2025 Predictions: Scarab, SFU, HVHC and more

Predicting the major trends and microfiche weirdness of the upcoming year in hardcore

Hardcore is a fast-moving subculture. Most people don’t stay involved for long, so every year has a little bit of a different flavour as kids find, celebrate and then get bored with bands, sounds and trends from bygone eras. Certain things have more staying power. We’re entering year five of the tough-guy renaissance, but even then, the lack of huge tours and big records in that lane from 2024 hints at a possible sea-change on the horizon.

I heard 2024 referred to by many as a “rebuilding year”. I think the splintering and lack of codification made it one to remember. Hopefully 2025 will be even more fun. It feels like we’re entering January as a freshly squished ball of Play-Doh. I can’t wait to see who and what will mould the back half of 2020’s hardcore.

That said, it’s not like we’re coming in blind. There was no pandemic-style extinction event making things impossible to predict. I’m fairly confident about what might happen this year. Below are some predictions, starting with generalized, scene-wide takes and getting more granular as we go.

Too Many Fucking Fests

I’m going deeper on this for a piece that’s sure to piss some of you off, but I’ll touch on it briefly here. There aren’t enough big/medium sized bands to draw +1,000 people to every city in North America for an entire weekend. At risk of sounding like an asshole, why would I fly to California for Sound and Fury when I can drive to Detroit and see 2/3 of the same lineup?

They’re watering down the product, and since most of these fests are trying to sell thousands of tickets, they’re pulling from the same “general interest” pile with very little regional variety or even cohesive vibe. Fest organizers either need to start scaling this shit down or just kick back and let somebody else get a crack at it. I don’t see how six or seven big hardcore fests per year in the United States is sustainable long-term.

Scarab Takeover

Everyone knows the upcoming Scarab LP will be big. Their catalog up to this point is basically perfect. They get co-signs from grizzled old tastemakers and 22-year-old Twitter celebrities alike. There will be no surprise when this record is near the top of everyone’s 2025 AOTY list. You don’t come here to read obvious takes, though, so let me get into my Stephen A. Smith/Nick Wright bag and say something crazy. If this record is good (and it most likely will be), it will facilitate an American Nightmare/Trapped Under Ice style sea-change in the trajectory of hardcore.

Here’s why. Everyone in the band has paid their dues, doing cool, high-profile shit for the last decade-plus. They have connections and backing from all the “right people”. That’s basically the recipe for overnight success in hardcore, but it’s not the only thing Scarab has going for them. They also play a style of music close enough to what’s popping now for people to instantly like it, but different enough to feel entirely fresh, especially for new kids.

Scarab are basically doing Terror worship with HM2 pedals, blast-beats and crazy vocals. Adding that little bit of Deathwish-era chaos into an already successful formula could flip the world of heavy hardcore on its head, especially if they come with the right aesthetic. The shape-up fade, 90’s hip-hop inspired crew guy persona is getting a little played out. Scarab bringing any sort of weirdness to their presentation would be a welcome change for myself and probably many others. The beautiful thing is, you can still be a gang-affiliated criminal and listen to Scarab because their music is hard as shit. You just gotta put on some green army pants and grow your hair out a bit.

I’m excited to hear the new material regardless. Everyone in the band has an excellent track record, and at the very least this LP should be no different. I also think they’re in the right spot at the right time to do something special. We’ll have to wait and see.

“Hudson Valley and friends” birth the new wave of fest bands

Look, before you get on my ass about who’s in what band or where they come from, please take two things into consideration. 1) I don’t know the lineup configurations of all these bands and 2) I don’t care. With that out of the way, let’s talk about one of the most exciting current hardcore scenes.

The advent of Zoom, Google Drive, Work from Home et al., makes it possible for people from Connecticut and Delaware to be in the same band and somehow pull it off. Northeast hardcore is taking full advantage of this, and many of the area’s most exciting new acts have roots in New York’s Hudson Valley

.The region is almost perfectly situated, geographically speaking. It borders New York City to the south, while I-87 allows for easy access to Western Massachusetts and Connecticut. I believe it also touches New Jersey, putting it in relative proximity to the Greater Philadelphia Area (which apparently extends as far south as Maryland??? God bless you Americans and your sprawling urban hellscapes).

There’s more to it than geography, though. Hudson Valley has a rich, complex hardcore history. That’s a story for another day (and probably another author who actually knows what they’re talking about). All you need to know is that the Hudson Valley is full of talented, creative hardcore musicians who live close enough to their talented, creative friends in other cities that they can team up to start excellent bands.

Boy have they. Here’s a short list of cool new bands with ties to HVHC: New World Man, Crush Your Soul, Fatal Realm, Cross of Disbelief and Godskin Peeler. If any of those bands don’t crack the lineup of either FYA, Tied Down or Sound and Fury 2026, I’ll Venmo everyone reading this $20. Things get even more exciting when you consider HVHC’s close ties to hot labels like DAZE, Ephyra and Scheme. Not to mention Streets of Hate, a long-running HV label who look poised to make a jump in visibility by working with good regional bands.

Cool things are happening in the Northeast, and no matter what string you pull, it almost inevitably leads you to HVHC.

Democore does the late 2000’s

The “regular hardcore” revival has been bubbling for a while now. 2024 was the year it broke out of the basement into hardcore’s larger consciousness. Much to my delight, a heavy portion of last year’s demo wave aped the early Lockin’ Out Records sound. Unfortunately, there’s not much of that material to pull from. Plus, demo-core is highly ephemeral by nature. The kids in that scene love nothing more than to dig up some obscure shit, share it with their friends, obsess over it for two weeks and then move on to the next thing before anyone else beats them to it.

I say that with no judgement because I’m one of those people. The chase is exhilarating, but the unfortunate byproduct is that nothing stays “cool” for longer than 6-12 months. If you’re trying to start a band that sounds like Mental in 2025 with hopes of getting big, good luck. People are already ten DFJ projects ahead of you. They’re getting into the mid-period Youngblood stuff and pretty soon they’ll find the Six Feet Under catalog.

Don’t take my word for it; they just put Kids Like Us and The Mongoloids back-to-back on a fest. Now they got Cold World, Naysayer and Bracewar playing United Blood like it’s 2008. These bands are back with a vengeance, and unlike the OG Lockin’ Out artists who are either oblivious to their newfound popularity or still hate each other, you can go see the next wave of stuff live.

Another selling point for this era of “regular” hardcore is that in the early 2000’s, LO and Youngblood were, to my knowledge, the only major players for revivalist demo freaks. By 2006, the kids who came up on that shit had taken it a million different directions, to the point where that period has something for almost everyone.

If you got into this stuff from heavy hardcore because you heard “The Hammer” by Think I Care you’ll probably love the Richmond/Wilkes-Barre connection of bands like War Hungry, Cold World and Down to Nothing. If you’re really into Youth Crew, this is the era of First Step, Mindset and about a zillion Youngblood Records bands who put out two releases and then disappeared. There’s also meaner, faster straight edge shit like No Tolerance, The Rival Mob and Coke Bust. You can go the punker route and mine from the Grave Mistake/No Way/Sorry State catalogs. Shit, you can even go down the Youth Attack rabbit hole.

2005-2010 is a crazy era for hardcore demos/seven inches and it will be fun to see what the kids come up with once they start hitting the depth charges on this shit.

Is “hardcore kids playing old school death metal” over?

Violent Treatment posed this question on their newest episode, and I think it’s an interesting one. Death metal as an influence on hardcore music is probably as prominent as ever, but what about the hardcore scene’s adoption of bands who are unmistakably playing death metal?

I firmly believed this stuff was on its way out the door six months or so ago. The top-tier bands in that space all signed to bigger metal labels and if they were playing hardcore shows, it was in big rooms with bands like Jesus Piece and Nails who have crossover appeal. Newer bands of that style seemed to have very little connection with old school death metal or my version of hardcore. I don’t say that derisively. I’m sure those kids are passionate and talented musicians, but in my opinion their bands are exploring the crossover between slam, beatdown and deathcore. I don’t see an appetite for that at the shows I attend.

Then Fatal Realm dropped. It should have been the death knell for hardcore-inspired OSDM. “Oh, the most talented guitarist in our scene, a man who’s been going to both death metal and hardcore shows since the mid-90's, put out arguably the best example of this in the last five years? Maybe I should try to play something easier”.

Fat chance. I know how this works. Kids will just repackage their half-baked deathcore with Xerox photocopy art, steal the Fatal Realm breakdowns, play them worse, and we’ll suffer through 18 more months of a trend that’s seen diminishing returns since 2022. I’ll just look on the bright side and hope more love for death metal means I get to see Obituary or Carcass on one of these festivals.

If any of you wanna go the Killing Frost route and start playing Bathory stomp parts for breakdowns, I’d be much more amenable to that than another year and a half of chromatic slam. Just saying.

Democore beatdown?

I’ve already talked about this briefly so I won’t beat it to death, but as beatdown stops trending on Tik Tok and returns to the dive bars where it rightfully belongs, we’re gonna see the real heads and cool new kids start digging through the subgenre’s obscure corners, much like fiends of my persuasion spent the last two years doing for Lockin’ Out and Tribunal Records.

That deep dive will probably bring about a reverence for less polished recordings, strange, irony-baked aesthetic choices, and an unbridled autistic passion for the dumbest shit imaginable (which is half of hardcore’s appeal in the first place). If you read my last prediction and thought, “wow, Vince doesn’t seem too fond of what Sunami and Sanguisugabogg wrought upon the hardcore scene”, it won’t shock you to learn that I’m excited about beatdown “going back to its roots”.

Flourishes in obscurity

I’ve noticed a few blips on the radar in the last six months from sounds and scenes that felt practically dead. The two emerging trends that excite me the most are DC hardcore revivalism and crust. I don’t think these styles will be a going concern in the world of what Axe to Grind calls “big tent hardcore” this year, but we might be having that convo in 2026.

GOATED CRUST IMO

Let’s talk about crust first, because it’s the one I’m least familiar with and the least likely to make a proper impact on hardcore in my opinion. To clarify, when I say crust, I’m not talking about d-beat played by dudes in leather jackets. That shit never seems to go away, God bless. I’m talking about heavy, blown out, stinky metallic hardcore made by kids with punk politics. Think Amebix, Neurosis, His Hero is Gone, what have you.

This stuff was popular when I first started going to shows and everyone in Toronto owned a Cursed shirt, but since then it’s seemingly retreated to the depths of the punk underworld, and I almost never hear anyone under 35 mention it. Which is kind of strange, because hardcore kids love Bolt Thrower, whose first three records share just as much in common with crust as with death metal. In fact, if you gave the new Lifeless Dark record a different production, you could probably put it out on Ephyra and kids would eat it up.

Yet despite some common musical ancestry, crust punk and heavy hardcore couldn’t be further apart in almost every other aspect. That’s why I don’t think this stuff will make much of an impact. These kids can’t even be in the same room together. I’m pretty sure the only reason I’m hearing more crust is because I tangentially keep track of what’s happening in the DIY punk world, where it appears to be experiencing a renaissance. That could trickle into some of hardcore’s fringes, but I don’t think Union of Uranus will be following Internal Bleeding’s lead and playing FYA Fest next year.

ARE PEOPLE BRINGING THIS BACK?

The next trend I’ve noticed is a steady increase in DC-style melodic hardcore. Again, this stuff was undeniable cannon when I was a kid, but as the goons chased amazingcore out of the VFW halls, the DC sound lost its inherent status in modern hardcore’s DNA.

I see why. DC-core hardly has tempo changes, let alone spin-kick riffs. Unless you’re taking the Mil-Spec route and cutting it with something more kinetic, nobody under 30 has any idea what to do with it in a live setting. A few isolated bands survived DC-core's nuclear winter, but they were either holdovers from an earlier era (Praise), criminally unheralded (Truth Cult [who just put a new album out]) or not worth mentioning.

Recently, though, DC hardcore appears to be on the upswing. Which makes sense. Tons of popular stuff draws from it if you’re paying attention. These new DC heads could be Drug Church fans taking Seaweed revivalism to its logical limit. They could be democore/punk kids out on a crazy limb. They might be coming at it from the emo angle. They could just be old people. Whatever the case, I’m here for it.

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