Dumb Hardcore, Moshers Delight, and Democore

I will admit I’m an annoying, pedantic traditionalist when it comes to hardcore. I’m the living embodiment of this meme. I would be perfectly fine if all I heard were kids ripping off Victim in Pain and the Negative Approach EP for an eternity. If I was around in the 80s and had a fanzine, I might have had a similar diatribe to the fanzine Sold Out, in which a writer points out “some of the greatest regressions in music history” in one issue. In it, the author laments the changes of Black Flag from “hardcore to self-indulgent shit” and 7 Seconds(it specifically says U2 copycats, which is funny to me) to pop, and many more that I won’t include.

I do not think of myself as someone with such regressive tendencies as the enjoyers of hardcore music many decades ago. I find SSD’s then lamented How We Rock enjoyable. I love it when a hardcore band swings for something, even when unsuccessful. But still, when I hear a particular strain of hardcore I like, I latch onto it and never let go. I go through certain eras and excavate until I have lost all interest. Sometimes, it will last a few days; other times, it will persist much longer. For most of December, I mostly listened to 2000s Boston hardcore, particularly the strand responsible for Lockin’ Out and its neighbors.I am slowly making my way through Painkiller Records’ discography. Not all of it is great. An EP from The Prowl was especially forgettable. It led me to a discovery in Step Forward, whose release from 2006 is simply called 10 Songs, which had a stranglehold on me at the end of the year. It was rudimentary and stompy hardcore punk that had fast and two-step parts in equal measure. And probably the biggest draw: ten songs in nine minutes. Those are some of the best words my ears could hope for. I was in heaven.

I could psychoanalyze my obsession with the familiar if I wanted. There was some refuge in listening to aggressive music that was loving retreads of what had happened before. Listening to any type of new music can lead to disappointment and feeling as if I wasted time on something unsatisfying. I could predict exactly where a Mental or Righteous Jams record would go. Any deviations would be slight. The draw is the primitiveness of its structure. Even though I haven’t picked up a guitar seriously in several years, it didn’t take me that long to pick out the various riffs. I don’t mean that as a slight; not every piece of music needs to be some clever composition that only real-deep-in-the-weeds musician nerds would care about. The bands I was listening to were looking backward at the time, reinterpreting where hardcore had been. The youth crew revival was long gone, with something new needing to emerge. But even if those bands weren’t anything unheard of, I can’t deny what the mosh parts did to my brain. All that matters is if I could imagine being driven to leave the comfort of the edge of the pit and become an active participant.

You could look at a song like “Invasion,” which comes halfway through Righteous Jams’ record, Age of Discipline. You first hear a drum beat revolving around the snare drum that launches into a two-step, with guitars then entering. I’ve listened to a million different iterations of what Righteous Jams is doing, but it gets me stoked every time. It builds up some basic tension and then provides a release. Every genre has some version of it. Indie rock has a soft section that explodes into some blown-out wash of distortion as a release. “Invasion” also follows the trope of the band saying their name in the song. There may be fifteen words spoken in the entire song, capping out at around 55 seconds. It is everything I could want from a hardcore song. It isn’t overthought. I can imagine the inception of “Invasion” in a practice space being relatively carefree. It is empty-headed in the best way possible. It is what Chicago hardcore band Punch in The Face would lovingly call “dumb hardcore,” which, in retrospect, reads as a response to the politicized state of the genre in the 90s.

In a video from This is Hardcore in 2012, Rival Mob best expresses a point of view that still dictates what I want on a base level from Hardcore. It comes from a short speech just before they give people exactly what they are looking for. “This first song we’re going to play is not for some political bullshit. It’s not for some tough guy pose. It’s not to make us sound like we’re romantic poets trying to be sensitive. It’s made for one fucking thing: moshing really hard.” After those words, the band moves into their intro song. Bodies quickly move toward the stage and shift in every direction.

Democore, to me, is the truest expression of the point of view that Rival Mob expressed a decade ago. For those who don’t know what that phrase means, it was a term given to bands in the 2010s that put out mostly small releases and whose album art looked like an old demo. The music itself was what could be called straight forward, not looking to reach beyond the bounds of the genre. If you will allow me to use an idiom, the bands were no-frills hardcore. If you were looking for experimentation seeking to expand the bounds of hardcore, you were in the wrong place. Instead, you would get something like United Stance, who released one demo that feels like unabashed New York hardcore worship.

I would point you towards the label Moshers Delight if you wanted to get the best expression of democore. It originally started as a one-page zine and expanded from there. One side would be record reviews, and the other a quick interview. The first release as a label was from Intent and sort of set out an expectation. It was full of the bouncy rhythms and grooves of late 80s New York hardcore. It sounded like people who had spent time listening to the New Breed comp and all the thriving bands that late 80s New York hardcore had produced. A section highlighting Intent in Moshers Delight #5 confirms those suspicions: “Intent started out between Gil and Alex back in late Summer 2011 with the idea to do a New Breed comp styled band.” Other releases on the label followed a similar line and provided some interesting artifacts, including a live Turnstile tape and a Freedom promo where they covered Warzone.

Some of the bands that were on Mohsers Delight were able to move towards something different. I cannot deny that there isn’t much room for development for what we call democore. Mil-Spec is one of the more prominent examples. Listening to their demo and most recent album feels like two different universes. Maybe that is hyperbole, as I can still feel the outlines of “Insight” in later material. But something like the spoken-word track (Belle Epoque) on Marathon feels relatively far from their demo. Fury, too, moved beyond the sort of hardcore that Moshers Delight provided. It is most apparent when you listen to the very underrated Failed Entertainment, which sees Fury broadening their scope and sound in a way that I found very compelling.

Though some limitations are inherent to whatever you categorize as democore, there is something endlessly appealing. It satiates that same urge that I described earlier with 2000s Boston hardcore. There is a very high floor of enjoyment, and at worst, the demo I’m listening to is forgettable and over within eight minutes. But the highs are pretty high for me. I’m having a great time when I listen to “Day Listen” off of Fury’s demo. It packs plenty within a relatively short run-time, which is all I can ask for. It reminds me of all of those wonderful basement or small club shows I’ve been to where a mass of bodies has suffocated me.

Even beyond being such a distilled version of aggressive music, democore seemed to be a necessary response for its participants. It stood out in its very DIY stance, from people making zines and tapes themselves instead of relying on someone else to make something happen. It points back to something that can get lost in that hardcore is counter-culture. It defeats its purpose just to create the same strictures of society but on a subcultural level. This realization is nothing new, and you can find people worrying about the state of punk and hardcore even in the late 80s in the zine Suburban Voice in issue 23, with writer Al Quint lamenting, “It’s made me realize, as I’ve stated before, that the punk scene is no different than anything else — subject to the same prejudices, foibles, phobias, cliques.” It is why there needs to be some purpose behind the aggression for many.

The ultra-DIY stance will sometimes will result in opinions I don’t always agree with, especially when I read things from a decade ago lamenting about “pro-core,” meaning those that moved to a more professionalized version of existing as a band. That point of view is a bit too regressive for me. As long as you’re behaving in a way that is still in line with the original ethics of hardcore, it doesn’t matter to me. But both viewpoints should exist in some way to balance each other out. There should be those bands that are aggressively hardcore and DIY to an almost annoying degree that annoys the shit out of me. It is healthy for any subcultural community.

It is a point of view that, at the end of 2023, I began to see come back. I wouldn’t say there is a democore revival except for a few very vocal participants, ranging from Mundane Moshers to Undivided Attention, two newer zines I’ve read. I won’t do the annoying music writer thing (looking at you, indie sleaze) and try to make some trend happen that isn’t real. But there does seem to be some sort of response to hardcore’s rise from the last few years beginning to bubble up more. I’ll also see some refrains of “We need to bring gatekeeping back” on Twitter. It has become a boilerplate question to ask people about the state of hardcore in any new zine you read nowadays, taking the place of asking people about straight edge in the 80s. I don’t need to be the millionth person to talk about all the outside business interests that have come in. Go to a hardcore fest anywhere in the US, and you will see what I mean. When I went to buy a Killing Time shirt at The Rumble, a hardcore fest in Chicago, the one design I wanted was a collaboration with PBR, and I would have bought it if my size was available.

Though they specifically push back on the term democore, Designated Moshers Unit seems to be flying the flag for the type of hardcore that the tag describes. The first post on their Instagram page lays out DMU’s mission pretty clearly. “Designated Moshers Unit is here to give the people the true sounds of hardcore and punk they so desperately need.” All the releases from the label seem to confirm that original goal. The first release was an eight-minute demo from Ballistic Ax. The songs were compact and full of aggressive diatribes that I would expect from a hardcore punk band. You can also look at a demo from All 4 All that came later in 2023. Its approach is a little different, taking different influences, but has some scene-oriented lyrics (“I fear the trends have/have taken their hold”). “Break The Cycle” also has a fun two-step part that I find endlessly enjoyable.

There are other bands across the country I can point towards as evidence for a democore resurgence. Matter of Fact from Chicago hits a 2000s hardcore note, covering Stop and Think on their demo. Collateral put out a demo on Fortress Records that seems to be gaining some traction. It is still novel enough that I cannot get enough of whatever you want to these newer bands making straightforward hardcore. What all of the newer bands have in common is a lack of pretense, and its attitude can be expressed by one line in the title track for Rival Mob’s 2010 EP: “Hardcore for hardcore. What the fuck else’?”