Go hard or go home: why is hardcore punk enjoying a renaissance?

The success of Manchester’s Outbreak festival shows the appetite for the genre isn’t just healthy, it’s on the rise. Its organisers discuss the scene’s evolution, its fragility, and its (very loud) future

At the end of June this year thousands of people – from Scotland to Bulgaria, Chile to Singapore – gathered in an industrial estate in Manchester to boot each other in the head. That wasn’t the express purpose, of course, but a common side-effect of attending Outbreak, the hardcore punk festival that has become a flagship event for a genre experiencing an unprecedented moment of mainstream visibility.

Bursting out of the American suburbs in the late 1970s, hardcore was a response to the punk and new wave invasion that had dominated the years prior. Early bands such as Black Flag, Bad Brains and Dead Kennedys distilled the rawness of punk and pushed it to extremes, pioneering a do-it-yourself ethos, and a fast, frantic sound that became the definitive sonic kickback to a decade of Reaganomics and rising conservatism. Though the sound of hardcore has evolved over the decades, spawning various subgenres (screamo, queercore, powerviolence) and acting as the jumping-off point for many of the pop-punk and emo bands that defined the 2000s, that grassroots philosophy has been unwavering. It’s there in the origins of Outbreak, too.