One band absolutely dominated the hardcore conversation this year, and they did it by working way, way harder than anyone else. Affable Boston bruisers Haywire spent 2025 playing sweaty, cathartic, extremely fun live shows in every VFW Hall and skate park from sea to shining sea. Within 12 months, they rocked venues in all 50 states, no exaggeration. Their sets, captured and broadcast by whoever was brave enough to hold up cellphones in high stagedive-density areas, only grew bigger and wilder. Along the way, Haywire got really, really good at performing their exceedingly simple basher anthems,. They are a grassroots sensation, a legend in the making. But Haywire’s debut full-length Conditioned For Demolition came out last year. Their only 2025 record was Shirts Vs. Skins, a split EP with No Guard. So this is a Chappell Roan 2024 situation. I can’t salute Haywire’s golden moment on this list, and this list is missing something without them.
Honestly, this list is probably missing a lot. 2025 is the year that I stopped writing my monthly hardcore column. Early in the year, I went to a show that I was going to cover for the column, and I suddenly realized that I had nothing to say about it. Hardcore is still a vast and exciting subculture, but I never want to force my enthusiasm for anything, and that’s what I was starting to do with that column. I’d been using the column as motivation to get out to more shows and to check out more random Bandcamp records. Since then, I’ve missed a bunch of big shows, including the triumphant moment when Haywire returned to Richmond, selling out the cavernous Canal Club on a Tuesday night and headlining a killer bill with Naysayer and Jivebomb and Cloakroom and Destiny Bond, charging just $10 for tickets. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go. I promise you, I wanted to go. Life just gets in the way sometimes.
Hardcore is live music. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the live music. At this point, I get antsy at shows where nobody is slamming into anyone else or jumping onto anyone else’s heads. I get bored when I’m not in danger. But even without factoring in the revivifying full-immersion chaos of the live show, a hardcore record can be a beautiful thing, even or especially when it just wants to be ugly.
A lot of my favorite 2025 albums came from hardcore bands, or bands with roots in hardcore, but they aren’t necessarily hardcore albums. In past years, I’ve used this list to spotlight a lot of those records. Hell, I put High Vis at #1 last year. The last two Turnstile albums topped this list. But I’m not doing that this time, mostly because I didn’t want this list to become a celebration of the hardcore-adjacent crossover stars of the moment. Turnstile, Militarie Gun, Scowl, Home Front, the Armed, Spiritual Cramp — all these bands made 2025 albums that I really, really liked. None of them are on this list. Instead, this year’s list is all brutality, no crossover. It’s still got plenty of music that’s not pure fastball hardcore, but I’m keeping the focus tighter here. It just felt like the thing to do.
This list is also full-length LPs only, even though that’s a dubious distinction in hardcore. (The #1 album on this list is 13 minutes long.) So it feels at least slightly ridiculous to exclude Mil-Spec, Crush Your Soul, xWeaponx, No Idols, Eliminators, Azshara, Balmora, Febuary, Grand Scheme, Missing Link, and who knows how many others because they made EPs instead of albums. But life isn’t fair. When you make up your fake rules, you need to stick by them.
Even in a year when I wasn’t chronicling the hardcore world as closely as before, there’s plenty of great stuff that could’ve appeared on this list if I’d been in a slightly different mood when I put it together. If you like the stuff here, I would encourage you to check out recent joints from Drain, Gasket, Gumm, Gridiron, Habak, Age Of Apocalypse, Raw Brigade, C4, and Alienator. I’m sure I missed plenty off stuff, too, so please drop recommendations in the comments below. My real advice, though, is to get out to some shows. You’ll get a better sense of what’s going on from that than you will from reading this.
10
What a concept: A band with the word “Youth” in its name where the members are actually young. These Seudo kids play in about a million different LA bands, and most of them sound a whole lot like one another. On Nobody Gets Down Like…, they play fast, mean, anthemic no-frills basement punk with just the right level of dumpster-wall echo. If you were bummed at Gel’s messy implosion, you might find some of that lawless spirit here.
09
There’s more than a little death metal and maybe even some grindcore in this Boise trio’s ultra-aggressive grunt-splatter speed-chug. If you’re not in the mood to wallow in someone else’s phlegm, it can be tough sledding. But even if Idaho isn’t your particular flavor of nasty, it’s hard to dispute the focused, ferocious power on display. Nobody, in any genre, is making grimier music than Ingrown at this moment. But there’s more to the grime. On Idaho, Ingrown cover “Asylum,” from frontman Ross Hansen’s father’s ’80s band State Of Confusion, a cool statement of second-generation hardcore pride. Then out of nowhere, Idaho ends with a gorgeous Irish folk instrumental. If they find a way to integrate that into their blitzkrieg on the next record, who knows what could happen?
08
These days, every half-decent hardcore scene on the planet has at least a dozen bands who studiously emulate the chest-thumping mosh-music that came out of New York City in the ’80s and ’90s. Lots of those non-New York NYHC bands are great, but this music hits different when it comes from the actual five boroughs. Staten Island’s Combust started out strong and then got better by touring tirelessly, and they hit a new apex on Belly Of The Beast, their second full-length. They bring a rare sense of swagger to their neck-breaking metallic riffage, their clipped rap-adjacent vocals, and their blood-rushing two-step parts. Sometimes, it feels good to know, with great certainty, that the lead shouter is wearing a XXXL Polo jersey and some Timberlands.
07
Thanks to a ridiculously fun live show and a couple of beautifully bruising EPs, Baltimore’s End It were underground legends long before they got around to recording a proper full-length. In fact, I wasn’t sure that they even needed to drop an album. Some bands are just better in 10-minute chunks, and End It seemed like prime candidates. But here, they have figured out how to stretch out their scabrous, charismatic bounce without compromising it. Wrong Side Of Heaven is 22 minutes of tight, polished, crowd-pleasing mosh music that builds on End It’s past records in subtle ways — a couple dashes of introspection, an occasional reminder that frontman Akil Godsey can actually sing. But the greatest moments on Wrong Side are exactly what you’d hope: The anthemic singalongs about how End It will leave you left right left right, right where you stand.
06
The mid-’90s Victory Records roster was full of heavy hitters — Earth Crisis, Integrity, Snapcase, Strife — but New Jersey’s Deadguy were probably the label’s scariest, most intense band. Deadguy broke up in the immediate aftermath of their 1995 classic Fixation On A Co-Worker. Returning three decades later, their jagged, misanthropic majesty is shockingly undiminished. The seasick, guttural, math-damaged riffage of Near-Death Travel Services serves as a reminder that noise-rock and metallic hardcore sprang from the same underground wellspring, and Tim Singer’s acerbic, strangulated roar still has few peers. Consider this a warning: “The sky is falling! It’s landing on us!” Bonus points for the way the last song always makes me think that I’ve forgotten to mute an open tab.
05
Hardcore is its own world, with its own canon and rules and communication channels in place. It can be so hermetic and closed-off that you can sometimes forget that it’s really just another branch of the rock ‘n’ roll tree. Destiny Bond never forget. The Denver punks bring a ton of swaggering snarl to the party. They’re fast and mean and surly, and Cloe Madonna Janzen’s screech has such attitudinal confidence hat you can imagine hordes of teenager trying to dress like her. At their best, Destiny Bond sound like the New York Dolls, if they played at Bad Brains speeds. And when they let in actual beauty, like the sighing, jangling guitar on their stunning The Love closer “Don’t Lose Control,” it can hit harder than the nastiest breakdown.
04
In September, we lost Tomas Lindberg to cancer. Lindberg will always be best-known for fronting the towering Swedish melodic death metal band At The Gates, but I remember him best as the voice of Disfear, the D-beat institution whose guturally gargantuan 2008 album Live The Storm is among my all-time favorites. I get some of that same gnarled exhilaration from Better Living Through Static Vision, the debut album from former Blacklisted members George Hirsch and David Walling’s new band Staticlone. Better Living is that real post-apocalyptic cowboy raider music. Between this and the new Deadguy, 2025 is a banner year for unc-status East Coast veterans making ambitiously feral statements that come out on Relapse Records.
03
Skinhead’s “Separate Checks” is a riled-up rant about your deadbeat friends who keep ordering way more food than you and expecting you to pay as much as them. At one point, the band mastermind known as Skull bellows out, “Kyle ordered a red wine and a piece of chocolate cake!” Is that my favorite lyrical moment of 2025? Maybe. Possibly. Do I keep thinking about that line and just chuckling to myself like a psycho? Yes, absolutely, all the time. It’s A Beautiful Day is full of moments like that — honest and real and stupid and almost accidentally eloquent spittle-spray rage-rant sentiments, delivered over riotously catchy oi-hardcore creepy-crawl music. Even at its darkest, this record is a life-affirming achievement simply because of the sheer overwhelming force of personality on display. To properly celebrate what he’s made, I hope Skull buys himself a red wine and a piece of chocolate cake.
02
Here’s the bad thing about Restraining Order: I can’t wear their name on a shirt. If anyone doesn’t know it’s a band, I look like a creep. They should’ve considered my feelings when deciding what to call their band. (Skinhead have the same issue, but it feels more intentional there.) Here’s the good thing about Restraining Order: Everything else. For three full albums now, these guys have been making neck-ripping early-’80s hardcore with verve and spirit and passion. Their songs are catchy and fun and physical, and they make me want to jump around to the point where I may or may not piss blood. Restraining Order’s command of their craft is such that they can experiment with acoustic guitars or classic rock riffage without ever seeming like they’re doing eclecticism for its own sake. They’re just finding new ways to push their frantic pogo anthems even harder. In their first record for a bigger label, Restraining Order don’t switch their style up at all. They’ve become the most consistent band in hardcore. I hope they keep doing this forever.
01
Don’t think. Don’t second-guess. Just feel it. Let the physical sensation travel through your body and feed pure violence into your heart. “What a mess! What a terrible place! I hate everything!” God, it feels good. When you let Burn After Listening infect your sprit, it can transform you on a cellular level. It can reshape you into a being of pure vibrating, incandescent rage. Eight songs. Thirteen minutes. Infinite damage. Burn After Listening is everything that a hardcore record should be. It’s fast and heavy and bracing and pissed-off to the point of psychedelic surrealism. Whenever you’re in a state of stress or panic or anxiety, take a moment to yourself. Turn the lights off. Throw your phone in the ocean. Play this at a brain-liquefying volume. Allow yourself to feel it. When I’m at my lowest, this record makes me believe that I can peel off my own skin and reveal the gleaming, impervious metallic flesh beneath. It’s a frantic bad-vibes masterpiece, an emotional acid bath. It sounds like the end of the world, and I’m so grateful that it exists.
