It’s the mark of a good hardcore show when you arrive forty-five minutes after doors and have already missed the opening band (in this case, Down To The Wire). Hardcore (both its capital H and lowercase h varieties) is a musical culture that demands urgency, immediacy, and if you’re slacking or aloof, you have no one to blame but yourself. This was the first in an ongoing series of matinees booked by local hardcore impresario Bob Wilson at the appropriately dive-y Nikki Lopez bar/venue. If you judge the quality of a show by its attendance, this one was a smashing success, the shoebox-shaped room packed with a variety of hardcore-types, from grizzled elders to ne’er-do-well teens (keeping the eyebrow-piercing industry alive, I couldn’t help but notice).

Dead On Your Feet took the stage without much fuss, a Gen Z straight-edge hardcore band whose first gig took place earlier in 2025. Featuring members of Scarab and Gridiron, they’ve got Philly roots, with plenty of mosh-happy friends in the crowd to prove it. It would seem the Muted Chug is a pre-requisite for any form of hardcore band nowadays, and while Dead On Your Feet did not diverge from this, I appreciated the equal presence of fast-core drumming and under-a-minute song lengths. Their sound wasn’t great – for a five piece, one guitar unintentionally dominated the mix – but I liked the way the bassist’s long hair was tucked deep within his hoodie, and the mosh antics from their younger fans kept things lively. Bodies shifted to the front when they fired off a cover of Youth Of Today’s “Positive Outlook”, and then once again when they closed with another cover song that I couldn’t place. I asked around, and my elder quorum decided it must have been a straight-edge hardcore band from the ’00s or later. Fire off in the comments if you were also there and can enlighten me.

The breakdown / setup time between bands was so efficient that I didn’t bother stepping outside before Fightback. Making the dreary drive up from Baltimore (“we passed so many accidents on the way here”), they were the scrappiest band of the afternoon, looking like a bunch of high-school seniors, college-acceptance letters fresh in hand. Their form of hardcore was derivative in the manner of early Revelation Records, and their stage sound was just as uneven as Dead On Your Feet’s, but they bopped around plenty on stage and the crowd followed suit. Technical prowess is never high on my list, particularly with loud energetic guitar music, so I was perfectly content watching them do their thing for fifteen minutes or so. Of note was their fall-apart cover of Judge’s “I’ve Lost” – the drummer didn’t seem to know the song, and yet they soldiered through it, never more than two of their five members playing the same parts at the same time in the way that Judge had originally written it. My one buddy, whose life-long dedication to hardcore is unbreakable, was there as well, and he couldn’t help but storm up front and sing along, unconcerned with the craftsmanship of Fightback’s rendition. It’s been a minute for me, but I eagerly anticipate the moment that I might feel that same magnetic pull into the pit from some unexpected cover song if I keep going to shows like these.

Speaking of eager anticipation, the excitement was high for C4, undoubtedly the main reason the room was wall-to-wall packed. Known for putting a naked guy with an erection on the cover of their 2025 album Payback’s A Bitch, it was clear that no apologies were forthcoming. After all, C4 hail from the pervasively negative city of Boston, these four mooks perfectly embodying the hate-filled hardcore/metal crossover they performed. From the jump, their sound didn’t suffer from the thin mix of their openers – their filthy Power Trip / Overkill-style riffs were towering and mean, and the crowd responded in kind, the pit easily doubling in size. Their meaty, unrepentant hate displayed a dry comedic edge if you watched closely, from the singer’s repeated C4 shoutouts (he worked the band name into most of their songs, not least in “C4 Goes To War”) to their decision to open and close with the same song, “Me And The Boys”, a lyrical tale which I can assure you ends not in heartfelt friendship but in beating someone’s ass. Halfway through the set, I watched a guy get knocked out on his feet, wobbling on sea legs and grasping at random shoulders to keep from collapsing entirely. Others quickly came to his aid, but he brushed them off, stumbling back into the battlefield of backwards flying forearms before the song ended. The back of his shirt read “PRICE OF PAIN”, and if irony shared the chemical properties of carbon monoxide we’d all be dead right now. All in all a pretty masterful set of unrepentant mosh music, the way it was meant to be experienced: in a crowded, dangerous little windowless room, not on colored vinyl in the comfort of your suburban finished basement.

Wrapping the show was the main reason I found myself in attendance: the “only East Coast appearance” from Zurich straight-edge band Monkeyfellow. The twist here is that Monkeyfellow is, in reality, a Euro-edge parody band from someone in leading Floridian vegan-edge unit Ecostrike, piss-taking our well-meaning European hardcore friends whose NYHC straight-edge tributes sometimes miss the mark in delightfully silly ways. To be clear, Monkeyfellow are a joke band, and while the name doesn’t make sense to me from any sort of hardcore perspective, it still got a chuckle or two. The same could be said for their live presentation, with each of the four performers wearing t-shirts over their hoods-up hoodies (Floorpunch, Nike, Youth Of Today, Crank X Call fanzine) along with funny sunglasses(?). It’s a joke that’s here for a good time, not a long time, but they received a rousing reaction from the crowd, who to my amazement knew the words to “Simple Youth” and “Still Has The Spirit”. Everyone in the house could sing along to “Zurich Straight Edge, Go!”, seeing as the lyrics are the title chanted repeatedly (and with the same trick as C4, they performed it twice). One thing that seems to unite all walks of Americans is an eagerness to harmlessly mock Europeans if given the chance (I think it’s a jealousy thing), and Monkeyfellow did a sufficient job of imitating the roadies of a Crucial Response youth-crew band, bantering about trading for “an Ignite shirt, size middle”, offering a moment of silence in memory of Raybeez and denouncing “eating hamburger”. Take that, you people with functioning health-care systems and an obligatory month of paid vacation! The younger straight-edge contingent that fell back for C4’s creatine-ingesting moshers were back up front, proudly sharing the mic with a band whose mockery belied a true love for its source material. After the entire Monkeyfellow songbook was performed (four songs, one twice), the amps were turned off, the house music came up, and I was shuffling past the friendly members of Quarantine (now Damage) out of the venue and onto the street.

By 4:00 pm, we were back home, fully ‘core-satiated and couch-bound, and only a little bummed to miss The Effigies, who were set to headline the same stage later in the evening for an entirely different show. If the hours of the day allowed for a third hardcore show to take place, I’m sure the folks at Nikki Lopez would’ve squeezed it in.

Yeah, I celebrate Earth Day… any day that Earth is playing a nearby show, of course! The legendary Seattle-based group are one of the few genuinely worthy of “iconic” status (an otherwise overused and devalued term), having more or less spawned entire new genres of music in their storied career. With Dylan Carlson its sole constant member, I’d certainly recommend checking out Even Hell Has Its Heroes, Clyde Petersen’s 2023 documentary on Carlson and the struggles and triumphs he has shared with Earth since the early ’90s. I’m going to stop with the biographical details now though, operating with the assumption that most of y’all are already firmly on the same page as me regarding Earth’s towering stature in the world of avant-garde guitar music (and beyond), but if by some chance you haven’t delved into their catalog – too vast and intimidating, maybe? – there’s no reason you can’t remedy that today. As for me, I wasn’t clued in to what they’d been up to lately, or even why they were on tour. All I knew is that Earth were coming to town on a blustery Monday night and I wasn’t gonna miss it.

Up against a few competing events – indie darlings Wednesday at Union Transfer, The Bad Plus at Solar Myth, and perhaps most damagingly, the Philadelphia Eagles taking on the Green Bay Packers on ESPN – the below-capacity crowd at Johnny Brenda’s clearly wanted to be there. There were simply too many other enticing options that evening (including the highly-regarded “staying at home”), and while I was a little surprised (and offended on Earth’s behalf) that the show didn’t sell out weeks in advance, I appreciated the ability to move freely about the room. This included chatting with friends about the opening act Stebmo, the nom-de-plume of one Steve Moore. If you’re like me, when you hear “Steve Moore” you think “Zombi”, and while the prospect of an Earth-opening slot from that Steve Moore still feels entirely plausible, it was a different guy. This Steve Moore is a pianist / trombonist / composer who has played with a list of brow-raising notables to include Sufjan Stevens, Bill Frisell and Sunn O))). With straight brown hair cascading down to his ass, Stebmo sat at his Wurlitzer and coaxed out some dreamy, Sun Ra-esque meditations, his nimble fingers playfully running the keyboard alongside a fresh-cooked cosmic drone. To my delight, he picked up a Casio SK-1 sampler keyboard (a late ’80s childhood classic), held it vertically, and improvised melodies from its hearing-test tone-setting directly into the microphone, the sort of spontaneously beautiful musical gesture I’d expect from Dan Higgs.

Our hearts and minds were clearly open and ready to receive, even down to the stumbling backwards-baseball-cap-ponytail-and-sunglasses guy who was crushing domestics directly in front of the stage. I had heard from a member of Earth that part of Stebmo’s set on this tour involved “a talk”, and after not even ten minutes of music, he put the Casio down, introduced himself, and entered into a kind-hearted ramble. Or should I clarify, extended ramble – Stebmo clearly had some loose parameters in mind for where he intended to take us, but he did so in a boldly unfocused, unhurried way, either not noticing or not caring how frequently he repeated himself or where he was headed. After sharing his gratitude for the audience and Earth, he went into some basic music theory / The Science Of Music details, playing single notes on a trombone and then explaining those single notes to us. Eventually, he concluded his talk with thoughts on the healing power of music. Maybe this doesn’t sound so bad, and I’m not saying it was bad, it was just long, painfully so for anyone in the audience with a lumbar spine over the age of thirty-five (I’d say that accounted for 100% of the crowd). I could feel the patience and goodwill of my fellow attendees draining like old iPhone batteries – Stebmo was a likable person, it’s just that I can’t think of anyone at all that I’d want to stand quietly and listen to for twenty-plus minutes until they eventually settled on the point of “music is a powerful and special thing”. He played himself off with another couple short tunes on the Wurlitzer, as sweetly satisfying as an ice cream cone after working a double shift.

It was barely ten minutes before Stebmo returned to the stage, this time as part of Earth’s ensemble. Turns out we were celebrating some sort of anniversary for Earth’s Hex; Or Printing In The Infernal Method. Twenty years, apparently… jeez! Dylan Carlson took center stage, alongside Bill Herzog on bass, Adrienne Davies on drums, Moore on trombone and keys, and Brett Netson on guitar. Carlson, in his appealingly squeaky speaking voice, explained that the group would be performing Hex in its entirety, and they proceeded to do exactly that. It’s my third favorite Earth record (behind Pentastar and The Bees Made Honey if you’re keeping score), and listening (and watching) them perform it front to back was a real treat. Davies remains the group’s most potent secret weapon, controlling her limbs with the grace and poise of an Olympic fencer. Under Carlson’s leadership, Moore’s trombone filled the room alongside Herzog’s precise bass – it was certainly easy in that moment, following Stebmo, to appreciate instrumental, talk-free music. We were on Earth time, to be sure, and if a clock had been visible on the wall, I’m certain it would’ve slowly blurred itself out. For music that invokes a Cormac McCarthyian vision of the quietly violent American desert landscape, the group looked the part, too. A friend of mine pointed out that Netson bore a striking resemblance to one of the produce purveyors at our local farmer’s market; we later concluded that the entire band looked like they had been selling organic eggs and hand-cut flowers earlier in the day, too late to drive back to Lancaster in their rusty pickup truck.

Having concluded Hex, I required no further sonic nourishment, but they threw us a special treat. Carlson confirmed that Earth are working on a new album, scheduled for tracking in March of next year, and announced that they’d end with a new one from that. It might’ve been called “Scalp Hunter Blues”, but I can’t confirm exactly what Carlson said over the audience’s rousing applause. It should come as no surprise that this song, while different from prior Earth material, was completely great. Herzog opened with an unexpectedly funky bass-line, and the song slowly revealed its form, Moore’s dappled keys recalling a Joshua Abrams Natural Information Society vibe that thrills and chills. Can you believe we’re getting a new Earth album in 2026? If you needed a good reason to stick around for another year, look no further.