Shortly after Scowl was handed keys to a modest U-Haul van, the calamities began. During the lonely eastward-bound drive from Tempe, Ariz., where the hardcore group's cross-country tour began in early March, the car sputtered out of gas. After hoofing it several miles on foot to the nearest gas station, the five-piece band learned that there were no gas cans — so the members filled individual water bottles with fuel to get back on the road. A flat tire followed. Scowl was mere days into a five-week run.
Still, spirits remain high. "We're up!" cheers bassist Bailey Lupo, as the band piles back into the van to chat before sound-check at Atlanta's Coca-Cola Roxy. The group's tour woes dissipate once guitarist Mike Bifolco recalls how someone in a banana costume crowd-surfed at a Nashville gig the night before. Someone brings up how at another recent stop, much of the crowd was screaming the words of a new single, the hooky and blazing "B.A.B.E," back at them. "How?" exclaims lead vocalist Kat Moss. The song is barely three weeks old. "I haven't learned the words and they knew it before me," adds an awestruck Malachi Greene, the band's second guitarist.
In the six years they've been making music together as Scowl, the cohort has gone from playing self-booked shows to friends in their local Santa Cruz, Calif. hardcore scene to opening for Limp Bizkit at Madison Square Garden. Now the band is headlining venues holding thousands of people, sometimes selling them out. Within that same time frame, hardcore — more an ethos defined by a scrappiness and furious energy than a musical genre — has transformed from an underground subculture bursting with agile songs into a mainstream, far more diverse cultural phenomenon, as seen on major festival stages and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Over the last few years, heavy bands of varied sensibilities including Knocked Loose (hailing from Oldham County, Ky.) Turnstile (from Baltimore, Md.), Code Orange (who rose out of Pittsburgh's metalcore community), and Scowl have become some of the unwitting torchbearers for this paradigm shift. Hardcore has never been more visible than it is right now, yet the moment arrives right as the musical tradition is in flux.
The band is releasing Are We All Angels on April 4, its first full-length since decamping from hardcore label Flatspot for the tastemaking indie outfit Dead Oceans (home to Mitski, Khruangbin and Toro y Moi). It also marks the first time its members have fully stepped away from their day jobs — as yerba mate delivery drivers, Trader Joe's checkout employees, running homeless shelters, teaching toddlers motor skill development, and as baristas — to sustain the band full-time. With the album, "it's like, okay, now we really have to do this s*** full time,'" explains Moss. "We're really stepping into our artist bag."
Scowl's success, along with that of other Northern California-based hardcore groups, including Sunami and Drain, has caused their own local scenes to swell with new intensity. Moss first met Greene in the mosh pit at 924 Gilman, the storied Berkeley, Calif. punk club, in 2017. Back then "if 80 people showed up, we're like, 'this show is huge,' " says Greene, who booked DIY shows around the Santa Cruz area for years. The pre-pandemic scene was "really small — we would play shows with each other with 20 people in attendance," adds Josef Alfonso, who fronts Sunami. Alfonso says that when he first started going to shows in the Bay, the scene was very "white-dominated." Now it's not uncommon to see hundreds of kids at shows, and he's noticed that more and more young fans, often people of color and women-identifying, are starting bands there. "Hardcore is the most accessible it's ever been for non-white men, and that's really f****** important to me," Moss says. "I think every change [to hardcore] has been for the better."
In 2019, Moss and Greene started releasing music as Scowl with drummer Cole Gilbert and bassist Lupo, who they knew from other bands in the area. (Bifolco, who lives in Philadelphia and played in hardcore bands, would join the group a few years later.) Initially, Scowl set out with the goal to make it to the Sound & Fury lineup, a beloved hardcore festival in Southern California; the prospect of playing alongside legends and peers there was "the biggest deal" ever, says Moss. Aside from that, the group aspired mostly to jam with friends around town.
Then COVID-19 hit. During lockdown Scowl started writing new music, with an eye to make a full-length hardcore album after releasing two EPs. "But even then we expanded beyond that a little bit," says Moss. "Just because none of us are the kind of people who are that afraid of doing things out of the box." That experiment became the band's debut LP How Flowers Grow, released in late 2021. Laden with thick squalls of grungy guitars giving way to metal licks (and one springy new wave stomp), with Moss' vocals oscillating between eviscerating growls and more melodic turns, the songs deftly mused on alienation and what happens when one becomes unrecognizable to the self. The singles that Scowl has released from the newest LP, Are We All Angels, also deliberately break with hardcore song structures by injecting strains of '90s alt rock, emo and pop punk into the fold.
Historically, hardcore has prized blistering riffs played as expeditiously as possible, with the occasional breakdown, before speeding things up again. Songs end just as fast, sometimes in under a minute. By breaking with form, Scowl's take on hardcore was considered atypical out the gate to hardcore traditionalists but had an uncompromising edge to it. Once pandemic measures lifted, the band's incandescent live sets and hectic tour schedule rocketed its name far outside of the local scene. The speed at which that happened — going from playing Sonic drive-throughs to Coachella sets — changed the band on a molecular level. Each member was living out what they'd fantasized about, albeit with a brutal tradeoff. Their relationships back home were strained. During a lengthy 2023 tour with Militarie Gun and MSPAINT, Moss was sick almost the entire time.
"The only way that I found to survive it was to just check out, disassociate, and just have my physical body show up," says Moss, an experience she immortalizes viscerally on "B.A.B.E." "And it sounds like it was a terrible experience. It wasn't. It was amazing. It's this dream-like experience, while also feeling like the fire of hell," she laughs. That duality informed the mood of Are We All Angels, whose body horror-imbued lyrics intentionally juxtapose the album's more propulsive instrumental throttles. "You could be listening to this song next to the beach on a sunny summer California day, very '90s teen movie vibe," she says of the record. "But then the lyrics are like: 'I'm pretty sad, actually. I'm grieving, and I feel alone.' "
The jump from getting a better feel for their instruments onstage to running a full-tilt operation is something they're all still admittedly feeling out. But when they find themselves missing routines, and even scanning groceries as they wait for a tow truck on a dark highway shoulder, Moss thinks about how their current ascent could be a mere "blip," as she describes it.
"You never really know how long we're gonna have this opportunity, or when life is going to hit us in some way that's going to change it forever," she says. "And so it's like, 'F*** it, I'm gonna go get the good local coffee, I'm gonna try the local yummy food spot, and enjoy the view. And sing my little heart out and giggle with my best friends.'"
Yet Scowl's accomplishments have not come without tension. Given the group's role in hardcore's ongoing evolution, Scowl has been touted as either the best or worst thing to happen to the movement. Moss, often a troubling focal point of these gripes, has been accused of being an "industry plant," and the degree to which she sings or screams on specific songs is picked apart by listeners online. "If Scowl was just a bunch of dudes, would people even care?" wonders DeeDee Kern, of MSPAINT. "Because there's a woman in the band, is that why people are weird about what they can do and can't do?"
These complaints also eschew a fundamental truth about hardcore: It's never been static. Bad Brains, one of hardcore's progenitors, shredded alongside reggae rhythms. Black Flag didn't always turn out breakneck riffs, yet that by no means dampened its intensity. "Even on [Scowl's] first album, there's a f****** song with saxophone and singing on it," adds Kern. "If a band saying they're hardcore and sounding like Scowl shatters your reality, there's something wrong with the reality, not the band." The hardcore community has always held an anti-establishment mindset, and that "selling out" either to a record label, a corporation, or other systems of power was tantamount to a cardinal sin. Some have called out Scowl for choosing to work with brands like Taco Bell and Converse, yet the band says it's cautious about who it aligns itself with. "I think the true definition of selling out is when you do something that makes it hard for you to sleep at night," Greene says.
Last year, the band dropped out of playing at South by Southwest in protest of the organization's ties with defense contractors. A few months later, the band declined to play at the UK's Download Festival because it did not agree with one of its sponsors, Barclays, and its connection to Israel. SXSW later ended its partnership with a defense contractor and Barclays suspended sponsorship for the UK Download festival as a result of multiple artist boycotts.
"It's important as artists to remember that this industry is built on our backs, and our art, and us performing and us showing up," Moss says. "And if we don't align with stuff, we have every choice in the book to say no. We all got into punk and hardcore to do what the f*** we want, we question this s***. We question ourselves, we question our best friends, we question our family, we question the systems at large. That doesn't change just because we're playing bigger festivals or bigger stages." The guys nod in agreement. "I don't feel comfortable aligning myself with things I don't agree with, no matter if we're making money or not," says Gilbert. "Especially if we're making money."
As the world has changed, so too has hardcore. If emerging bands aspire to eventually play bigger rooms, it's practically impossible to not grapple in some way with influencer culture's impact on being an artist — musicians are expected to cultivate a robust personal brand, while writing consistently bar-raising songs, as a means of grabbing audience's limited attention. Artists often must work with brands to make ends meet, given that the previous mechanism of touring and selling records isn't as profitable for bands anymore. Hand-drawn fliers that once proliferated record stores are posted to Instagram; bands tweet tour dates along with memes.
But Scowl, a band composed of millennial-to-Gen Z cuspers, has dialed into an approach that's working for them within these mechanisms: Remaining skeptical while "practicing sincerity," as Moss puts it. You won't catch them doing any TikTok dances. The members' natural goofiness makes its way onto their social media, and they make a point to elevate homegrown initiatives they believe in, such as a benefit for the all-ages nonprofit foundation Crossthread. "If you pay attention to their social media, they actively support their local scene and smaller bands," says Alfonso of Sunami. "Yes, they're growing. But they're also trying to bring up the whole community."
Yet even though the stages might be larger, and the songs more ambitious, Scowl's goals largely haven't changed since the band first began noodling around together (although Moss wants to play in Japan one day). Then again, the alternative doesn't faze them. "Hell, half of us have local bands that we still play at home with," says Gilbert. "If this ended, we would just be back out playing and on the floor in front of like six people," Bifolco grins. "Being like, yeahhh!"
"I just want the music to connect with the people who need it the most," Moss says. "That's the bottom line, especially right now with the way that the world is and this fearful rise of fascism happening. I don't know what's going to be a constant. But I know art will always be constant."
Copyright 2025 NPR
