AM Radio: September 2024
The best new hardcore and community-made music, updated monthly for Anti-Matter.
Summer is definitely over because the fall rush is so here right now. I went through an enormous amount of music this month to bring you 20 of the best new tracks from September—in my opinion!—and the AM Radio playlist has been appropriately updated. This time, Anti-Matter alum like Drug Church, Ian Shelton of Regional Justice Center, Laura Jane Grace, and Many Eyes bring new music to the table, as do Nails, Stateside, Squint, Show Me The Body (featuring High Vis!), Hammok, and many more. There’s no shortage of hardcore styles and personal substance in this month’s update.
The usual disclaimer, of course, still applies: 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. That’s a promise. This month’s selection of standout tracks follows below.
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AGNOSTIC FRONT “God Is Dead” (Glassnote)
Jesse Malin started his first hardcore band, Heart Attack, in 1980, at the age of thirteen. Since then, he’s been one of New York City’s most beloved figures—as a member of D-Generation, as a solo artist, as a co-owner of Niagara (which sits at the site of the legendary hardcore club A7), and as a human being. Late last year, Malin tragically suffered from a rare type of spinal stroke, leaving him immobile from the waist down, and this month, Silver Patron Saints: The Songs of Jesse Malin arrives as both a tribute and a benefit album—to provide financial aid for his ongoing treatment and physical rehabilitation. This contribution from Agnostic Front is not only a trenchant cover of Heart Attack’s most iconic song, it’s proof that a great hardcore song can be just as timeless as any other.
BUY IT: Vinyl
PLANES MISTAKEN FOR STARS “Fix Me” (Deathwish Inc.)
The forthcoming fifth album from Planes Mistaken For Stars, their first in eight years, is called Do You Still Love Me?—and it’s their first since losing singer Gared O’Donnell to cancer in 2021. Recorded somewhere in the middle of his diagnosis and treatment, “Fix Me” is a plaintive and moving introduction to the album: When Gared gets to its coda—“Swipe these tears / Fix forgiveness / Steal back some years / Just say you love me”—the feeling resonates long after the song fades.
TOUCHÉ AMORÉ “Hal Ashby” (Rise)
Touché Amoré have always been great at the incremental, but meaningful evolution, and their forthcoming Spiral In A Straight Line strongly carries that tradition. Quite frankly, Spiral is already one of my favorite Touché records; it’s an album that feels heavy without relying on so many of the lyrical and musical signifiers that we use in hardcore to communicate heaviness. “Hal Ashby,” for one, doesn’t have a distortion pedal in sight and it still hits harder than most of the beatdown records that hit my desk.
BUY IT: Vinyl
STATE POWER “The Year of the Harvest” (White Russian)
My ongoing obsession with the Holland-based State Power is in full swing with the release of The Year of The Harvest—in what can only be described as one of the most successful distillations of the last 20 years of hardcore that I’ve ever heard on one EP. There’s speed, there’s breakneck mosh parts, there’s a dash of metalcore and a smidge of melodicism, and on this, the title track, State Power also throw in a detailed true-to-form crossover guitar lead so as to not leave any era out. Best of all: There are actual songs here. The musicality is intentional and the end result is visceral.
BUY IT: Bandcamp
HAMMOK “One Minute” (Fysisk Format)
Their bio on Spotify reads simply, “Hardcore band from Norway,” but the more Hammok evolves from last year’s compelling “Wannabe (Billboard No.1)", the more that description feels insufficient. Their latest single, “One Minute,” is a tempered, but driving post-punk track with the teeth of a hardcore song and a drive towards inventive new means. It’s a space where vocal manipulation and distorted synths float above the band’s still in-tact aggression—and whatever they want to call this, it works. Sometimes, hardcore is what happens when the spirit overcomes the statute.
BUY IT: Bandcamp
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