To End a Letter
On the eve of our indefinite hiatus, I offer you gratitude—and a gift. Let it be known that we did something special here.
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.
Anti-Matter is ad-free, anti-algorithm, and all about hardcore. For updates on its future, please consider subscribing now. ✨
“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 love this possibility.
Thanks for these months of Anti Matter, it was super interesting to read and for sure it mattered