AM Radio: December 2023
The best new hardcore and community-made music, updated monthly for Anti-Matter.
It’s the final AM Radio of 2023—delivered a little bit early to beat the holidays—but I’ve still managed to sneak nine new songs onto the playlist that are in heavy rotation around here. I’ll speak about this more when we do a semi-proper year-end roundup in the coming week, but hardcore’s global presence is stronger than ever, and this month’s picks show it—with new entries coming from the UK, France, Germany, and Norway. That’s exciting to me.
As always, AM Radio is not a running list of every new release, but a running list of select songs that I have personally handpicked to share. This is what I’m actually listening to; no one else influences what gets added. Below are a few of my favorites.
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HAMMOK “Wannabe (Billboard No. 1)” (Thirty Something, November 2023)
Allow me to be hyperbolic: I fucking love this song. It’s the kind of song where there’s a new lift every minute, a new opportunity to pause and say, I fucking love this song. The lyrics are vivid and impactful, the energy is dynamic, and it’s hard to fault a song that can turn “I worship cannibals” into a hook. Hammok is making a strong case for Norwegian hardcore in 2024.
BUY IT: Bandcamp
FORGIVE “Vacant” (Useless Pride, December 2023)
There was definitely a time when the divide between the opposite ends of “hardcore” and “emo” had drifted so far apart it was becoming difficult to connect the two anymore. France’s Forgive fills that gap: “Vacant” has all the speed and vitality of classic hardcore—in this case, think Verbal Assault—but its melodic undercurrent builds a sturdy bridge between anger and melancholy.
BUY IT: Vinyl
PRIVATE MIND “Disconnected” (Triple B, October 2023)
When it comes to New York bands from the ‘90s—and I’ve mentioned this on Instagram before—one of the best and most unheralded of them all was Shift. It might be for that reason that I’ve been particularly smitten with this song from the new Private Mind EP: “Disconnected” has the same kind of low-slung post-hardcore groove that made a song like “Spacesuit” so effortlessly cool without losing the earnest lyricism that binds Private Mind to their Long Island hardcore roots.
SPITE HOUSE “Losing Skin” (New Morality Zine, October 2023)
Montreal’s Spite House have been building a solid reputation for themselves since the release of their self-titled album in the summer of 2022, but while we wait for the follow-up, this cover of Seaweed’s “Losing Skin” brings one of their more substantial influences into focus and skillfully reveals the timelessness of a true classic.
GUMM “Slogan Machine” (Convulse, May 2023)
They’ve toured with Drain, Restraining Order, Fiddlehead, and Militarie Gun all in the last year, and yet, somehow this year’s Gumm album was a blindspot for me. Better late than never, though, and I’ve been playing the hell out of Slogan Machine all month. The title track is the kind of scathing hardcore rebuke that I live for.
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Gumm's "Slogan Machine" is the most underrated album of the year. Every time I listen to it I find something new I love about it.
Thanks for including my band (Spite House). Every song on here is awesome! Love the Gumm LP