl have signified hardcore angst for the better part of the last 45 years. And yet as I came to discover in this conversation, Stigma himself is not angsty. If anything, it’s just the opposite: He loves people, he loves community, he loves culture, he really does love being alive. And much like Roger attests, Stigma very much arranges his life in a way that nurtures only these things.

Vinnie Stigma is a steward of sorts. For hardcore, yes, of course. But also for an old world way of being that is deeply rooted in New York, in the midcentury Italian diaspora, in family, and even in the Lower East Side building where he has lived his entire life. He has a dogged resistance to change—and he will be the first to tell you that—but Stigma is still remarkably willing to adapt. I also believe from speaking with him that his aspirations are, in fact, devoid of ill will. “You got your act and you leave it on stage,” he tells me. “But you come off stage and you be a regular person, you be a good person. And believe me: I’m not going to fuck up.”

In the introduction to your book, [co-author] Howie Abrams tells the story of the first time he went to CBGB in 1984. He writes that you blindly went up to him and kind of personally welcomed him into the scene—and then he surmises that many people also share some version of that story. But my first literal brush-in with you wasn’t actually in the eighties. It was in 1992, when I was on tour with Ressurection and Lifetime. We were driving through Pennsylvania when we saw another van pull up beside us on the highway. It was obvious that everyone in both vans were trying to eye each other up, that we knew we were both touring bands. Whoever was riding shotgun in the other van finally gave us the sign to roll our window down, and when we did, out of nowhere, you stuck your head outside of that window and screamed, “We’re AF! Pull over!” [laughs]. We spent the next ten minutes just hanging out with you guys at the gas station, shooting the shit. Is that something you normally do?

VINNIE: To tell you the truth, yeah! [laughs] If I’m on the subway and I see another punk rocker or a hardcore person or a tattooed person, I don’t know, I’ll just strike up a conversation. I mean, I was just at DiPalo’s buying food—you know, like my gorgonzola cheese and my burrata della and all these high-end cheeses—and I just started talking to everyone. I saw a guy with an Austin City Limits shirt, so I said, “Are you from Texas?” He said yeah, and I told him, “I just played the Moody Center with the Misfits. I just played the House of Blues with Sepultura just a couple of weeks ago!” I’d rather start up a conversation. It’s better than just standing there.

There was a moment where we thought, “Agnostic Front is pulling us over. Do they want to fight?” [laughs]

VINNIE: We actually used to pull the van over to watch Roger [Miret] and Craig [Setari] fight all the time. The guys in the band would fight and I would cheer against Roger because he was always the one instigating it. Craig is strong, though! So we’d let them go. You think Roger would have learned his lesson by today? I don’t think so!

The other story I wanted to bring up comes from one of my best friends, [Cause For Alarm singer and one-time Agnostic Front singer] Keith Burkhardt.

VINNIE: OK, Keith!

I was texting with him this morning and I told him I was speaking with you. Keith wrote back, “Tell him I said hello! When I moved into what became known as Apartment X, the first time my father came to visit you can imagine he was a bit nervous about the whole situation. Living in a cellar with no windows. I was seventeen. But he happened to meet Vinnie out front and Vinnie made him feel good about everything. So my father went home feeling a lot better about his delinquent son. He really enjoyed talking to Vinnie and he referenced him many times over the years.”

VINNIE: I met with Mr. Burkhardt a couple of times through the years before he passed. He was kind of like me in a way, you know? He was a street Italian guy, a knock-around guy. Keith is not that way; he was more of a square egg [laughs]. But yeah, his father was a real sweetheart of a guy. I also remember one time when we were playing, Keith’s daughter showed up at a show. She said, “I’m Keith Burkhardt’s daughter”—and that was all she had to say. I was like, “Come here! Everybody, backstage!” And then, “Go stand over here where it’s safe.” We’ve always been very family-oriented.

The family part of your story is fascinating, especially because I now have this almost mythical idea of 285 Mott Street. I just love that there’s this physical space that you’re almost anchored to in a way, which is something that most of us don’t have. You’ve literally been there your whole life, and at one point, that building almost served as a communal space for your entire family.

VINNIE: Well, it’s kind of rough because, you know, I’m [still] here. It’s where I’m talking to you right now. And all around me there was an orbit of family and people that I grew up with. Now I look at their doors and… Apartment B18, my grandmother lived there. I look at it like a tombstone now. As a matter of fact, I just noticed that my aunt’s mop that was hanging out the window isn’t there anymore. She’s been dead 25 years, and her mop was still hanging out there, but it’s not there! I just noticed it now! But all around me, all these doors are shut down. I just have the spirit here with me, and it lives with me when I walk through my building.

Like, now there’s nobody allowed on the roof. They got an alarm up there. But my mother and father got married on that roof. I had a pigeon coop on the roof when I was a kid. I used to go up there and get my sun—“tar beach,” you know? [laughs] It was cool. Get a little fresh air and play that song: [He sings] “When this old world starts getting me down / I go up on the roof.” Like the Drifters. It’s slowly taken away, but I gotta move. I gotta move forward with it, but I carry it with me wherever I go. 

The other connection is that I lived so close to CBs that we would hang out here and write out the set lists… This [apartment] was like the backstage! You know, I was just in Canada a week ago and I met this guy in a band called Vomit and the Zits. We used to have this connection in 1985—the Montreal-New York connection ‘85—and all four bands would stay in this apartment: Countdown Zero, Vomit and the Zits, Gassenhauer, and Blood Sausage. Basically, they’d park all their vans out there and everyone would stay here. And my grandma and all my aunts would always bring in bowls of pasta on the Capodimonte dish—the money dish. I was not allowed to wash that dish because they were afraid I might chip it [laughs].

How big is that apartment?

VINNIE: It’s not that big!

Between the book and the movie, I feel like I’ve been able to crib together a couple of vague ideas about your parents. At least in my perception, it seems to me like your father was a little mysterious…

VINNIE: Yeah, a little bit. He was a good guy. He wasn’t a bad guy. But he was one of the “goodfellas” [laughs]—you had to, you know? It was a thing.

…and it seems like your mother was more of the hammer.

VINNIE: Yes, that’s true. The wooden spoon. I was so fucking afraid of that fucking spoon. I don’t know what happened to it. I think it was made of balsa wood. She would just come at me with it and I’d be so afraid.

How would you describe your personal relationships with each of them? I don’t really feel like you get into that in the book.

VINNIE: I mean, good. I was with my mom until the day she died. And then my father, he wound up getting married to some other girl and he smoked his life away. That was about it, you know? I got the [love for cooking] food from my mom and I got the streetwise from my father. But I didn’t come from a broken home. My father was good to me; he never hit me or nothing like that. It was only my mother with the wooden spoon.

I’m always curious when I hear about punks with good family lives because I didn’t have that, so hardcore was a relief from that for me in a lot of ways.

VINNIE: I understand that.

Which is why I’m trying to figure out what you think you didn’t get at home that led you to become a disaffected street punk?

VINNIE: To be honest with you, I always did it more because I loved it and I had fun with it. I had no problems at home, you know what I mean? I never ran away from home or none of that kind of stuff. I just enjoyed playing punk music because I was always somewhat a musician—somewhat a musician!—even when it was hard rock and I was in a band in 1973. I still had the band. When hard rock turned into punk rock, I made that jump. And then when punk rock turned into hardcore, I made that jump. I just loved music and I loved having a good time with my friends. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so that’s why I had a lot of friends. My mother always told me, “You got a lot of friends” [laughs]. But she loved them all. All good people.

You know what it was, though? I could walk to the clubs. It was the neighborhood. I could walk to Max’s Kansas City. Even back in the day, TR3 or the Mudd Club. These are all just outside my neighborhood, and I rolled to all those clubs. The thing is with punk rock—what the Sex Pistols and Johnny Rotten did—is that they made it seem like you could do it, too. And I feel like I had that attitude. I looked at bands and I looked at whatever it was they were doing, and I said, “Yeah. I could do that.” That gives hope to a kid out there that’s in a club for the first time, looking around with a lot of other punk rockers. It feels like he might not fit it, but you could bridge that gap. 

And you did your part in the neighborhood. You basically provided all the gear that bands would play at A7 and CBs for a long time.

VINNIE: Right. I’ve had studios all my life. I always practiced where my grandfather made his wine in the basement, right here in this building. And I used to love gear. I loved big amps. Them days are over [laughs]. But I had a lot of equipment. So I would supply all the equipment for the bands: I had a Sunn 105 cabinet with a head. I had an Ampeg V4 cabinet with the head. I had a set of drums, except for some cymbals. And I would just dole it out to the bands. Whoever wanted to play it.

There’s a clip in The Godfathers of Hardcore where an interviewer asks everyone in the band, “Who started Agnostic Front?” and you just sit there silently for 30 seconds. You really, really didn’t want to take the credit. I feel like that kind of modesty is a theme with you.

VINNIE: I don’t want to be responsible for anything [laughs]. But I don’t know… It’s no big deal. I’m very proud of Agnostic Front and what we did because I’ve always believed in myself. Don’t ever believe in a band that doesn’t believe in themselves. I see it. I can almost sense it sometimes, when bands are doing it for the wrong reasons. If you’re doing it for the wrong reasons, don’t do it. Save yourself the pain and don’t do it.

You originally wrote “Power” when you played with The Eliminators. I’ve never heard that band, but how different was that from the version that AF plays?

VINNIE: It’s the same. I’ve been playing that song for almost 50 years—since 1978. 

I mean, if you played that song for me tomorrow and I’d never heard it, I would say, “That’s hardcore.” Did you know back then that you wanted to do something harder-edged than punk?

VINNIE: I was in the moment. I was younger. You know, you get older and you gotta cook, you gotta shop, you gotta eat, you got kids, you got a job. Life gets more difficult and there’s not enough time in the day. But then, strictly from the minute I woke up, I was punk rock. I am today, but I just live it. But them days I would get up and I was always going to wear my “costume.” I call it “the costume.” I still got the leather jacket and the bondage pants. I went to Paul [Bakija] from Reagan Youth’s memorial at Niagara yesterday and I wanted to dress up in my old clothes. I still fit into them, too.

There’s a point that you make in the book that really resonates with me because I don’t hear a lot of hardcore people say this. You write: “To be clear, I think of myself as an entertainer first and foremost, and I have great respect for those who make a living entertaining others, whether they’re musicians, actors, or anything else. It takes talent and balls.”

 VINNIE: It does.

100 percent. I remember in 1993, when I was in Shelter, watching some videos of myself and thinking, “Man, people are paying money to see you play and it looks like you’re not even feeling it.” It really changed the way I approached playing live. At some point, I had to just accept that part of what I was doing was, in fact, entertaining an audience. Is that how you think about it?

VINNIE: Yes! Even until today. Like, whenever I wind up at a festival in Germany somewhere, I will go out early in the morning and I’ll go out into the field and I will look at the stage and say to myself, “Where’s the best spot so everybody could see me?” [laughs] When you’re out there, you gotta just give it. You gotta leave it all on stage. Tomorrow’s another day, and then you leave it on stage again. Don’t be afraid. Just go for it.

A lot of hardcore kids have this virtue that “realness” is going on stage in whatever clothes you were wearing that day and just doing whatever the fuck you do. They’d see that as “authentic” and so-called performance as “inauthentic.” I’m curious how you see the difference.

VINNIE: A lot of it is entertainment. There’s choreography. There’s gotta be a good soundman. Even the lighting guy, you know? It’s part of the show. And I want to put on a good show because it’s not about me. It’s about them. My band Stigma, my solo band, people always come up to me and say, “Vinnie, I had so much fun just watching you guys.” Because we come out like the Rat Pack. One time we came out with a rolling bar. Sometimes I do this thing where I act like the ending [to a song] don’t end right and I yell at the band—it’s all part of the act. I talk to the audience like, “Look at these fuckin’ guys over here!” And I get them in on the joke. I’m not afraid to be payaso. Because you’ve gotta recognize the audience. I wave to people, I tell everybody thank you, I show respect to military people or specially challenged children. I always make sure they’re on stage and I make a big deal, you know what I mean? Because we’ve all gotta thank God that we’re able to do this.

There’s a part in Roger’s foreword to your book where he writes, “I’ve never met anybody who lives like Vinnie: never a worry or concern, it’s amazing.” Do you really think that’s true?

VINNIE: It’s true. You know why it’s true? I went to the doctor one day for a checkup and I had perfect blood pressure. The lady said, “I have never seen anybody with such perfect blood pressure.” And I was like, “Yeah. It’s because I don’t give a fuck” [laughs]. I don’t know.

But the book does reveal a few concerns. For one thing, you seem to repeatedly express frustration over change. Especially with New York City.

VINNIE: I don’t like change. I don’t. Like, I remember when they zinced the quarters. Because when I was a kid, [quarters were made from] silver and you could even hear it. We used to toss a coin, heads or tails, and when they zinced the coin I was like, “Something’s not right here!” [laughs]. At an early age I remember that. But I miss things like Dave’s Corner. Ratner’s. You know, the old New York places. The Chelsea Hotel. There’s a Jewish bakery that closed a couple of years ago. All these old school places. I miss that. But it’s kind of a ghost. I feel a little déjà vu in my own head. It’s about the memory and the people who have been here before. It’s like, they deserve more. These are the people that built New York; they made New York.

It also feels like you hate being misunderstood—and this comes up most specifically when you talk about the early skinhead era of Agnostic Front. I’m curious about this because I had my own skinhead era, but aside from the look, what did being a skinhead actually mean to you at the time? Did you actually have some sort of coherent philosophy about it?

VINNIE: We were just New York skins. We were out there having a good time. We shaved our heads. We got tattoos. There wasn’t a political agenda or a social agenda.

But early in AF’s career you definitely talked about being a band that wanted to comment on social issues.

VINNIE: We still do. Even my last album, Get Loud, you had “Conquer and Divide”… a lot of great songs on there. But yeah, for me, it was really more about being a hardcore skinhead ex-punk rocker. I never, never wore a Fred Perry. Maybe once to a funeral or something. A lot of people would give them to me, and I’m like, “Thanks, I don’t wear this shit” [laughs]. I’m not that kind of skinhead. I used to wear zipper boots. I didn’t shine them. I was never that guy.

One part of your life that I would imagine would have given you some kind of strife would have been that period where Roger went to prison and Agnostic Front basically broke up. Take me back to that place. What were you thinking at the time?

VINNIE: It’s a lot of years ago. But basically, I knew I had to put Agnostic Front on hold and wait for Roger, which is what we did. I wouldn’t do it without Roger—and he was supposed to be in jail longer. I was really scared. He got four-to-life. I still worry for him; I worry for his health, I worry for a lot of reasons. But back then I was concerned [that the band was over]. I mean, four-to-life. I was more worried about Roger getting life, you know? He’d still be in prison today. What a crazy sentence! I can see when they say 25-to-life, but four? It’s like, wait a minute, what did you do? How many people did you kill? [laughs] But thankfully, he came out in two years.

At one point in the book, you say there’s “almost no difference between Vinnie Capuccio and Vinnie Stigma”—the key word, to me, being “almost.” In what important ways do you think the “Vinnie Stigma” character differs from the person off stage?

VINNIE: Well first of all, I leave that guy on stage. You got your act and you leave it on stage. But you come off stage and you be a regular person, you be a good person. And believe me: I’m not going to fuck up. I’ve got too much of a good reputation. I’ve always made friends. Always. I could care less who you are or what you are. I don’t care. Nothing matters to me because all my life I’ve lived among the people and I enjoy all the cultures. When I’m on tour and everybody’s sitting backstage or whatever, I say, “Fuck you guys. I’m going to go out and meet the real people.” And I’ll just walk up to somebody, anybody, and say, “Thanks for coming to the show”—and I’ll start drinking with them, making friends.

I’m looking at [turning] 70 years old, you know what I mean? I don’t know how many 70-year-old guys are still going to go on a major tour and not complain—physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally. I’m happy with myself and my music and my life and my worries. You know, I’m retired now. My rent don’t go up. My gas and electric last month was thirty dollars. Nothing matters to me no more.

Have you ever been anywhere where you just felt like, “I don’t belong here”?

VINNIE: Yeah, a few places. Even recently, I was in Montauk and I went to a yacht club because my girlfriend has a little yacht in Snug Harbor. I went to this place and I felt a little uncomfortable. But then I said to myself, “Fuck you. I’m comfortable. I’m here. I’m not going to feel uncomfortable.”

More than anyone else I’ve ever talked to, it really feels like your entire objective is to just be exactly who you are all the time and to be happy.

VINNIE: Yeah. You got it. Sometimes I’m so happy I say to myself, “Am I crazy?” [laughs]

So when was the last time you cried?

VINNIE: Pretty recently, at a Q&A for the book. There’s a story in the book about a guy I [was coaxed into crank-calling]. I was like [in a deeply affected New York Italian accent], “Hey, come down to the show and I’ll break your fuckin’ legs! You better show up!”—you know, the whole thing. Anyway, on the next tour we come around and I’m at an aftershow party and Mike [Gallo] says, “Hey Vinnie, there’s a guy downstairs. He wants to talk to you.” So I go downstairs and I see this fucking giant of a guy. I walk up to him and he says, “You’re Stigma?” And I go, “Yeah.” He says, “You crank called me?” I said, “I did.” And he says, “You don’t know how much that meant to me. We were [on active duty] in Iraq when you called. You made us laugh. It took us to a better place.” So, you know, telling that story the other day, I cried.

I even tear up when I tell the story about the guy right next door in [Apartment] B16. Jean Salisi lived in B16 and her husband was a World War II vet. He lost part of his face, he had a fake eye, and he worked for Fanny Farmer when I was a little kid—like five, eight years old. I’d be playing in the hallway with my cousin and I’d hear Jean Salisi yell, “Vincent! Come up! Jimmy’s got something for you!” And I fucking knew just what he got. He’d come out with his hand behind his back and then he’d give me a box of Fanny Farmer [candy], because I would help carry his wife’s groceries up. Respect. So he’d give me a box of Fanny Farmer and me and my cousin would knock that off in five minutes—right outside my door, right here where I’m sitting now. The whole box. God.

There was another lady, Lily Caggiano, she lived underneath me. I seen her when I was forty-something years old and I was like, “Hey Lily, how are you?” And she said, “Hey Vinnie, how are you? You’re such a good boy.” Because I used to see her coming up the block and I’d run up to her and grab her groceries. She lived on the fifth floor. I’d go up there and leave them by her door. She said, “You’re still with the band?” They always ask if I’m still with the band. They know me as the punk rocker from the neighborhood. I told her yeah and she says, “I’m going to church right now. I’m going to light a candle for you.” I’m not even fucking dead! I’m not dead and they’re lighting candles for me because I show respect. And this is the way I get it back. I live my life like that.

Even in the book, whenever you talk about people in our scene who have passed, like Raybeez or Todd Youth or Steve Poss, it feels like there’s almost this stubborn determination to keep the people around you present through stories.

VINNIE: I’m alive. But I live with the dead. I’m always with the dead.

What do you think about when you think about the end of Agnostic Front?

VINNIE: The same thing I think about when I think about the end of my life. I think about how, first of all, I’d like to leave a good memory—a good catalog, a good reputation, all that. Because you know, the curtain will fall on all of us one day. Whether you’re in a band or you’re a truck driver, that curtain’s gonna fall. And I know that, so I appreciate it now more than ever. I always have. I’ve been saying that for the last 50 years because I’ve always appreciated that I am physically and mentally able to do this.

The same thing in life, though. I wonder, who’s going to live in this apartment? There’s a French guy living in my grandmother’s apartment. There’s a supermodel living in my mother’s apartment. These are transplants from somewhere else. I’ll have to have my friends put out a plaque [laughs]. But the curtain will fall one day. I don’t fear death. As long as you leave a good footprint, it’ll all be OK.

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I.

Before Friendster first launched in 2003, the act of marketing yourself inside of a neatly organized container to be submitted for public audit had been reserved almost exclusively for composing a résumé—a necessary evil, if ever there was one. There is simply no easier way to show your qualifications for work without taking a written inventory of your interests, your skills, and your accomplishments. Still, résumés have a hyperspecific function, and more importantly, they are designed to be expanded upon, in person and with conversation. There has never been a sense that a résumé is a document charged with expressing who you are as much as it is simply meant to show what you’ve done. The most relevant parts of a résumé are objectively measurable; the most relevant qualities of a human, in contrast, are not. We understand this. Or at least we used to.

There were personal ads and bulletin board systems before Friendster, no doubt. There were also early dating sites and niche proto-social networks like Makeoutclub, whose creator, Gibby Miller, went on to become the cofounder of Dais Records—home to High Vis and Trauma Ray, among others. But Friendster was the first social networking site to sweep up folks from almost every social circle I had, or at least enough of them that I felt compelled to join despite my initial resistance to the idea. It was there that I created my first social media “profile” ever, and it was there that I realized I was being asked to define myself with a level of granularity that I never cared to think about before.

Of course, in the years before social media, we were still often tasked with identifying ourselves. We were mainstream or punk, liberal or conservative, theist or atheist, urban or rural. But we also held the luxury of being able to walk around largely blissfully unaware of each other’s every little detail. When I moved to Chicago in 1998 and started DJing in house music clubs, most of my New York friends had no idea what I was doing. Hardcore kids who weren’t in my immediate friend group told me they didn’t hear I’d come out as a gay man until well into the new millennium—years after the fact. At several points in the nineties, I would just take off to India for three months, completely free of any obligation to give anyone an update. There was a freedom to experiment on yourself, and to report back only if and when you felt like it, and it was incredible. What Friendster asked us to do, however, was to make our complex identities byte-sized, and the only way to do that was to reconcile the inevitable contradictions that make up our lives and to update the people around us, frequently, with every minute change to that makeup. Friendster (and later MySpace and Facebook) required us to make choices and take sides, and in doing so, it created an obligation—and a new source of anxiety and discomfort—that did not yet exist.

It may be that you are young enough to have never experienced this exact moment, but if you are old enough to have come of age without the internet—and especially without social media—then it’s quite likely that you, too, remember the first time you were asked to flatten yourself into a single attractive, cohesive, and impossibly consistent avatar of yourself. There was a mass schism and we felt it. It happened at precisely the same moment that we all unwittingly agreed to bear the psychic weight of public scrutiny as a rule, and not an exception.

II.

I will never be the guy who tells you “hardcore was better” at any one particular moment in time. I will never say it because I don’t believe it. But the emergence of the internet—and social networking specifically—have certainly changed the dynamics of how this community talks about each other and even how we talk to each other, and I can’t say it’s been an improvement. Part of this is a symptom of being extremely online: Go on Reddit or inside of the comments section of any band’s social media pages and you’re more than likely to see hardcore kids talking about other hardcore kids as if we were all nothing but flattened avatars. They’ll say things to each other that they’d never say in person at a show, and more often than not, they’ll say it from behind a cloak of anonymity. There can be a lack of empathy involved, for sure, but there is also a distinct lack of joy in these exchanges—and this lack of joy is contagious to everyone who reads it, even if we don’t publicly engage. Because for as much as I say that “I’m not one to click through to the comments,” I almost always do sometimes, and I almost always regret it. If you ever want to feel like hardcore is only a tiny microcosm of the greater world of despair and dehumanization—that same world that many of us came to hardcore to escape—there’s an app for that.

Hardcore joy, I discovered by accident, is offline. But how do I know?

If you speak to almost anyone who has known Vinnie Stigma on a personal level since he founded the legendary Agnostic Front in 1980, you’ll get different versions of the same assertion: This man is not bothered by anything. Stigma’s primary and perhaps only concern, they say, is that everyone gets along. He cares about respect for each other and he cares about community—whether it be the hardcore scene he helped to pioneer or the Lower East Side block where he has lived his entire life—and everything else, goes the assertion, just rolls off his back.

You’ll forgive me if I arrived to my interview with Vinnie Stigma skeptical of this claim, but in 2024, I know very few people who live free from the anxieties of modern life—and even fewer of those people play in bands. If you’re a regular reader of Anti-Matter, in fact, you are probably well-acquainted with many of the anxieties that so many of us contend with in order to do the things we do: the artist-unfriendly economics of streaming, the fear of saying the wrong thing on stage or online to alienate a fanbase, the seemingly never-ending barrage of professional and amateur online criticism, and the pressure of feeling like you must constantly feed the content machine, among several other things. These are all very recent concerns for hardcore bands, but they reflect the reality that hardcore lives as much on the internet as it does in the real world—and the internet, much to our detriment sometimes, is always on. Surely, I thought, Vinnie Stigma cannot be immune to this reality.

Yet the more he and I spoke, the more this assertion came to life. Whenever I attempted to bring up a topic that might have ostensibly bothered almost anyone else, Stigma treated it with all of the fuss of taking a pebble out of his shoe. And whenever he did show genuine worry or concern, it was never about himself. It was about his longtime bandmate (and best friend) Roger Miret’s health challenges or for a fan he met who served in the military during the Iraq War. The bulk of our conversation was, in fact, conspicuously worry-free. “I went to the doctor one day for a checkup and I had perfect blood pressure,” he laughed at one point. “The lady said, ‘I have never seen anybody with such perfect blood pressure.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah. It’s because I don’t give a fuck.’”

The reason for this, as far as I can extrapolate, is because Stigma doesn’t care about things. He cares about people, and throughout our conversation—which will be published in full on Thursday—you can actually sense the almost tangible joy that his relationships bring to his life. Every memory, attached to a person.

“There was a lady, Lily Caggiano, she lived underneath me,” he told me. “I seen her when I was forty-something years old and I was like, ‘Hey Lily, how are you?’ And she said, ‘Hey Vinnie, how are you? You’re such a good boy’—because I used to see her coming up the block and I’d run up to her and grab her groceries. She says, ‘I’m going to church right now. I’m going to light a candle for you.’ I’m not even fucking dead! I’m not dead and they’re lighting candles for me because I show respect. And this is the way I get it back. I live my life like that.”

Whatever cynicism I had going in, I left this conversation convinced that everything I’d ever heard about Vinnie Stigma was true. The only question left, then, was the obvious one: As he approaches his 69th birthday in December, how has Stigma managed to protect himself from the stress and anxiety that keeps the rest of us awake at night? The morning after our conversation I chanced upon something that, I believe, sheds some light on this.

I already knew that Vinnie Stigma doesn’t really do social media; his Instagram presence, for example, is largely mediated by a third party. But what I didn’t know was that he doesn’t even bother to have Wi-Fi at home. Which is to say that Stigma is quite literally as unplugged as you can be in this day and age. He is almost always situated deeply inside of the present, inside of a real-world-with-real-people moment. It defies reason to believe that his nearly carefree way of being is wholly unrelated to this fact.

III.

We often associate hardcore with struggle and strife and anger and even melancholy, but its association with happiness has been somewhat elusive—regardless of the fact that some of my happiest moments have been at a hardcore show, in a puddle of sweat, on stage or singing along to whoever is on stage, huddled together with a group of likeminded people sharing a moment. I know I’m not the only one with this experience.

Bringing Anti-Matter to the internet always felt like a risk to me because I didn’t know how I could avoid the way hardcore music discourse tends to devolve online. I certainly didn’t want to provide another platform for hardcore kids to treat each other like soulless ones and zeroes, and I’m relieved to say that hasn’t happened. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t remained vigilant. Barring a couple of random trolls who came and went, I feel incredibly grateful to have found a community of readers who seem to understand this fanzine’s original premise—which, perhaps not so coincidentally before the internet, hoped to prioritize people over almost everything else. I’ve only ever wanted to unflatten each other, to bring each other as close to three-dimensional as we can using language, and to celebrate our always-evolving selves. To exist on the internet for me, both with this zine and as a person, has always been an uphill battle.

In one of only a handful of hardcore songs I can think of that mentions happiness outright, Youth Brigade’s 1984 song “What Price Happiness” asks a particularly relevant question in this regard. “They say that love’s the only way to find true happiness,” Shawn Stern sings. “So why do we keep fighting for a life that makes no sense?”

In other words, go wherever the love is. That’s where the joy lives.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Vinnie Stigma of Agnostic Front.

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It’s a solid month for upcoming album premieres, and that’s a good sign for the shape of things to come—with this month’s AM Radio update collecting another seventeen new adds to the playlist. Among them, the return of Anti-Matter alum like Scowl, Touché Amoré, and first iteration vets Samuel S.C., as well as fresh cuts from Fading Signal, Firestarter (with a guest spot from Mark Porter of Floorpunch), High Vis, Ways Away, Secret World (a new band featuring Dennis Vichidvongsa from Speed), L.S. Dunes, and much more. The variety is rich.

My usual disclaimer, of course, never changes: AM Radio is not a running list of every new release, but a selection of personally handpicked music that reflects only those songs that personally excite me—with no outside influence or interference ever. As another month comes to an end, these are the songs that stuck with me. An additional selection of standout tracks follows below.

FOLLOW & LISTEN TO AM RADIO: Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music

NO ESCAPE “Silenced” (Revelation)

Before Deadguy and Kiss It Goodbye (and shortly after Boiling Point fanzine), Tim Singer’s No Escape was one of the best new bands to come out of the wreckage of the eighties and chart a path forward for the new decade. Revelation will reissue No Escape’s early discography next month, but until then, we’ve got this remastered version of “Silenced”—a song that originally appeared on the Rebuilding compilation EP and completely held its own alongside Gorilla Biscuits, Burn, and Turning Point. It’s still one of my favorite hardcore songs of the era, easily.

BUY IT: Bandcamp | Vinyl

ANXIOUS “Counting Sheep” (Run For Cover)

When Grady Allen spoke with me exactly one year ago, Anxious seemed to be at a familiar crossroads to me: That moment when your band’s quick ascension starts to fuck with your head, causing you to wonder what you really want. In my life, that generally leads to self-destruction, so I’m happy to see that Grady went constructive with it—taking that feeling and investing it into Bambi, the forthcoming second Anxious album. First single “Counting Sheep” is a bold and instantly memorable song that bodes incredibly well for their return.

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NO PEACE “Love Letter” (life.lair.regret)

Australian hardcore is on the map right now, and No Peace have been bringing their sociopolitically-minded vision to the scene since forming during the 2020 lockdown. Musically, “Love Letter” is a quick and dirty hardcore song with an early 2000s feel, while lyrically, it’s a community-forward note of appreciation for the Australian scene that fostered them—and it brings on fellow local bands Fever Shack and Death Tax for a little extra love.

BUY IT: Bandcamp

COMMON SAGE “Vehicles” (Equal Vision)

In terms of getting greater faster, Common Sage’s rate of progression is kind of on fire. “Vehicles” is the first single from their second album (and upcoming Equal Vision debut) Closer To;, and it’s the kind of seasoned post-hardcore that cuts the difference between late-nineties clean guitar minimalism and that early-millennium heartfelt hardcore outbreak. Real talk: There aren’t many bands doing this kind of thing this well right now.

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THE DOPAMINES “Tamper-Resistant” (Rad Girlfriend)

Dan Ozzi once said the Dopamines “have successfully lumped themselves into the Dillinger Four category of low-expectation punk”—which is to say that they make new music so sporadically, you shouldn’t hold your breath. And indeed, Dan wrote that seven years ago, when the band released their last album. But the new record is out, it’s called 80/20, and “Tamper-Resistant” is a worth-the-wait kind of song that reminds me of the kind of harder-edged pop-punk you’d get from Jawbreaker or Samiam at their prime. Honestly, I cannot stress enough how much I love this.

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Jon Bunch would have turned 54 years old this coming October 25th. His absence is still felt: As the singer for Sense Field and Reason to Believe, Bunch left us with both a powerful musical legacy and the endless stories of the lives he touched. He continues to be missed. But with almost nine years since his passing, I thought it was the right moment to approach his story with some of the added perspective of time. And few people are better qualified to speak with about this era than Chris Evenson, who was—from 1987 to 2013—Bunch’s most consistent musical partner. To revisit Sense Field and Reason to Believe, after all, is also to revisit Chris’s own life and work.

Easily the less gregarious of the two, Chris has always been happy being the quiet one. But while he openly credits Bunch with being the spring of hope from which Sense Field drew its water, it’s also true that Chris was an integral driver for the band’s creative and practical accomplishments. His approach to these things, in other words, has always been more workmanlike than attention-seeking, more hard-working hardcore kid than aspiring rock star.

“It’s ironic that I ever became a guy who got on stage and played guitar,” he tells me. “This is not my personality. I am not that guy. I don’t seek that kind of adulation out of it, or that notoriety. It’s only because I love music so much that I wanted to partake in this.”

I feel like I remember hearing that you went to your first show in 1982. Is that right?

CHRIS: I know, I’m old, that is a fact [laughs]. I was fourteen. I actually found the flyer and framed it. It was in March of 1982. I’d been into punk rock for maybe a few months by then, but only casually. Once I got into high school, I became friends with some of the local punk guys and they said they were going to see Bad Brains and Bad Religion—and that I should go. So I went. I think I had a mop-top haircut and wasn’t super cool looking. I mean, do you want to hear about it?

Sure. Tell me whatever you’re thinking.

CHRIS: Well, first of all, I had to tell my parents I was going to a dance because I was fourteen and they wouldn’t have been hip to [me going to a punk rock show]. Punk rock back then seemed scary. The show was down in this really grimy area of East Hollywood on Melrose. When I got there, there was a big line outside and a car across the street that was on fire. The cops were harassing all the punk kids. Like, I remember they went up to this guy in front of me who had a big, thick mohawk and said, “Hey man. Your hair looks like the hair on my asshole” [laughs]. I was just some dork from the suburbs. I was like, Jesus Christ, this is frightening.

Later, at the show, I slammed to this band called The Lewd, who were a punk band from San Francisco, and I got knocked out. I took an elbow to the side of my head and went down like a sack of potatoes. I was knocked unconscious. And when I came to, I didn’t really know where I was. I was scared. At that point the L.A. riot police came into the show to try to shut it down. That was a common occurrence back then. I was just so freaked out. But it was an awesome experience. I was kind of hooked after that because something about the scariness of it was kind of intriguing. It was fun to be scared.

That feels like a very outgoing story, but when I think about the Chris that I’ve known for over 30 years, I think of someone who is more unassuming than that. Were you a little more wild as a kid?

CHRIS: No! I was a shy kid. I was a totally shy kid. I didn’t drink either. I’d never even had a beer at that point. And that’s an important point because once I actually started drinking a little bit later, punk shows became a lot more fun—mostly because you kind of looked like you were more fearless, you know? Right before I got into punk, I was more of a preppy kid. I hung out with the preppy kids at school, the Polo shirts and that whole thing. I discovered punk bands like the Adolescents and stuff like that because they played them on Rodney on the ROQ here in L.A. And I liked it. So I started buying some of the records and meeting some of the people. I was still a quiet, unassuming, nerdy kid, but it was fun to be able to attach yourself to something that was cool. Or at least cool by association, in a way.

I guess I’ve always been the quiet type, the stoic one in the background. That was always my thing. And that’s probably the guy you knew back in the day. I don’t how you were with your band, but with Sense Field, somebody had to be the de facto leader, right? I didn’t want to be, but sometimes it was like you almost had to be because everybody else was so fucking scattered and nobody else wanted to take the reins. It was just totally dysfunctional. So I’d be like, “OK, fuck. I will just be the adult here. I don’t want to be, but I will.” That’s what they used to call me on tour: The Captain.

One thing I’ve started to notice lately is that whenever we talk about Gen X kids who got into punk, it feels there are two routes: The younger side of the Gen X spectrum, a lot of them came into punk through metal. But the older folks in the Gen X spectrum, a lot of them came in through new wave.

CHRIS: That’s me.

Right. Whenever you talk about your early love of music, you mention bands like the B-52s or the Go-Go’s—and I think that’s meaningful because these bands were actually kind of joyful. It was the epitome of fun. How would you say those bands informed your early relationship with punk?

CHRIS: Before I discovered some of the new wave bands—like B-52s, Go-Go’s, Adam and the Ants, Devo, and that kind of stuff—I wasn’t really into music at all. I was the youngest of four, so [my older siblings] all had music that they already listened to. Some of it was good. But I just wasn’t really into it. It wasn’t until I heard some of those bands that I got excited about music, because it sounded fun, it was weird, and it felt like it was mine. That was the music of the time. Punk was going on, but that was still a little more underground, so it would take some more time for me to find out about it.

Some people say that new wave was just the commercial, family-friendly version of punk, that it was watered down. But a lot of the early new wave stuff was very weird! You cannot tell me that Devo is not a completely bizarre, avant-garde, and confrontational band. As were the B-52s in their own way. They seemed like outsiders, and I felt that because I wasn’t the cool kid either. I was the quiet kid that nobody noticed. So it felt like something to latch onto that set me apart.

The other thing I think about when I think about the B-52s or the Go-Go’s is that there is a clear female and queer aspect to what both of those bands did. Were you conscious of that?

CHRIS: I can remember playing B-52s for some people and how my “normal” friends were put off by Fred Scheider’s vocals [laughs]. They had somewhat of an affectation to them, I guess. But that didn’t bother me. I thought it was cool and different and I liked that about it. I was somebody seeking an identity, you know? There was something mysterious about what they were doing, and it felt like the people were strange and outsidery, so I felt a kinship with them in that way. I don’t know what specifically appealed to me, but I liked that it was fun and colorful and joyful—all those kinds of things. At the same time, I also liked a lot of scary music after that. I mean, one of my favorite bands was Discharge, and they are completely different from that.

Sometimes I feel like people look at me like I’m weird when I talk about how I was into new wave. They’re like, “OK, yeah, whatever, dork.” Because I do talk about that kind of stuff! When I first got into the B-52s, it was during the Wild Planet album, which is their second one. I used to play that every day. Literally, I would come home, put it on, and play it every day. It just seemed like it was my thing. My brother had Bread and America. My older sister had Bowie and stuff like that. And I loved Bowie, but Wild Planet was mine.

If I put this inside of your musical trajectory, it makes sense. Because when you started Reason to Believe in 1987, I wouldn’t say that you guys were the most hypermasculine band in hardcore [laughs]. Obviously, you gravitated more towards bands like 7 Seconds. Is that how you thought about what you wanted to do?

CHRIS: It’s funny because when I hear it now, I hear the 7 Seconds influence, but that is totally not what I was trying to do! But it’s so obvious when I hear it now. I liked 7 Seconds, but I wasn’t trying to do that. I’ve just never really been into that macho knuckledragger kind of music. That’s not my thing. People would make fun of me sometimes. I remember even Jon [Bunch] and his friends, when I would put on music in the car that was some of the weirder L.A. punk stuff that leaned a little more feminine—or maybe there was a gay element, I don’t know—but they would rag on me for that. I was just like, “You guys don’t know shit. This is the good stuff. You’ll figure it out one day” [laughs]. And they did, later.

I always said that Reason to Believe didn’t fit the mold. I mean, we played fast and we played hardcore, but it was definitely on the melodic side. It’s funny. Sometimes I wish we were more contrived in the way we went about making music because I would get envious of other bands for going for a thing. They had an audience in mind. And I don’t think we ever really thought about the audience. We just hoped an audience would find us. We did whatever felt good in the moment, whether it was cool or not. I mean, I don’t know if you can hear it on the Reason to Believe album, but Jon and I were listening to a lot of Dickies records and stuff like that, and at the time, I wanted to write hardcore songs that could maybe bring in some of those elements.

How long were you friends with Bunch before Reason to Believe?

CHRIS: We had him sing on a really rough demo in ‘87, and I probably knew him for a couple of years by then. He and a friend of mine met a friend of his at a show and then bonded over their love for SSD—even though, at this point, SSD were in their metal phase. But they were like, “We don’t care! We love SSD!” [laughs]. So I ended up hooking up with some of Jon’s friends and started playing drums in their bands, because drums was my first instrument. There was a band called Active Response, one called Persistence; it was all very posi-core. It wasn’t until Reason to Believe that I tried to play guitar.

Jon used to get up sometimes at band practices for the other bands and jump on to sing. And I would notice that he would actually try to sing notes and hold notes and things like that—maybe because he was into 7 Seconds and Scream and stuff like that. And I thought, OK. That’s what I want. I didn’t want somebody who was just going to spit out words. So eventually I did a little recording of my own, this little crappy demo, and I asked him to sing on it. That became the first Reason to Believe demo, which is very, very rough. But I had the pleasure of hearing it the other day for the first time in 30 years, and it was like, holy shit. It’s so clear that Jon had never really sung a full song before. It’s very apparent. And Revelation may end up putting that thing out, which is scary. I’m torn because it feels like, do I owe it to Jon to not let the world hear this? [laughs] Do I just let the world hear what a sixteen-year-old version of Jon sounded like, or should I just say, fuck it? It is what it is. It’s a snapshot in time of what he did when he was just starting out.

I wanted to talk about this transformation that happened between Reason to Believe and Sense Field, because whatever happened between those two bands must have been major. Just to contextualize, I only recently discovered Sense Field’s first three-song demo, which I didn’t even know was a thing…

CHRIS: …of Sense Field?

Yes. It was a three-song tape recorded on a four-track with “Trip Poem” on it, “Today and Tomorrow,” and another song that never came out anywhere else.

CHRIS: I honestly don’t even remember that [laughs]. Maybe I blocked it out.

Listening to it was kind of a revelation because it’s so different from even the two self-released CDs that came later. Like, this version of “Trip Poem” sounds like 10,000 Maniacs [laughs]. I guess I’m just trying to imagine what the internal conversation was like when you started Sense Field, because this demo is wild.

CHRIS: I think that we were doing Reason to Believe and we just kind of felt like that [‘80s hardcore] world was dying. Rodney [Sellars] had recently come back into the band, and he has a different background than us. He was into punk, too, but he was also into Pink Floyd and all this other shit. The rest of us weren’t. So a lot of that was his influence. “Trip Poem” and “Today” were his; a lot of those songs were his. We kind of deferred to him in the early days a lot. But we were developing that stuff in a bubble. We weren’t playing out live at all. We never did anything. It was all done in a practice room, totally in isolation. It wasn’t until much later that we started reintegrating ourselves into the hardcore scene, and that’s why we were such a weird fit when we got there. It’s almost like we went into hibernation and just came up with this stuff that had no connection to our past, no connection to anything. We weren’t doing anything that had any basis in what was going on outside of our little world—and it showed.

I’ve talked about this before, and it bears repeating because I don’t know that it’s ever happened in exactly the same way, but that fulcrum between the ‘80s and the ‘90s—between the first two full decades of hardcore specifically—for me and for a lot of people, it felt like when the clock struck midnight on 1990, everybody was just lost. We didn’t know what the fuck was going on anymore. Everyone started growing their hair out or wondering why we were still straightedge or just having this identity crisis that happened en masse.

CHRIS: That’s absolutely true. It felt like the party was over for punk and hardcore; all of that stuff just sort of disintegrated and nothing had coalesced yet into a new thing yet so there was a major identity crisis. All the late ‘80s bands seemed to be morphing—like Uniform Choice, who we toured with, they wanted to be The Cult. 7 Seconds had kind of become U2 in some respects. You kind of forget that everybody was adrift.

Sense Field didn’t try to take the early stuff we were doing back into the hardcore world. We just thought, “All right. We’re on our own now.” We just figured we were trying to do something from scratch, and that we didn’t have a scene to fall back on.

Tell me about that period for a second, because it feels really drastic to retreat from the only community you ever knew. Where exactly did you see yourselves existing?

CHRIS: I don’t know. I think we just thought that we were doing something so different from what we had done before that nobody in that world would accept it, or they would think it was lame. So we were like, “Let’s not even try that because they’ll just hate it anyway.” We used to play random weeknight club dates around Hollywood. We’d play to five people on a Tuesday. Those early days were all about begging our friends to come out and see us because we were determined to make our way without relying on our old world—mainly because we believed those people would think we sucked. We really didn’t think hardcore kids would take to it. Little did we know that some of our softest stuff was actually the stuff that some of the old hardcore crowd really started liking.

How did that change? What made you realize that you were wrong?

CHRIS: I don’t remember what show it was, but we got booked on more of a hardcore show. It wasn’t like everyone liked us, but there were people who liked it. And it felt like home; it was the world we came from. Suddenly it just made sense—like, why are we trying to get away from this? Why are we fighting this? We had to have enough faith in what we were doing. And once we did that, it started to click. That first little five-song CD made its way to Revelation, and the people there liked it. But we really went about this the hard way.

You had to have been aware of the way Sense Field was perceived during the Building era, though. There was this persistent narrative about how going to a Sense Field show was like a “religious experience.” I heard that all the time.

CHRIS: See, I never heard any of that! [laughs] I mean, I was aware that we’d gotten more popular and that things seemed to be coming together more, but I always felt like we were going out there and playing like it was us versus the crowd. I’m not saying it was hostile, or that we were going to war or something, but just that… There were always people to be won over. I felt like we needed to re-prove ourselves every time, or even win people over when it was our own damn show. And maybe that’s just a weirdness in me, that I couldn’t just enjoy a good thing. They say you never know when you’re in the good times until years later and you realize, “Oh shit. I should have enjoyed that more.” I never did. Those beginning years kind of scarred me to some extent.

One of my most indelible memories with Jon, which I’ve written about before, is from when we were on tour together and he came into the Texas is the Reason van on a drive. You guys had just signed to Warner, things were going great, and I said to Jon, “What happens if the band doesn’t make it? Where do you go from here?” He just looked at me like I had asked the most ridiculous thing. He said, “We will make it. We’ve worked too hard. We’ve put everything we have into this.” I mean, talk about confidence. Or maybe it was more this sense of speaking into the ether to try to make it real. Am I to take it from what you’re telling me that this wasn’t a position you necessarily shared with him?

CHRIS: No. Honestly, Jon was the true believer. Jon was the impetus for the whole thing. He’s the one who drove the ship. We did a lot of the things we did because Jon believed that we could do it. I’m much more cynical. I’m a product of my upbringing. I’m used to disappointment. So a lot of times I was just like, “OK, I’m going to believe you.” If it were up to me, we would have never gotten out of the garage. Jon was the one who connected with people. He was just one of those people who had a positive outlook and just believed—whether it was justified or not. Jon was a spiritual guy, you know, and that kind of lends itself to this kind of belief without evidence. It was faith. And maybe some of it was that he wanted to will this into existence. But his momentum is what carried us along. And I must have believed on some level, because I put my faith in him and what he believed in spite of my own skeptical nature. We wouldn’t have done anything if it wasn’t for Jon’s belief in us.

If I’m honest, I remember telling my band after he left the van that day that I was concerned about Jon. I just thought that position is a very difficult one to take. Growing up in New York, we knew all the bands that signed, and we knew how difficult it was when some of the people involved realized that it wasn’t going to go anywhere. That realization can be difficult to accept. Did that true believer thing concern you as well?

CHRIS: It absolutely was concerning. Jon had a childlike attitude towards some things. That believer thing can be a very dangerous thing, because when it doesn’t happen—what happens? And when it didn’t happen for us, when we decided we were going to break up the band in our last go-around, Jon kind of went off the rails from where he was. When we were a band, Jon was always super focused, super professional. You remember him. He was bringing his juicer on the road, he was taking care of his voice as best as he could. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t do any of it. But once we realized this was the last go-around, he just let it all go. That’s how he dealt with it. It was just like, OK, fuck it, I’m going to do it all now—and that’s not healthy. And it wasn’t healthy for him. I never believed the way he did, so I didn’t have that far to fall. It was a disappointment, yes, but in my heart, I knew it was a long-shot. It was a win-the-lottery kind of long-shot.

At what point did you start thinking about a Plan B?

CHRIS: As soon as we stopped doing music I had that come-to-Jesus moment of: What the hell am I going to do now? I didn’t want to end up like so many ex-musicians working a minimum wage job, just toiling away. So I went back to school and finished my degree and got a regular nine-to-five job that paid better. And that’s what I do today.

It’s funny because it seems like the smart thing to do, but a lot of people were disappointed in me for doing it, you know? Even my own family: “You’re not still going to go after music? What are you, giving up on your dream?!” It’s like, fuck, I thought I was doing the responsible thing here! [laughs] By that point I was in my mid-thirties. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I know that sounds young to me now, but at the time, in that world, it felt old. And it felt like we’d given it our best shot. It felt like we’d better get out now.

Which is completely strange to me because not even a year before you broke up, you actually did have a minor hit in “Save Yourself.” Were you just so fucking exhausted that it didn’t even register by that point?

CHRIS: The last tour we did was exhausting. It wasn’t fun anymore. It was a grind. And up until that point, it had always been fun and exciting to me, you know? It’s weird in retrospect. The label put resources into “Save Yourself.” It actually did really well in certain regions and became one of the top songs on a lot of radio stations around the country. But that’s not everything, right? Fans from radio aren’t really fans. They come and go real quick. As long as your song is on the radio, that’s great. But as soon as that goes away, those fans are gone. It just felt like it was time. From the time we started to that point in time, it was maybe a dozen years. It seemed like an eternity. It wasn’t going to happen.

Was Jon fully on board with breaking up?

CHRIS: He agreed, but he started to unravel a bit. There was this whole idea of, “Oh my god, I’m not going to be able to do music for the rest of my life.” Making the last record was really difficult. It was pretty much just him and me trying to make that happen by the end. You could see that it was weighing on his mind because he wasn’t taking care of himself anymore. He was partying really hard. He went out to clubs all the time and did everything under the sun. He just wasn’t the same focused and hardworking Jon that he’d always been. And I think that’s because he realized it was coming to an end, and he went into a kind of self-destructive phase. It was hard to watch, you know? There was a lot of conflict between the two of us then. Sadly, we were never close again after that, and we actually didn’t even speak for many years after that.

Were the Revelation anniversary shows the only reunions that you ever played?

CHRIS: Yes. We did two Revelation shows, one in L.A. and one in Chicago.

Were there still open wounds there?

CHRIS: The first Revelation show in L.A. was really nice. Everybody was really excited and it was like no time had passed. Jon was on his best behavior, and it was all cool, and it felt good. But then after that, he got the bug again for playing. Up until that point, he had been on a path where he went back to school and he was going to be a teacher. It seemed like he had put the band stuff aside and was onto the next phase of his life. But after we did that first reunion show, he was like, “Oh. I want to play again. I want to do that again.” And by the time we did the second reunion, he was a little bit back to that Jon that was there at the end of Sense Field, where it wasn’t that comfortable to be around him. Honestly, I sometimes think doing that first reunion show was the worst thing for him. He was on a better path before that. I wish we had never done that show because that was when he got the bug again and when he decided to do it again. That was his undoing.

The first band I was ever in, Fountainhead, was such a formative memory for me. But our singer, Bill Kiernan, killed himself in 2013. It created such a mark on that entire memory for me—and we weren’t together for a fraction of the time that you made music with Jon. I’m wondering what your memory of Sense Field is at this point.

CHRIS: It’s kind of problematic for me in a lot of ways. It’s not like I run away from it, but I don’t latch onto it. There were a lot of great memories with Sense Field, but you know, I never listen to it. I can’t even remember the last time I heard a Sense Field song. So in a weird way, it’s not like I flee from it—and it’s not like I don’t identify with it either—but I feel uncomfortable when I hear it. I don’t like to talk about it much with random people. I don’t know why that is. People tell me, “You should just be proud of what you did. You had some success and be proud of it.” But I guess I don’t take that to heart. I probably have an unhealthy relationship with it, compared to other people who are a little more well-adjusted.

It’s interesting because that doesn’t even sound like cynicism to me. It sounds more like an unwillingness to own the good stuff.

CHRIS: Yeah, I know. There’s obviously something inside of me that has a hard time doing that and I don’t know what it is. I used to work for this nonprofit organization where we had to do one of these psychological tests, and it pinpointed that the idea of being publicly embarrassed was my Achilles’ heel. That was the thing I tried to avoid at all costs. That’s why it’s ironic that I ever became a guy who got on stage and played guitar. This is not my personality. I am not that guy. I don’t seek that kind of adulation out of it, or that notoriety. It’s only because I love music so much that I wanted to partake in this.

I came up with the idea to do this interview when I realized that Jon’s birthday was coming up, so I wanted to end by asking if you could share a memory or a story about Jon that you feel best represents the person you remember.

CHRIS: That’s a tough one. Jon was a complicated guy. But I’ll just tell one anecdote about Jon’s belief, and how that could carry him through—and how it could almost take on a life of its own.

There was a point when we were on Warner Bros. where we were in a holding pattern. We were in this weird limbo between the tour we did with you [in 1996] and a year where we were just demoing songs and spending too much time not doing anything. So Jon and I just decided that we were going to go to CMJ that year. For the fuck of it. Just go to New York, spend a few days there, and go to shows and stuff. We went there and we didn’t have credentials. I paid for the flights and I think we stayed at our ex-manager’s house, but we didn’t have anything. But Jon just decided. He said, “Fuck it. Let’s just act like we belong here and we’ll get into any show we want.” So we actually did that. We just walked into every show, with no credentials, no nothing, just acting like we belonged—and it worked. We would walk right by everybody and they’d be like, “I guess they’re supposed to be here.” I cannot believe that worked. But that was Jon’s make-your-own-destiny, will it into existence, Zen-Jedi shit. He believed against all odds, and sometimes, it worked.

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I.

It was the kind of text message that you look at more than once. First on your lock screen, where you’re seeing enough of a preview to know that opening your text app might make it real. And then again, later, after you’ve already opened it and you know that it’s real. Hoping it’s not true. Wondering if you can un-read it. Thinking you might be able to play dumb enough with yourself to forget what you know. No matter how many times you look or look away, none of this works.

This particular text came from a friend who seemed to believe that Bill—one of my oldest friends and the singer for my first band—took his own life while living in Lima, Peru. Attached to this message was an article from a Spanish-speaking newspaper that he wanted me to read, I assume, because he knew I can read Spanish fluently.

“Is that what it actually says?” he asked. “Is that even him?”

Trying to decide whether or not to click through at a moment like this is a rare kind of dread. For as much as we know that nothing is forever, we still make whatever dissociative choices are necessary to spend most of our lives untethered from that reality, planning for a future in which all our friends and loved ones—even the ones we’ve lost touch with—will simply always be there. At the time I received that text message it had been several years since the last time I saw Bill, but we still checked in on each other whenever we could. Life had become somewhat complicated for him when he left New York, first to Florida and then to Lima, and although he was loath to share any details, Bill was always very good at strong assurances. “I’m fine,” he always told me. “It’s all good, man.” In my head, there was never a future where we wouldn’t meet again.

And yet even before I followed that link, I knew where it was going to take me. Not because I ever seriously thought Bill was at risk—I would have done anything to help him had I any reason to suspect the worst—but because this was someone I’d known since we were teenagers. I knew who he was.

Bill was someone who only knew how to paint with broad strokes. He was the kid who jumped on your head at a show if he thought he could do it stylishly and the kid who plainly decided he was going to sing for a band long before he ever actually tried to sing. (True to form, I’d never heard him sing before we started our band, Fountainhead. Bill’s sheer audacity was more of a qualification to me than his voice.) He was the first kid I knew to move into a Hare Krishna temple when his interest in “krishnacore” was piqued and the first kid I knew to dive headfirst into the early New York City rave scene when his interest in hardcore began to wane. I mean, he moved to fucking Peru out of nowhere. Bill was someone who took risks. But for all of the experience and wisdom that may theoretically come from being such a person, it was also true that those risks sometimes got him into trouble. Bill was aware of that, but for him, it was just another risk to take.

Eventually, I read the newspaper story. It said what my friend thought it said.

Over the next couple of weeks, the people who knew Bill all felt compelled to look for signs—anything we could use to make it make sense. But whenever I started to think about all of the ways of being that may have put Bill “at risk,” I couldn’t help but see so much of the same story that brought the both of us to hardcore in the first place. We both barreled our way inside of a community of radical outcasts and dissidents because there was always something inside of us that never felt right in the outside world we were presented with, and we both held onto it because we knew there was a better chance that whatever made us feel different and unwanted everywhere else might be appreciated here. Ultimately, though, hardcore is more of a relief valve than a psychological quick-fix, and eventually, there comes a time when all of us must find an actionable path towards wholeness. Until then, we are always going to be more alike than different. This is the reason I ask so many people I interview: “What fucked you up to be here?” Because Bill was not some sort of troubled outlier in a sea of well-adjusted hardcore kids. He was you. He was me.

II.

This coming October 25th would have been Jon Bunch’s 54th birthday. He is still best known as the high-spirited singer for Reason to Believe, Sense Field, and for at least one album, Further Seems Forever, but above all else, Jon was my friend. Our bands toured together in the summer of 1996, but even before then, I could always rely on Jon for his dependable cheerleading. That trust in “hope” that lives in his lyrics also existed in Jon’s person; he truly seemed to relish pulling me aside at different points in my life over the years to give me encouraging words for whatever it was that I was focused on at the time. The last time I saw him, at a show that we played together in Chicago in 2013—a show that turned out to be Sense Field’s last-ever appearance with Jon—he did just that, telling me how much our band moved him during soundcheck. “I just really want you to know that I love you,” he told me. I loved him, too.

It’s important to me, then, that I don’t totally sanitize what I know about Jon’s life after Sense Field. At around the time of their final album, Living Outside, he’d begun to speak publicly about some of the issues that he was silently struggling with throughout his time in our community: a complicated relationship with his father, issues with addiction, childhood sexual abuse. For as long as I knew Jon, there was always a sense of pain rubbing up against his indelible need to express affection. “I’ve always equated being treated poorly as the equivalent of being loved,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “The songs [on this album] are still hopeful songs, but it’s finally just about standing up for yourself.” Much like Bill, Jon was also very good at strong assurances.

Chris Evenson, Jon’s longtime friend and musical partner since 1987, remembers the end of Sense Field with some heartache. As the guitarist for both Sense Field and Reason to Believe, Chris had known Jon long enough by that point to know that even though they both agreed the band should break up, a drastic shift was simultaneously taking place.

“He started to unravel a bit,” Chris tells me, as part of a wide-ranging conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “Making the last record was really difficult. It was pretty much just him and me trying to make that happen by the end. You could see that it was weighing on his mind because he wasn’t taking care of himself anymore. He was partying really hard. He went out to clubs all the time and did everything under the sun. He just wasn’t the same focused and hardworking Jon that he’d always been. And I think that’s because he realized it was coming to an end, and he went into a kind of self-destructive phase. It was hard to watch, you know?” He pauses, then adds, “There was a lot of conflict between the two of us then. Sadly, we were never close again after that, and we actually didn’t even speak for many years after that.”

No one will ever be able to really say why Jon Bunch took his own life on the evening of January 31, 2016. Almost nine years later, I still have a hard time imagining what could have pushed him over the edge and into such a desperate place. But thinking about it today, it feels important to me that we never sideline Jon as some kind of anomaly—simply for being a person with lifelong struggles in a scene that was literally founded by people with lifelong struggles. These people had a desire to create a space where looking out for one another is a non-negotiable part of the culture, a space where we could struggle together without judgment. Even the early pioneers seemed to know: We are all at risk.

III.

I received that text message about Bill’s death on February 16, 2013, a little over a month after the last time I saw Jon Bunch in person. It’s nearly impossible for me to separate those two events in my mind. Two hardcore kids, two singers, two friends whose mere existence enriched my life in so many ways—gone. It’s an incalculable loss, but it’s also a reminder: What we do here can help on some level, but we still need to fully eradicate the stigmas surrounding mental health in our community and we all must learn to ask for outside help when things get too difficult, as they inevitably do.

I also remember that date for something else that happened. Texas is the Reason was in the middle of our only real reunion tour on that day, and we were playing at Union Transfer in Philadelphia that night. At some point after soundcheck, while I was still processing the news about Bill, we were told that the family and friends of a fan who couldn’t be there wanted to meet us. When we walked outside to speak with them, we were told the story of Daniel—a young man who loved our band, and who even had a ticket for the show, but who also suffered from a life-threatening illness. He died before he could see us, but he still asked his family to play the song “Do You Know Who You Are?” as he passed. We were astonished to hear this.

We did not share the story of our own loss with Daniel’s family that afternoon, but we did believe that this had now become an opportunity to share our grief and to celebrate the lives of our loved ones. So we made the decision to do something we’d never done before and never did again: We played the song “Do You Know Who You Are?” live. The room was quiet and reverent and seemed to understand. We were all inside of a moment. We were all struggling together, and life felt all the more precious for it.

If you are experiencing mental health-related distress or are worried about a loved one who may need crisis support, please call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org. Connect with a trained crisis counselor. It’s confidential, free, and available 24/7/365.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Chris Evenson of Sense Field.

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If you’re asking Craig Wedren to take stock of his own life in 2024, he’d tell you it would be difficult to imagine a better outcome: He is a happy family man, a proud father, and perhaps the most successful he’s ever been as an artist and musician—an in-demand composer for film and television projects, whose most recent work includes scoring for the Emmy-nominated Yellowjackets. The road to now, however, has not been linear. And it sure as hell hasn’t been easy.

When Craig and I first met for an Anti-Matter interview in 1995, he was the loveably eccentric singer for Shudder to Think, whose fifth album, Pony Express Record, boldly expanded the language and possibilities of post-hardcore. It also, quite plainly, almost killed him. We didn’t know back then that the internal pressures of making and supporting this record would drive Craig into insomnia, illness, and lingering self-implosion; we certainly had no idea that, less than a year later, he would be diagnosed with cancer.

But as we stand in the 30th anniversary of that album, we are also able to stand in the knowledge that his survival—from all of it—gave him the perspective he needed to step out of the darkness and into the life he actually wanted. In a lot of ways, it looks a lot like the one he hoped to have found when he first discovered hardcore in the early eighties: Twenty-nine years after our first interview, I feel privileged to find a healthy Craig Wedren, still dedicated to creative pursuits, self-determination, and living a life unbound from outside rules. “That was the promise of punk to me,” he says. “It wasn’t just two chords and a mosh pit. It was about being sprung from restrictive ideas and being inspired by a whole lot of weird shit.”

The first thing that strikes me from going back to our original interview from 1995 is that you were quite possibly the most meticulous and well thought-out—or maybe over-thought-out—26-year-old kid in the world.

CRAIG: Oh my God, I was so over-thought-out [laughs]. I think about that so much now, especially because sometime over the last couple of years I got all of my journals digitized—from age fifteen through to now—and occasionally I’ll be looking for something, and… Well, I just want to massage that dude’s temples and loosen his jaw and be like, “It’s OK! You’re OK. You can breathe and relax because it’s all going to be OK. You’re doing great” [laughs]. I can’t believe how nuts I was.

Sure, but let’s contextualize this. Because at the time of that conversation you were in a situation where you were basically hurtling towards true adulthood: You graduated college. All of your friends are out there getting jobs. Shudder To Think signs with a major label. You’re being forced to make lots of decisions. For a young person, all of those things carry weight.

CRAIG: Stakes is high, right? I mean, I don’t know how you feel [as a musician], but at this point in my life, I’m really able to enjoy making music so much. I make music virtually all day, you know? This was not the case back then because you’re dealing with other shit. You’ve got to wait for your bandmates, you’ve got to get to the venue, you’ve got to set up. There’s always so much downtime. Now I just make music all the time and I’m so happy most of the time. Then, I was almost never happy or free or relaxed. It was so fraught. It was so loaded with ambition, competition, that odd combination of self-loathing and self-aggrandizing. And I really think that’s just how you feel at that age. I don’t know if there’s any way around that. Especially if you’re a weirdo or a punk or a thinker.

What’s funny to me is that you had a real naked ambition during the Pony Express Record era. But typically, most people with that kind of naked ambition are making something relatively palatable [laughs]. You were ambitious about making music that was truly difficult for a lot of people.

CRAIG: Yes! That was part of the ambition! It was like, “Not only are we going to fucking do this, but we are going to fucking do this on our terms. Because that was the contract [we made] with our punk gods and literary heroes!” [laughs] It was such a strange combination of things, but that conflict never seemed contradictory to me. Because if you’re going to go for it, then you’d better go for it on your own terms. Otherwise, what if it works? What if you are successful but you make it on somebody else’s terms? It’s got to come from [the heart]. That was the promise of punk to me. It wasn’t just two chords and a mosh pit. It was about being sprung from restrictive ideas and being inspired by a whole lot of weird shit. And once that bug bit when I was a teenager, it didn’t stop. It kept growing and growing. So when we met, and I was in my mid-twenties, there was already this Frankenstein that had been created, which was myself—this funny creature that I had been working on for ten or fifteen years. When I look back on it now, I think it was both freeing and a total straitjacket.

The way you describe it feels relevant to two things that I think are important to the Shudder To Think origin story: The first part is when you’re asked to try out for Stüge [the more traditional hardcore band that became Shudder To Think], and you think to yourself, quote, “I love some hardcore, but I am so not a hardcore singer”—and yet you still go on to do it. And then the second part is that you join the band, and according to the lore, the new band is named when Mike Russell supposedly says that he “shuddered to think that we would be just another hardcore band.”

CRAIG: That’s right.

Clearly, you continued to operate inside the hardcore community, so I was curious as to what more you wanted from hardcore at that time. What did you feel like you needed to contribute?

CRAIG: I think it connects to what we were just talking about, which is the idea that the rules are that there ain’t no rules. We were kind of a smarty-pants band, right? Everybody was very well-read and super into film and into a lot of different kinds of music. As with our entire generation, we grew up listening to whatever was on the radio in the 1970s. Classic rock and then first-wave punk and then new wave—which, at least in the first half of the ‘80s and partly because of MTV, was such a wild, wild west of identity and gender and fashion and avant-pop. But then there was this restriction that happened with some of American hardcore at the time, at least in terms of composition and lyrical content and vocal style. It just seemed like the easiest target in the world because obviously this was some conservative-ass restrictive shit. But also, everybody in D.C. was growing up, and everybody’s music was starting to spill out over the edges of what had been the more teenage strictures of D.C. hardcore.

I got to D.C. right at the end of what has come to be known as Revolution Summer. I was living in Cleveland, but I was already listening to Minor Threat and for sure Bad Brains, maybe Government Issue. And then I got there and I immediately got the Rites of Spring record, and honestly, that record blew the doors wide open for me and for anybody else with an exploratory mindset. It was just gorgeous and free. It had a strange combination of being both hyper-individualized and hyper-collective. It was almost a cell made up of radically different, staunch individuals, and that just really spoke to me. There was something in the water in 1985 and 1986. It was a really great time to be coming up with new ideas and throwing them against the wall. So by the time I tried out for Shudder To Think, I think I just sort of felt like, “Whoa. This isn’t like other things. And I like things that aren’t like other things.” I had already learned that in Cleveland because… There were no rules in Cleveland because there were just no people [laughs]. You couldn’t get a minion together of any one style. It was just like, if you were a freak, you would hang out with the freaks, and everyone would bring in their freaky shit. It was like first-wave L.A. punk or first-wave CBGBs, where it was just weirdos, homos, punks, and artists, and you just sort of bumped into each other and tried to come up with something new. The first wave of D.C. hardcore, that kind of Dischord sound, it had a style. And even if it wasn’t intentional, it still felt rules-y.

The perception outside of D.C. in the eighties was always that it was more of a haven for the freaks than other places, but I recently came across this thing that Ian MacKaye said about you coming onto the scene that was funny. He says, “[Craig] just suddenly appeared wearing a fucking sweater and his belly sticking out. We’re like, ‘What, who is this guy?’ I mean, he was really very annoying onstage, to begin with. Then I just grew to love him, you know? I just loved the guy.” [laughs]. But when I read that I thought: That doesn’t sound so much like a freak haven. That sounds kind of judgey.

CRAIG: I mean, I was annoying on stage. I was pretentious and theatrical… I was a theater kid! I was both super cocky and super insecure. I had been sort of a local cover-band rock star in Cleveland, so I was like, “Well, I’m just gonna come here and show them how it’s done because I’ve been singing Journey covers for the last three years!” [laughs] And then I got kicked out of a bunch of bands for being annoying and singing the way I do and having my belly sticking out. But the thing is, I got there at exactly the right time because everybody was wanting and needing to do something new. Everyone was evolving.

One of the things we talked about in our original interview was how Shudder came out in D.C. at a time when there were a lot of big messages and political activism—all of the things that we typically associate with Dischord and with the city. And then here you come, singing about clock-climbing cockroaches and plastic yachts [laughs]. In 1995, you said that was a very “fuck that” choice. That’s the way you phrased it.

CRAIG: That’s interesting, because from my perspective now I don’t think it was a choice at all. I just always ran from [big messages]. I still do. I did a podcast with a friend of mine a couple of years ago, and at the end of the podcast, she asked me a question—something to the effect of, “In what way are you an activist?” I came up with some cockamamie answer that I felt uncomfortable and embarrassed about afterwards. It wasn’t a lie, but the truth is, I am not an activist. I like personal things. I like relational things. I like dreams and I like psychedelics. I like movies. I like photos and photo imagery. I like stories. But on a limbic, unconscious level, I never liked to talk about politics. I just feel like the point of music is to get sprung. To be free of this body, this world, and these rules. So to then talk about our bodies and our world and our rules? It’s like, just run for office, man. We need better leaders! [laughs] I’m running from office, you know what I mean?

Back then, you thought that your aversion to it may stem from the fact you want to reserve the right to change. And you felt like making concrete statements on records might lock you in somehow.

CRAIG: Well, look at how it’s haunted Ian! Well, maybe not haunted, but…

It would haunt me, to be honest.

CRAIG: It’s just, he wrote this song. An amazing fucking song. A personal manifesto—or just a diary of the moment—called “Straight Edge” and look what happened. I don’t want that. I just want to stay slippery and free. I can still sing any of my songs anytime because they’re loose enough. They’re in this liminal space between meaning and interpretation. I can sing them and have whatever associations I have to the imagery that are relevant to me now, or even revisit where I was and whatever those associations were back then in a more dear and tender way. Like, I’m going to rehearsal later. I’m playing with some friends of mine who have this band called Middle Aged Dad Jam Band—it’s David Wain and Ken Marino from The State. It’s a wonderful, hilarious band where I basically sing background vocals and shake my ass [laughs]. But we’re doing a big New Years show and David asked if we could play a couple of Shudder To Think songs, so we’re going to start working on those today. Is that going to be strange? No. It’s not going to be strange at all. I love those songs. They’re all very sturdy boats, you know? Part of that is that they all exist a little bit outside of time and trends.

One of the things I love about doing these reunion interviews is that whenever I go back and look at these old conversations again, I am not only looking at who you were and where you were at, but I’m also getting to see the younger me—and this interview struck a particular chord in that way. In the introduction, I described what you were wearing that day as “an overtly fuzzy sweater that I could never get away with wearing.” And that sentence is dripping with subtext for me. Because 29 years ago, I was still in the closet. And “getting away with it,” for me, meant feeling like I wasn’t allowed to wear something a little more flamboyant without giving away my sexuality. So on some level, I was sitting there kind of jealous of you because your ostensible straightness actually somehow allowed you to be gayer than me! [laughs] Did you actually look at your personal style back then as a site to challenge gender or sexuality? Or was that really a pure expression?

CRAIG: I think it was both. I always liked costuming even from a pretty young age. I loved to dress up—similar to music, where I really like to try it all. Even when I was thirteen or fourteen, sometimes I wanted to dress punk and some days I wanted to look like Boy George. Some days maybe I would wear a skirt and other days I would dress like a surfer. I mean, it’s all just costume, right? It’s all just stuff we invent and put meaning up against.

You’re born naked and the rest is drag.

CRAIG: Exactly. I still get emotional whenever I see someone or something—whether it’s a movie or reading a story—that feels like outlaw freedom. There was always this sense of trying to stretch the parameters of things I could try so that I could feel free. In the eighties, it felt fun and provocative. But when I was living in Cleveland, and I would go out looking sort of New Romantic or punk or whatever it was, I would get my ass kicked for “being a faggot.” Which would just make me more mad and more determined to be free.

When the “alternative” thing happened in the nineties, honestly, it was a bummer. It was really drab and judgey and restrictive, I thought. Because I always thought the whole thing was to try your ideas, to throw them against the wall and play around, to use all the colors. But [alternative rock] felt brown and gray. So that also made me rebellious. It was definitely provocative on some level, but it was coming from a genuine place.

Pony Express Record was, in so many ways, a fuck-you record.

CRAIG: Yes [laughs].

This is kind of a weird counterfactual question, but bigger budgets aside, do you think you would have made the same kind of record on Dischord? Or did signing to Epic actually make you want to fly your freak flag higher?

CRAIG: I mean, we had already been writing and performing a lot of those songs before we signed to a major. But the major label interest was there, so there may have been a little bit of that, “Well, if we’re going to make any kind of move, we’d better really show them what they’re signing.” We weren’t even 100 percent sure that we were going to leave Dischord; we just knew that we wanted to do it as a career. We knew we wanted to reach as many people as possible, and Dischord has its own ethos—which, you know, has its own freedoms and its own constraints. So I think we would have made the same record because we were well on our way. But I bet it would have been a little chiller.

There were a bunch of years that I was like, “I wish I could go back and really let some air and some light into that record—into the performances, into the presentation of the music.” Not the actual music, the songs I love. But in the last few years, I’m like, “No, no, no. It’s Pony Express Record! It’s awesome. I love it” [laughs] It’s just got that discipline. It feels mean in a way that most of our records don’t, but in a cool way, in a sexy or almost leathery way. There’s something nocturnal about it. It can be dark.

At one point in our original conversation, perhaps because we were two twenty-something over-thinkers, we get into this deep dive on mortality. And then one year after our interview, you are diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease. It’s hard not to connect the two things in my mind.

CRAIG: Right.

Recently you wrote something about Pony Express Record, and I wanted to read part of that here. You said: “When the album didn’t do as well as we’d hoped, it felt like a personal rejection on a level I hadn’t experienced before. Between that and some other contributing factors, things started to fragment and shatter, and I think I went a little bit insane. Within a year or so of the album’s release I got really sick and was diagnosed with cancer. It was a brutal crucible. I can still feel it now.” What can you tell me now about this experience and how it relates to the way you remember that year?

CRAIG: The first thing that comes to mind is the nocturnality and intensity around Pony Express Record and our ambitions for it. There was a really brutal kind of perfectionism and rigor around it that wasn’t healthy. Certainly I was grinding myself down, trying to just overachieve. It was so important to me. The way I look at it now, it was just this singular focus that started from age twelve, or whenever I started singing in bands, to this final culmination of what had been a lifelong dream—and it fell short of the mark on a commercial level, even though we were doing such great stuff. Every band wanted to take us on tour. Smashing Pumpkins took us out. Pavement took us out. We went out with Foo Fighters. It was really great, but everything was starting to fragment. I think I also started to have this idea about how I was “supposed to be,” or what “a rock star” was supposed to be like. Which is ironic with all this talk about independence, doing your own thing, and being unique to yourself. I was not being myself. I wasn’t mature enough. I was trying to fit into some mold or idea that I had about who and how I was supposed to be.

That was the beginning of the era where Nathan [Larson] really needed to break off and do something on his own. He recorded Mind Science of the Mind with Joan Wasser and Kevin March and Mary Timony. Such a fucking great, underrated record. But he needed his own project. He was kind of gunning for my position—not overtly, but in an increasingly and frankly dark, psychic, mindfucky way. I basically felt like I was losing the room. Because Pony Express Record and Get Your Goat, even though they are totally band records, they are also very much my records. The ideas, the style, the direction of the music, obviously all the vocals and lyrics, but also so many of the riffs. It felt like I had discovered my songwriting voice and it was being rejected. And not only was it being rejected, but I was losing my band. They were losing faith in me.

All these things were happening to me personally, as well, that I literally felt like I was starting to disappear. I couldn’t sleep. For a handful of months, I would just stay out as late as I possibly could—until the last person who would stay out with me was like, “Baby, I gotta go” [laughs]. And then I would go back to Jesse [Peretz]’s apartment, where I was living, and just lay there for a couple of hours, from four to six a.m., when I knew one of my best and oldest friends would wake up. So I would just lay there and think the crazy thoughts you have between four and six a.m. when you’re going through something difficult.

And then I started to itch. I started having these weird skin things. I went to a dermatologist and they told me it was scabies. Eventually, that went away and things settled down a little bit. I got back together with my girlfriend. And then within a few months of that, the skin thing came back super intensely, and it was clear that this was not scabies. That’s when I was diagnosed with cancer. At that point, I no longer felt insane. It had all manifested in my body as cancer. I mean, this is my story—or at least the way I think about it.

This may be weird to ask, then, but when you did finally get diagnosed, was there a relief in that?

CRAIG: You know what? Weirdly, yes. Totally. I was always dimly aware, or even acutely aware sometimes, of the shit I needed to work on: Drink less. Sleep more. Exercise. Calm the fuck down. Stop beating yourself up. Whatever it is. In this case, it was the pushing and pushing and perfectionism and beating myself up and comparing myself to other people—which is something we all struggle with to some degree or another, but that was particularly intense for me in my teens and twenties. So I needed to work on it, and when I got diagnosed, it was just a forced time-out. And there was relief in that. I knew I had to deal with it now, because otherwise, I could die.

How did that episode affect the trajectory of the band—as it started moving its way towards 50,000 B.C. and then, the band’s eventual ending?

CRAIG: Very, very radically. You know, I think it had a very positive effect. It brought us all together. We’ve always been very familial, and we love each other very much. Nathan is absolutely one of my number-one soul brothers since the day we met when we were fifteen. Obviously, we were going through some tough stuff back then, but [my illness] just brought us all back down to earth for a second and reminded us of that. I suppose it’s stating the obvious, but it reminded us of our priorities, which is that we love each other and we wanted to make music together and we were extremely fortunate to be alive and to be having the opportunities that were, quite frankly, being heaped upon us at the time. 

The fact that Pony Express didn’t do as well as the label needed it to, and as the whole band wanted it to do, meant that I started writing differently for 50,000 B.C.—to appeal to Nathan and Stuart [Hill], really. I was excited to do that. It wasn’t a problem or something. I love an assignment and I love knowing who my audience is, and that’s why I’m good at [composing for] movies and TV shows. So I was writing 50,000 B.C. while I was going through chemotherapy. Actually, we were recording it by that time, too.

Which is inconceivable to me after seeing this Polaroid picture of you at that time, where you’re laying in bed…

CRAIG: …with a dachshund!

Yes! You know I love dachshunds [laughs]. But for real, you did not look good! I cannot imagine how you could go to the studio like that.

CRAIG: I wasn’t doing so good. I had all the time in the world, though. And I couldn’t do much. It was bad. I mean, by that point, when I had no eyebrows and I was basically green or yellow, we were full into recording that album. We all just really banded together after my diagnosis. It was very beautiful. I still fucking love that record. If anything, it’s the one I listen to most. I know it’s not as cohesive as some of the others; we’re clearly kind of trying things out, like it’s a little bit of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle on the breakfast table. But we felt really great about it. We made a more commercial, but still totally weirdly Shudder to Think record that really doesn’t sound like anything else.

I remember on the last day of recording, I was being radiated on my chest and neck—my heart and my voice. I mean, come on. The metaphors never cease! [laughs] Anyway, I was so dry. I didn’t have any saliva because it would get radiated, so all that was left was mucus. It was just globby and not great for singing. So I would supplement it with fucking gallons of water in the vocal booth. We were just so determined and so on fire, and we were a team. So we were in New York, recording vocals, and I just had to be surrounded by gallons of water in between every line so that I had enough lubrication. I would just go glug glug glug glug, and then sing. Glug glug glug glug, and then sing. And then whoever the Pro-Tools engineer was, after we were done recording, would have to go through all my vocal takes and have to remove all the glugs [laughs]. I weirdly remember that as kind of a wonderful time for the band. My having cancer just got us over a lot of our ego bullshit.

I feel like I remember your first show back being at Tramps [in New York City]. Or at least in my memory, you were talking about being in remission, and I feel like you maybe even cried at one point…

CRAIG: I don’t doubt it.

I just remember the feeling in the room, and even the feeling on stage, felt so different from when I saw you playing for Pony Express. It was almost as if a heaviness had been lifted.

CRAIG: I think that’s right. I don’t know that it was a conscious thing, but it just naturally happened. At that point, we were probably starting to work on movies, too, so things were just starting to loosen up. But the damage had been done interpersonally.

Not to jump ahead too far, but you also had a heart attack in 2018.

CRAIG: Yes. A massive one.

There had to have been a point where you were just like, “Oh come on, what the fuck.”

CRAIG: Of course, because at this point I am legitimately really healthy and fairly mature and not trying to be a fucking rock star “dawg” [laughs]. It’s so interesting, you know, the stories we tell ourselves about illness. That was the cancer one. The heart attack one, though, is so much simpler for me: I fucking got radiated, in my heart, in my mid-twenties! One of the things they tell you is: “Listen. This treatment does a bang-up job of getting rid of cancer, but it can lead to long-term tissue damage.” So I really just think it’s as simple as my mom’s side of the family having heart issues and crazy cholesterol things. My doctors had told me I had really high cholesterol, and that we were going to have to deal with that at some point, but because I was so healthy in other ways, they were like, “We don’t need to rush into it.” Cut to: me having a heart attack. That’s really just what it is. I mean, I could tell bigger stories about it, but it’s just never occurred to me that having a heart attack was much more than that.

There were certain things that I was happy to change, though. I was working really fucking hard for a lot of years—just building up the business, providing for our son, and being a daddy-provider guy, which is something I love. I love having that purpose and mission. But it wasn’t like when you hear about somebody working so hard that they have a heart attack. It wasn’t like that at all. That said, it was a “widowmaker” heart attack that could have easily killed me—and it didn’t, for which I’m very grateful.

There’s one more thing that 26-year-old Craig said that I wanted to bring up here, which I love. He said, “Change, growth, and evolution have become almost an obsession of mine. I see so many musicians just repeating themselves over and over, and it becomes stagnant and dull. It’s not their fault. It’s really easy when somebody pats you on the head with approval.” Reading this and thinking about our conversation today, it really strikes me that your present life—which you love—is totally contingent on the fact that Pony Express was not a commercial success.

CRAIG: Absolutely.

You didn’t get that pat on the head—or at least not in the way that you were maybe thinking you would. Did that experience change your relationship with these concepts of “success” and “failure?”

CRAIG: It’s interesting. You asking that question makes me realize that I’ve been thinking about that lately, but not in those exact terms. Because, now, it’s no longer an obsession. It’s an ingrained, imprinted, in-my-DNA thing that I couldn’t possibly not do a thousand different kinds of music. I love it. Like, right now I’m deep in [composing for] Yellowjackets. But on Saturday my friend and I did an eight-hour improvised musical accompaniment for a psychedelic plant medicine ceremony, where we were just doing sound support using modular synths and vocal looping and some guitars and whatever else came up. And right now I’m about to go up to band practice with Middle Aged Dad Jam Band, where the set list is basically the same songs that we used to do in my cover bands in Cleveland when I was twelve. It’s just such a joy-sport to do all of it. To continually just explore for exploration’s sake. It doesn’t feel obsessive; it just feels like, how could I possibly limit myself to any one of these wonderful things?

The fact that it’s been a lifetime of this has taught me that there is always so much more to discover than what’s been discovered. I wonder what would have happened if Pony Express Record had been the hit that we were so certain that it was destined to be. But I see friends of mine who have had inordinate success, and it’s not easy. I’m sure I could be happier somehow? But I can’t imagine what that would look like. Things happen the way they need to happen. To say I have no regrets—like, I don’t buy that for a minute, I have a billion regrets. But that doesn’t mean I would change anything.

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I.

Back in 1991, K Records issued a four-song 7-inch from a band called Brief Weeds. There was literally no information about the band on the sleeve—no sense of who they were, where they came from, or even what the music inside might sound like. The cover art was simply a harsh sketch of a shirtless man. Not even the band’s name could be bothered to be featured in anything but the most nondescript of stock Microsoft Word fonts. A second Brief Weeds 7-inch followed in 1993, but for the most part, this record, too, kept the band’s enigma intact.

There is nothing particularly distinguishable about these records other than to say that Brief Weeds were primarily a psychedelic pop band—not unlike Syd Barrett or the Zombies or the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society era. They also appeared to be gently curious about dub music. (“The River Song” indulges in this interest over four minutes of drums drenched in reverb and what seems to be a field recording of seagulls.) Listen carefully to a song like “Hands of Love,” and it’s possible you might even catch their singer slip into a faintly English accent, but that’s really the only perceptible clue of their origin. It’s almost as if Brief Weeds were a band that was only meant to be lost, not found.

The reality of the Brief Weeds story, however, is more fascinating than any of this might suggest. At the time that these recordings were made, three of the four members involved—Guy Picciotto, Eddie Janney, and Brendan Canty—were better known as Rites of Spring. (Not to be outshined, fourth member Michael Hampton played in The Faith and Embrace.) And as most of us know, Rites of Spring are regularly credited with being a bellwether for both the mythical Revolution Summer in Washington D.C. and for what later became known as (much to everyone’s disdain) “emo.” So where did their simultaneous impulse to make music like this come from?

There have been dozens of books written about these two movements since then, and by and large, their song remains the same: A surge of violence and property destruction at hardcore shows in Washington D.C. in 1984 leads to multiple punk bans at venues across the city. A brief editorial for Issue 7 of Metrozine in 1985, penned by Government Issue’s John Stabb, describes the state of the local scene as having “800 people at shows [with] usually 600 of them [being] morons,” before asking, “Do you want a football game or a show?” A new wave of bands form in this environment—with Rites of Spring, Embrace, and Beefeater often seen at the forefront—and these groups begin actively discouraging violence at shows, not only with words, but through the development of a new hardcore musical movement that was considered more melodic, more engaged with local and global politics, and somewhat dubiously, more “emotional.” A special feature in Thrasher that covered the scene dubbed some of it “emo-core,” and so it was that history conceded the movement to this narrative.

I’m not saying that none of this is true. But I do believe that, as with most matters of historical significance, it’s easy to be so reductive that some of the more glaringly obvious details can go overlooked. Because in the long list of the things that we talk about when we talk about Revolution Summer, we somehow rarely ever articulate the fact that this was also an era where bands got unapologetically weird.

“You have to understand how miserable the general climate at punk shows was at this time,” explained longtime Dischord Records employee and Severin frontperson Alec Bourgeois in a 2008 interview. “Shows that had previously featured a diverse community of punks, rastas, freaks, queers and, yes, thugs—mostly looking out for one another—had degenerated into huge mosh pits of mostly ex-jocks and suburban skinheads.”

In other words, Revolution Summer was also an attempt to reconnect with our history of being stubborn outcasts. When the members of Rites of Spring hung out in their basement making four-track cassette tapes in the guise of a psych-pop band called Brief Weeds, whether in jest or not, it was only one part of a much bigger project to follow their most peculiar instincts—without inhibition. It came from the same place that led them to make hand-painted set lists or to scatter the stage with flowers at their shows. Being “punk” could mean a lot of things in 1985, but being a freak operated outside of that ambiguity. “From thirteen [years old] on,” Picciotto says in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, “there wasn’t a single fucking thing that existed that I didn’t want to undercut or question in some way.”

This is the point that none of the punk history books ever really make: Rites of Spring and the bands of Revolution Summer were not “being emo.” They were finding the joy in being weird again.

II.

If punk is, by definition, a culture designed to exist on the fringes of the mainstream, then it only makes sense that the ways in which we express our differences—the things that mark us as strange—must evolve alongside the ever-evolving norms that exist in society. Allowing punk and hardcore to be codified into any one specific sound or style runs the risk of petrifying conventions that discourage experimentation and inquiry; it privileges the misguided idea of hardcore as an aesthetic form over its function as a vessel to be free. The position of Revolution Summer, then, was in its name: We are not here to preserve hardcore precedents, they essentially declared. We are here to revolt.

Few bands took this idea to heart more than Shudder to Think. Formed in 1986 from the remains of a more traditional hardcore band called Stüge, the band took its curious shape quickly upon finding its vocalist in Craig Wedren—a recent transplant to Washington D.C. whose own penchant for “freakishness” caused even Ian MacKaye to describe him as someone who “just suddenly appeared wearing a fucking sweater and his belly sticking out. We were like, ‘What, who is this guy?’” MacKaye, of course, would later bring Shudder to Think into the Dischord Records fold, where Wedren would go on to thrive as the singer for one of hardcore’s “weirdest” bands. But it’s a legacy that, he says, couldn’t have happened without that pivotal inflection point in 1985.

“I got to D.C. right at the end of what has come to be known as Revolution Summer,” Wedren tells me, for an interview that will be published in full on Thursday. “I was living in Cleveland, but I was already listening to Minor Threat and for sure Bad Brains, maybe Government Issue. And then I got there and I immediately got the Rites of Spring record, and honestly, that record blew the doors wide open for me and for anybody else with an exploratory mindset. It was just gorgeous and free. There was something in the water in 1985 and 1986. It was a really great time to be coming up with new ideas and throwing them against the wall. So by the time I tried out for Shudder to Think, I think I just sort of felt like, ‘Whoa. This isn’t like other things. And I like things that aren’t like other things.’ I had already learned that in Cleveland because… There were no rules in Cleveland because there were just no people. You couldn’t get a minion together of any one style. If you were a freak, you would hang out with the freaks, and everyone would bring in their freaky shit.” He laughs, then adds, “It was like first-wave L.A. punk or first-wave CBGBs, where it was just weirdos, homos, punks, and artists—and you just sort of bumped into each other and tried to come up with something new.”

With Shudder’s landmark album Pony Express Record reaching its 30th anniversary this month, it strikes me as especially necessary to appreciate the way this album still feels so defiantly idiosyncratic. It’s a collection of songs that pays no mind to genre conventions or any of punk’s so-called sacred totems, and as a result, it remains one of the most enduring and original records ever to come from our scene. Pony Express Record is all revolt and no conservatism. It’s an extraordinary freak flag, flying high.

III.

Insofar as we are still somewhat hesitant to embrace a hardcore scene where the rules truly are that there are no rules, the way we talk about Revolution Summer today is telling: Rites of Spring and Embrace continue to get endlessly namechecked, largely in part because—even though the records they made were considered unusual for the hardcore scene at the time—their extended influence has made it so that neither band is particularly unpalatable to a modern hardcore ear. Beefeater, on the other hand, are often relegated to the sidelines of any mainstream conversation about Revolution Summer, and I suspect this has something to do with just how far they were willing to go in their mission to reconnect with hardcore’s anti-“normal” beginnings—and how much that still causes discomfort for some.

“Beefeater, throughout its existence, listened to pretty much anything,” explained the late Fred “Freak” Smith, whose nickname tells you everything you need to know. “We took from this and that and just blended it into something. We fucking pulled from anything and everything. Nothing was off limits. That is what made it cool. That is what kept things fresh. Yes, we were a hardcore band, in essence, but we had a lot more shit to experiment with, and we made damn sure we did. No restrictions.”

Beefeater’s unwillingness to capitulate to hardcore conservatism is as important a part of the Revolution Summer ethos as anything else, and I’d argue that their inclination to view hardcore musical expression as a site for the liberation of personal expression is the only way we can keep from fetishizing any one particular form of hardcore that will inevitably cease to serve its function. Brief Weeds also understood this. So did Shudder to Think.

And so did Positive Force D.C. cofounder Mark Andersen, whose Dance of Days is one of the most definitive books ever compiled about the Washington, D.C. punk scene. In an editorial for the Washington Post written to commemorate 30 years of Revolution Summer in 2015, Andersen offers what I believe to be the most complete assessment of this moment’s long-term impact, as well as the insight to use its lessons to create a culture that will remain relevant for generations to come.

“Revolution Summer meant many different things to many different people,” he contends, “but the power of the idea lay in its openness, its sense of possibility, and its willingness to challenge individual punks and the world. What it communicated then—as it does right now—is the utter urgency to stand, feel, and create in each new, unfolding moment. In this, it defies commodification or categorization, forever overturning punk nostalgia to focus on the challenges of now.”

This is to say that revolutions don’t come to protect the past. They come to force our hand into the future.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think.

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I don’t remember meeting Jeremy Bolm for the first time. He’s just one of those people in hardcore who seems to have always been there, someone who leaves evidence of his active presence and participation everywhere he goes. Since 2007, he’s been the singer of Touché Amoré, but over the years, he’s also been a writer and publisher, owner-evangelist of Secret Voice Records, and host of the long-running First Ever Podcast, among many other things. But in order to be the person he is, Jeremy needs to put himself out there. A lot. And sometimes, this kind of life can create psychological friction—stress, anxiety, low-level dread. I can attest to this from personal experience.

Touché Amoré’s upcoming sixth album, Spiral in a Straight Line, due out next week, began as an acknowledgment of the unconscious arising of these feelings during the writing process. It’s about that very modern moment that we’re in, with all of our self-consciousness and self-diagnoses, and all of the things that make us feel overexposed and underappreciated. Hardcore kids are not immune to it. At the same time, Jeremy tells me, this is not a bare confessional. “This may be a shock to hear,” he insists, “but I have a hard time being completely open with people. I’ll be open enough with people, and I’ll say things that are probably ‘too deep’ for some people about what I’m going through, but I do keep a lot. I keep a lot away.”

The readers can’t see this, obviously, but I wore this shirt today in your honor. It says, “Leonard Cohen Was Right” [laughs]. So I wanted to start there because while I’ve heard you talk about Leonard Cohen as something of a touchstone for you—in your life and in your work—I’ve never really heard you expand on that. What do you think it is about him that so deeply resonates with you?

JEREMY: There are things that appear in the actual work itself—the writing, his lyricism, the way he can make something feel so dark and so heavy and so sad and so honest, while also having these tinges of sexuality to them. Things that, especially in the kind of music we make, I don’t even know that I could comfortably write about. But there are also things about his life that are very inspiring to me. I think the fact that he didn’t put out an album until he was in his thirties is always going to be one of those things that reminds you it’s never too late to have a new chapter in your life. I mean, sure, he was obviously a published author and he was sort of successful in that way, but even that aspect is really nice to know.

Also, as someone who does not have what one would describe as “a nice singing voice,” you know, he just has a very unique singing voice and he doesn’t have a lot of range, and that's something I can certainly relate to [laughs]. There are just all these little things about him. Sometimes I’ll throw on an old interview with him and [admire] the way he is so generous; he is so old school and polite. It feels like there are always new things for me to appreciate about him. I was lucky enough to see him live before he passed away, and it’s funny because it was the same weekend that I got to see Morrissey for the first time live…

That’s quite a pair.

JEREMY: Yeah. I saw Morrissey on a Friday at Hollywood High School, and then I drove up to Oakland to see Leonard. Morrissey played for maybe 80 minutes; Leonard played for three and a half hours. The humility and the generosity between the two of them was like night and day! It really made me go, “Yeah, I’m Team Leonard for life.” Whereas Morrissey, as we know, likes to be praised and toot his own horn and let the crowd tear his shirt off and worship the ground he walks on, any time one of Leonard’s band or backup singers would do a solo, the spotlight would go on that person—and Leonard would always say their name afterwards so the audience could applaud. Even if the same person got three solos, he would still do it every single time. It was very much like he was saying, “This show is not for me, even if I’m billed on top. We’re doing this together.”

What year was this?

JEREMY: 2012 or 2013.

OK, so this is post-Dead Horse. I ask because it feels like kind of a weird coincidence that you saw them both for the first time in the same week, and then, when you went in to re-record Dead Horse for its tenth anniversary, you replaced that lyric you wrote about Morrissey in “And Now It’s Happening In Mine” with a lyric about Leonard Cohen.

JEREMY: Yeah. That was a move from once Morrissey officially started talking out of his neck. I was like, “I don’t actually want to learn a thing from this man” [laughs]. He wrote some good songs at a whole different time in his life. I think he’s totally incapable of it now.

At what point did you make the decision to change that lyric?

JEREMY: I probably changed it live about six or seven years before we re-recorded it. There are a lot of lyrics that I just eventually do differently. I’m a big fan of that stuff, even if it’s something subtle. Like, I remember the first time I saw Glassjaw live, I want to say it was in 2000 with Deftones at the Palladium in Hollywood. And at the end of a song, Daryl starts singing Vision of Disorder lyrics on stage: “Don’t talk to me about your love, don’t talk to me about your love.” And I’m in the audience like, I don’t think anyone knows what he’s doing! It felt like a moment for me. It was like, That’s for me. Anytime you do something like that—where someone in the audience who knows every word and is expecting you to say that word, but then you do something slightly different—I’m a big fan of that.

When I interviewed Tim Kasher last month, I remember asking him if there were ever any things that he wished he could rewrite—things where he might correct his former self. So the Morrissey-Cohen switch really stood out to me because that’s not just a creative flourish; there’s a semantic difference there. Are there other songs you would change if given the chance?

JEREMY: I always try to go into most things at least trying my best to be as honest as possible about whatever it is that I’m going through in those moments—and I haven’t often written about specific people or anything like that because I always knew from being in bands before that feelings change. So I don’t want to write a song about a specific instance to where, if that gets resolved, I now have to sing that song for the rest of my life and it just loses meaning every time that I do it. I never wanted that.

There’s something that you said in an interview once that I’m thinking about right now. You said, “Failure would be doing things we’re not comfortable with and regretting them later.” And then you said, “We’ve had those moments in our career here and there where we’ve maybe done a thing, taking a chance on something and it feeling wrong, and then it actually being wrong where you’re like, ‘Wow, that wasn’t worth it.’” Can you remember what it was that you might have been thinking about when you said that?

JEREMY: I can think of two things. One was when we were on tour with AFI, and a shoe company—forgive me for not remembering which one—was like, “Hey. We’ll give you X amount of money to fly to Hamburg to play a super small show that will be free for your audience on this day.” We were like, “Yo! We’ll get paid, free flights, free accommodations, and play a show in Hamburg, and then rejoin the tour”—because there happened to be a week off on the AFI tour where they were doing festivals and we were going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere. It felt so serendipitous, so we were like, “Let’s do it!” But then we got there and it became very apparent that this was not advertised. Nobody knew that we were even doing it. They were supposed to be giving away tickets at a record store that did not advertise that they had the tickets.

At this point, we were doing pretty well in Germany. So for us, we thought this show would be a home run, a super small show in a town that we do well in, and it would be really rowdy because it was on a boat. But we got there, and we had the horseshoe when we played; people weren’t even up front. We were playing mostly to staff members and maybe twelve people that were there because they knew who our band was. It was one of the most humiliating experiences, so that was one where it felt like we didn’t really think this one through [laughs]. I can’t blame us for taking that chance, but it made us realize we had to think a little deeper about this stuff.

The other one would have been playing the Made In America festival in Philly, which is Jay-Z’s festival. The headliners were Rihanna and Coldplay. We played a stage that was basically there to perform to the people on the walkway leading to the main stage. So no one, at any point, really stopped to watch us. They were all passing by on their way to watch DJ Khaled [laughs].

Do you look back in retrospect and appreciate being humiliated like that?

JEREMY: Yes! We all need a big slice of humble pie every now and again. It’s so important. So would I change those experiences? Fuck no. Those are the stories that we all laugh about now. It’s all a part of growth, and I think growth is important. And it just informs you more going down the line whenever something comes across your table—especially at this point where all of us, I think, are so grateful for any opportunity. Because there is no shortage of bands. And there is no shortage of fucking ways for companies to try to take advantage of whatever you have going on in that moment to amplify whatever product they’re trying to sell. That’s always going to be a thing. You learn as you go along.

One of things about you that I love is that your personal history in hardcore is one that feels almost compulsive in terms of participation: Bands, fanzines, your label, your podcast. The first thing I ever heard about you was that you actually ran a Thursday fan-site very early on. So maybe this is where the generation gap between us is a little bit wider, but I remember not being able to understand the impetus for making a fan-site like that. I was always curious. Like, what did you get out of doing that?

JEREMY: It’s a great question. So first, they didn’t have a website at the time. They owned Thursday dot-com or dot-net or whatever, I forget what it was, but I’m pretty sure it was just a main page that said “Coming Soon” on it—and [Full Collapse], by that point, had been out for a very long time. I found access to them because somewhere their contact was posted as “thursdaydove” at aol.com. So, you know, I threw that motherfucker in my AOL buddy list just waiting for it to come online [laughs]. And eventually it did! So I IM’d that name, and I’m pretty sure it was Steve [Pedulla] who ran it. I was like, “Hey, I’m a huge fan of your band.” And his response was, “How did someone in California hear our band?” So I told him I knew how to make a bad, pretty janky website and that I’d love to do it for you guys.

It was exciting. It was this band that I just discovered and fell in love with, and now I have some sort of limited access to them, and they’re being nice to me and allowing me to do this thing for them. And then getting to meet them for the first time, when they played the Glass House [in Pomona, California]… It was such a humiliating night for me because I had some form of laryngitis or something—my voice is always going to be an issue for me—but I was hardly able to speak. I was like, “Hi, I’m Jeremy, who does your website,” and they all lit up and gave me a huge hug. Geoff [Rickly] demanded that I take every shirt they had at the merch table. I think about that now in reality: They were first of four on this tour, so to give every single shirt to a near-stranger, that was a really nice thing to do! From then on, they always made sure I was taken care of if they were coming to town.

It’s really interesting to think about, because it feels like there are so many layers of accessibility to bands these days. Even with Anti-Matter, in the first iteration of the zine, I would just show up to a show and be like, “Hey, do you want to do an interview?” And we would just sit on the sidewalk and talk. There wasn’t a publicist or a manager. There was no red tape between us. I realize that still exists on some scale, but I can’t remember the last time I did that. And knowing what I know now about playing in a touring band, I don’t think I can just presuppose that I can go to a show and expect that you’d have an hour and a half to hang out with me.

JEREMY: No, I know what you mean. There was a magazine out here called Status that me, Ray Harkins, and Joey Cahill all used to write for. It was mostly album reviews, but the first time I ever did an interview, I talked to Jake Bannon [from Converge] for Status. I forget how it was set up, but it was at The Troubadour, and I found him, and he was nice. He came outside and we sat on a curb. I still have the tapes somewhere; I’ve never listened to them. I’m scared to listen to them! I was so nervous. He claims he remembers that night, but I don’t know [laughs].

In terms of accessibility, you and I have these front-facing projects where we are essentially directly connected to the people who support our work—through Substack or Patreon. But that also requires constantly generating new work. And there have been times in the last year where I’ve had a little voice in my head wondering if I am putting too much of myself out there. Like, is there a point where I run out of things to say? A point where I’ve shared too much? A point where this doesn’t work? I’m wondering if that voice ever enters your head.

JEREMY: Yes, 100 percent. Especially when I’m writing a new record where I get that feeling that’s like, What can I say that I haven’t said already? It’s the same sort of thing. I am hard on myself because I’ve been in a band this long and I’m still writing these kinds of songs. Is there going to be a listener that’s going to be like, “Bro, how have you not fixed this yet?!” [laughs]. You know what I’m saying? There’s this thing where I imagine the voice of the listener being like, “You’re still complaining.” But I know that person doesn’t exist. I know that we are all going through these sorts of things.

I used to be a lot more forthcoming on social media in general, but I’ve dialed it back a lot in the last year to where I might have something ready to post on [Instagram] Stories or whatever—even if it’s just a silly thought or something that has some snark to it or maybe something I think is funny—and I’ll end up not posting it because it’s just not worth it. I know that in an hour I’m going to be like, Why did I post that? Or I’ll think, How about I just not have any of these feelings and not do anything at all and just go about my day? I don’t know if that’s self-preservation or if that’s self-preservation-slash-anxiety, but I’ve just gotten to the point where I think I’d rather not do it at all. Especially on Twitter, which is just a fucking walking cesspool. 99 percent of the time, the only thing I ever post on Twitter is just: “New episode. New episode. New episode.” I just can’t give myself to it because it doesn’t make me feel good anymore. And maybe that’s a positive. Maybe it’s better for me to be more present to what’s around me.

Did the response to Stage Four, in particular, ever make you feel like you put too much out there? That’s maybe one of the most personal records I’ve ever heard.

JEREMY: [Pauses] Um… No. Because even when I listen back to it, I know that I got out what I needed to get out of it. So for that, I can’t really be too harsh on myself for getting too vulnerable. I forget if we’ve ever talked about it, but the one memory that sticks out to me the most is playing [Stage Four] for Pat Kindlon before we put it out. He’s sitting shotgun as I’m driving around playing it for him, and he turns the volume down and says, “Who is this for?” He was like, “You’re going to alienate your audience with this. No 20-year-old wants to think about their parent dying. Your audience is not going to connect with this.” I just said, “Hey, you’re probably right but I couldn’t write about anything else.” And you know, he was wrong because that was our most popular record, so fuck you, Pat Kindlon! [laughs] But it was a very Pat thing to do, and I knew it, because that’s his sense of humor and I adore him for it.

But yeah, that record for me… I didn’t go to grief counseling. I should probably still just go to grief counseling. Coming up next month will be exactly ten years since [my mom] passed away, which is crazy. There’s still a lot of stuff I haven’t resolved. I always like to think that writing is going to resolve something for me, or that performing is going to resolve it for me, but there’s always something new to feel about it. Like, we’re going to literally play Fest on the same weekend, which is where we played when my mom died.

Oh damn.

JEREMY: But I wanted this to happen! I made our agent set this up and book it because I want to own that. I want to do this. And I think it’ll feel good for me to kind of reclaim this thing ten years later. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. When I told Pierce [Jordan] from Soul Glo that I was doing that, his response was, “Are you trying to hurt yourself? What are you doing?” [laughs] But what do you think? Do you think this is crazy for me to do? Or do you think it makes sense?

I think that, ten years later, it has the potential to be healthy. As long as you’re not looking for “closure.” I don’t think closure is a thing. But using different strategies as a way to work through your feelings about something—that’s a thing. And this feels like a strategy to work on something.

JEREMY: Totally.

I want to go back to something you said earlier about never having been to grief counseling. It’s my understanding that you’ve never actually been to therapy ever. And I’ve also heard you say that if you went to therapy, you might not have anything to sing about [laughs]. You don’t really believe that, do you?

JEREMY: That’s my cop-out excuse. Because I’ve talked to so many friends that have been therapy-pilled about this, where they’re like, “You’re never fixed. You just have a new way of framing it and it gives you a deeper understanding of it.” And I’m like, “Yeah, OK, sure” [laughs]. But I know it would benefit me in many, many, many ways. 

It’s funny, there was actually one or two times where I put in some effort to do something about it. I was telling my primary doctor about how I just can’t sleep, ever. I was telling him about anxiety and sort of waking up with consistent dread every single day—which is pretty much the entire point of this record that we’re about to put out. And he was basically like, “That’s just old age.” I was like, “Um, something tells me you’re not a good doctor” [laughs]. But he was who I could afford on my… what I call “the Rust Plan.” It’s not quite Bronze. I have the Rust Plan, where even if I wanted to find a therapist, there’s no fucking way in hell it’s going to be covered. And as someone who is out here living by myself for the first time in my life, paying three times the rent I used to, having to now also work a part-time job, I can’t afford it nor do I have time for it. So there’s also that aspect. Thank God I have a notebook and a band, I guess? I don’t think my problems are going to get resolved anytime soon.

I mean, that’s actually valid. And I think practical and financial access are things we don’t talk about enough when we have these conversations about mental health.

JEREMY: Yeah. I mean, I know I’m going to do [therapy] at some point, and I know I’ll be better for it. At the same time, and this may be a shock to hear, but I have a hard time being completely open with people. I’ll be open enough with people, and I’ll say things that are probably “too deep” for some people about what I’m going through, but I do keep a lot. I keep a lot away. So the idea of being with a therapist who I don’t know personally in any capacity and then starting to reveal my deepest thoughts… I think that I would freak out. That also makes me a little anxious.

That’s probably a good segue to get into making the new record, for which you returned to Ross Robinson to produce. You’ve called working with Ross “the closest thing to therapy that you’ve ever had.” I’ve heard a lot about his psychological techniques, and I know most of them seem really focused on the singer—like, for instance, the practice of making you go through your lyrics out loud, line by line, explaining them, and then asking your band how it makes them feel. Was that a what-the-fuck moment for you?

JEREMY: This is probably not the most sexy answer for this, but I had known going into it that this is just what was going to happen. I was prepared for it. I had talked to bands that worked with him, and I knew all the lore about Ross Robinson. All of it. So I went in knowing that I had to be open in these sorts of ways, and knowing that most [of the albums he’s produced] feature the singers of the bands crying—but I am someone who is incapable of crying. Unless I’m fucking watching a Pixar movie, then maybe I’ll get a tear down my face. Otherwise, I can’t think of the last time I cried. Probably not since I was a child. Even when my mom passed, I had tears falling out of my face, but I didn’t have that release of a hard cry. It doesn’t happen for me. I would fucking love it, too, because I know it would feel so good.

But working with Ross. The vulnerability in that moment is really extreme, not only because I am doing this in front of a stranger—being Ross Robinson—but because I know my band. These are the guys that are my family, and the guys in my band have never questioned anything I’ve ever written before because that’s just my job, and they give me the space to do what I’m going to do. So for all of the sudden to have to be this open with them about stuff… I mean, we’re from Los Angeles. We don’t say how we ever really feel about anything. I never know how they really feel about things and they never know how I really feel about things. I was anxious to see how they would respond. So to come to find out that all of us were extremely supportive of one another, that was nice.

I think that those sessions with Ross, what they did for me therapy-wise, was that they made me feel really supported. Everyone, especially Ross, would constantly remind me: “We all have your back. The point of all this is that we have your back and we want to make the best foundation possible for you to do what you need to do on top of it. So everybody in this room is going to be playing their best. Every note of music that’s going to come out is in support of your emotions and feelings.” That’s what was so important to Ross in doing those things.

When we spoke in December, you made a comment about how Stage Four was the easiest record you ever wrote because there was so much material to draw from. But then you said, “When you’re starting from scratch and having to be like, what am I singing about today? That’s hard.” So what was the first topic or motif you remember clicking with when you started working on Spiral?

JEREMY: That idea of that dread and anxiety I was describing, which I think is a pretty universal feeling that just about every one of us goes through at some point in our lives. Like, most of us do the same routine where you wake up and you look at your phone and you’re like, “Welp, now my day is off to a bad start!” I remember hearing an interview with Ben Gibbard, or maybe Jenny Lewis, about how they sleep with their phone in the other room when they go to bed. God bless them for that. But also, I think it was Ben Gibbard who talked about how even in the morning, when he wakes up, he exercises and drinks coffee and has a meal, and then, maybe two hours after he’s awake, he’ll go check his phone. I can only imagine how much better your day starts that way. Like, oh my God, what a dream.

The first song we wrote for this record is a song called “Altitude,” and in that song I say, “I spiral in a straight line, like some clever reaction / I didn’t know how to feel, was I impressed that it happened?”—which is me taking the piss out of myself. There’s this idea that all of us are going through this tornado of emotions most days, where we feel out of control and then we still have to go out and do a job, or show up for people that we love, or show up for people that we care about, or show up for people that we’re taking care of, or whatever it is. Whatever our life duty is, we still have to do it, even when things aren’t so good up here [in your head]. That’s the straight line aspect: It’s about having to move forward. So when I say I’m taking the piss out of myself, I say that because it’s like saying, “Wow, even when you’re going through all this, you still think you need to be clever about it” [laughs].

Before we wrap this up I wanted to talk about one more thing. For people who don’t know, you and your ex-partner have spent years adopting very senior rescue dogs. You’d spend however much time the dog had left, and then the dog would pass and you would rescue another one. And I remember the first time you told me about this, just thinking to myself that I could never handle that. Like, I still hard cry about my dog who passed three years ago. This practice would devastate me. But you keep doing it. I know you’re still co-parenting dogs with your ex. What does this say about who you are?

JEREMY: Well… as we know, senior dogs are not the first pick of the litter when you’re at a shelter. In general, it’s not a good situation for them. It’s even terribly heartbreaking that they’ve ended up there, and more often than not, it’s because of a circumstance that is really sad. You can only imagine how scary it is for them, and—especially if it’s a kill shelter—no one is going to take these dogs. Also, a lot of them have health issues, which has been really hard to navigate because my partner and I were not ever the kind of people who were very financially stable. So we’ve taken financial risks with this stuff.

But you know, it’s nice to have a pet that’s lived some form of life. It’s really nice to know that whatever life this dog had before, you’re going to give them in these last few years the best life they could have possibly had. Our dog Lemon, who we currently share, like, it’s very clear that this dog had puppies and was just ditched. She had been through the system twice, which is crazy to think about. She had been taken to a shelter by two different owners over time. I cannot imagine giving this dog up! She is the nicest dog in the entire world.

I don’t know if I’m getting to the core of an answer here, but ultimately, my ex and I, we have both lost people in our lives. And maybe, in some way, without even fully realizing it, we kind of just know that if we were able to get through that, we could probably get through this. Not that it makes it any easier—every time we’ve ever had to put a pet down, it was awful—but you sign yourself up for that when you get any pet. You know that day is going to come eventually. So ultimately, we just want to do as much as we can for these dogs and cats because we know we’ll be able to get there together. We know we can just be there for them. Whether we’re fully conscious of it or not, we just want to make sure this dog feels as much love as possible at the end. What that says about me, I don’t know.

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I.

When I tell you that I overanalyzed and fucking agonized over this decision, I am not overstating the ordeal. It was 2002, five years after we’d broken up. Five years after we stumbled out of a major-label bidding war without that much-ballyhooed seven-figure record deal, sure, but personally and emotionally drained nonetheless. We spent a great deal of our short lifespan as a band perpetually worried that every decision we made was the “wrong” or “right” one—whether it was the musical direction of a song or the price of a t-shirt—but it felt like we were always using someone else’s measurements. As a band, we very rarely used the words “selling out” to describe such decisions in conversation, but let’s be honest: We were hardcore kids who came up in the late eighties. Of course we were concerned about the perception of selling out.

There were always so many small choices to make, like the time we turned down the chance to play a massive show in Washington D.C. with Quicksand and CIV because we’d already committed to play a 200-capacity show in New York with Garden Variety—and keeping our word, we decided, was clearly the righteous thing to do. (I still back that.) But there were also the more consequential and well-documented choices, like the way we very publicly signed a multi-album deal to Revelation Records in 1995 as a smug fuck-you to the major labels who wanted to sign us, only for them to shrug, undeterred, saying they’d be happy to buy us out of our contract anyway. (And in at least one case, that they’d be happy to buy Revelation outright if it meant having us.) The more popular we became, the more complicated these choices seemed to be, and this tension undoubtedly contributed to our inevitable implosion. Constantly having to calculate every decision you make according to a vague moral rubric can be exhausting for even the most well-meaning band of hardcore kids.

So when that email arrived five years later, presenting us with the opportunity to license one of our songs for a TV car commercial, so help me God, I was mortified. I could only stare blankly at the wall and treat the whole thing like a philosophical question—like, is it even selling out if you’re not actually a band anymore? Five years after we’d played our final note at a youth center in Bielefeld, Germany, I was still putting other people’s judgments in front of my own thoughts and needs, as if no time had passed at all.

II.

A few years ago, my friend Dan Ozzi put out a book whose premise partly rests on the observation that people just don’t care about selling out like they used to. That he was able to convince eleven fairly major bands, both active and disbanded, to come together under the umbrella of a book called Sellout speaks to this assertion. There was certainly a time when no one would have wanted to be caught dead next to that word, but today, the term “selling out” has lost almost all its sting. What happened?

For one thing, words like that, over time, lose their punch because they lose their meaning. Which is to say that as our community grew, and as our bands and other artists scaled along with that growth, it began to feel like the ever-expanding net of “selling out” was being used to absorb everything. Did your band sign to In-Effect? Sellout. Are you playing a club with barricades? Sellout. Did your third album feature midtempo songs and actual singing? Sellout. Does your record label use barcodes? Sellout. Did Converse give you free sneakers? Sellout. They sell your fanzine at Tower Records? Sellout. Well, OK, that last one happened to me in 1995, but still, the point is there: Barring a complete fealty to the idea of never doing anything that Fugazi didn’t do, we were all most likely doomed to go down for one thing or another.

By the early 2000s, though, and especially at around the same time that we were approached with the idea of doing that commercial, there seemed to be a cultural shift happening among the younger generation of kids. These were kids who, I realize now, grew up in an era where Green Day and the Offspring were literal rock stars and summer vacations meant going to the immensely popular (and unabashedly corporate-branded) Vans Warped Tour. These kids were wholly unbothered by the reality that even some of the more righteous hardcore indie labels had agreements with the Sony-owned RED and the Warner-owned ADA for distribution, much less so whenever a band signed with a major. They were also part of the Napster generation who grew up downloading countless gigabytes of free music, so they didn’t begrudge bands for getting paid in other ways—including brand partnerships and commercial and TV licensing. For a huge swath of young people, the old ways of talking about selling out had become archaic.

This early millennium version of punk was disconcerting to me, but I also didn’t feel like it was my place to call the shots anymore. The ways in which I expressed my “punkness” were unique to my lived experience; they were based on a very specific set of circumstances at a very specific point in time. This kind of laissez-faire, anything-seems-to-go permissiveness, however, reflected the new generation’s own lived experience. I still believed it was an over-correction at the time—I may have joked that we were paving our way into a bleak future of “Monster Energy Drink Sunday Matinees”—but admittedly, I also found something strangely liberating about the approach. It was like saying, “Hey. How about we all just like what we like and do what we do, and whenever anyone is seriously fucking up, we’ll let you know.” It wasn’t perfect by any means—and some truly awful things came out of it—but in spite of its failures and dissents, rejecting the idea of “selling out” as a harsh binary actually helped to reveal the failure of sellout ideology as a whole: It heralded the idea of a punk culture that honors individual agency and personal accountability over fear and social punishment.

III.

Touché Amoré came out of the next generation after that, which means that the sheer amount of choices that have been made available to them since forming in 2007—in the world after Fuse and Fall Out Boy—quite likely dwarf whatever I had gone through ten years earlier. Through it all, they’ve been widely viewed as one of our most thoughtful and ethical bands, and for singer Jeremy Bolm, that means putting a fine point on what his virtues are. In a 2020 interview for The Creative Independent, he put it in these terms: “If I’m able to survive financially and I’m able to be proud of the work that we’ve done—and didn’t compromise any of our integrity, which I don’t think we would ever do in any circumstance—that’s enough for me. Failure would be doing things that we’re not comfortable with and regretting them later.”

I was struck by this last note about failure for two reasons. First, because it places integrity as his primary measure of success, but more interestingly, because while “doing things that we’re not comfortable with” can certainly be seen as the first step towards a bad decision, it’s also known to be the first step towards learning and growth—traits that are vital to us, whether you’re a band or a human being. In advance of Touché Amoré’s upcoming sixth album, Spiral in a Straight Line, I spoke with Jeremy about this personal ideal, and he was quite frank about how, even under best intentions, he’s still made mistakes along the way.

“One time, when we were on tour with AFI, a shoe company—forgive me for not remembering which one—was like, ‘Hey. We’ll give you X amount of money to fly to Hamburg to play a super small show that will be free for your audience on this day,’” he recalls, for a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “We were like, ‘Yo! We’ll get paid, free flights, free accommodations, and play a show in Hamburg, and then rejoin the tour!’—because there happened to be a week off on the AFI tour where they were doing festivals and we were going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere. It felt so serendipitous, so we were like, ‘Let’s do it!’ But then we got there and it became very apparent that this was not advertised. Nobody knew we were even doing it. They were supposed to be giving away tickets at a record store that did not advertise that they had the tickets. At this point, we were doing pretty well in Germany. So for us, we thought this show would be a home run, a super small show in a town that we do well in, and it would be really rowdy because it was on a boat. But then we got there, and we had the horseshoe when we played—people weren’t even up front. We were playing mostly to staff members and maybe twelve people that were there because they knew who our band was. It was one of the most humiliating experiences, and that was one where it felt like we didn’t really think this one through.” He laughs, then adds, “I can’t blame us for taking that chance, but it made us realize we had to think a little deeper about this stuff.”

There are always multiple trains of thought that go into making any decision, and sometimes, of course, money plays a role. But over the last several years, I’ve started identifying myself as “an experience collector,” as someone who just wants to know what will follow from making certain decisions or who just wants to know what it feels like to turn left when I’ve always turned right. I’m not trying to purposely fuck up—I fuck up enough by accident, thank you very much—but I do also know that I’ve never really learned anything of value from not fucking up. If we want to experience growth in this community, it’s crucial that we cut ourselves some slack and give each other the permission to go experience success or defeat for ourselves. This is how we learn.

As Jeremy insists, “We all need a big slice of humble pie every now and again. It’s so important. So would I change those experiences? Fuck no.”

IV.

In the end, for a short period of time in Germany, a car commercial with one of our songs in it aired on television. It was, quite frankly, a non-event. The commercial itself just repurposed some footage from the moon landing, introduced a new car, and then managed to slip in ten seconds total of our song—without giving the viewer any sort of real clue as to what connects those three things in the first place. One YouTube commenter said, “Love Texas is the Reason, but this was definitely a horrible choice of music for the commercial,” and I’m inclined to agree. Another commenter, this time on Reddit, offered, “I wish bands would be in more car commercials lol. I remember reading that the Modest Mouse song in a car commercial netted them more money than their entire career up to that point.” This was also true for us. By a lot. But for the most part, no one really cared. Anyone who felt like we “sold out” said their piece and moved on with their lives. As did we.

I don’t regret this decision. That was not a given at the time that we made it. You can trust me when I say that I know all of the ethical arguments against licensing songs for commercial use, but—and I can only speak for myself here—I honestly just wanted to experience this for myself. It felt weird to get self-righteous about putting a song on television knowing how much I actually love watching television; it felt weird to get self-righteous about car companies, as if I never drive in cars. The person at the advertising agency was also a legitimate fan, a friend of a friend of our European booking agent, and that mattered to me. I did not believe I was better than them because they chose a more traditional job to survive. Staying alive is what we all have in common.

I wish I could give you more of a cautionary tale, like the one Jeremy gave, but the conclusion to my part of this story doesn’t end like that. In this story, one year after the commercial aired, I was hit by a tow truck in California and found myself unable to walk—and unable to work—for almost six months. My incredibly generous employer at the record store I managed offered to pay my rent until I could come back, but it was that commercial money, which I’d saved for a rainy day, that ultimately covered the rest of my debts and expenses until I was able to start generating an income again. Whatever you think of that commercial, I owe some part of my existence today to the fact that I made that decision the way I did in 2002. You can call it whatever you want, but those ten seconds of music kind of saved my life.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Jeremy Bolm of Touché Amoré.

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