Outbreak Festival is a hardcore institution. Throughout the 2010s, it built a name for itself as the genre’s centre in the UK. It hosted the country’s first set by Turnstile and established every band that would go on to be a major native act. As the decade drew to a close, the festival seemed on its last legs. After three years as a two-dayer, 2019 saw it cut to one. Then, the 2020 date was set to leave its 1,400-capacity home, Canal Mills, for an 800-capacity home at Peddler’s Warehouse.
That year’s COVID cancellation may have been the most important thing that ever happened to it. The resurrection that began in 2022 has been monumental. Its long-established relationship with headliners Knocked Loose and Turnstile allowed it to ride hardcore’s unprecedented surge in popularity to become the most consistently hailed festival in European hardcore. Now, four years into that title, how can it possibly live up to the hype?
Free Throw
In the 34°C heat, it was a relief that Friday took place only on Bowlers Exhibition Centre’s two indoor stages. While the air conditioning was on, both rooms quickly became damp with condensation and sweat. Emo bands occupied the day. Free Throw (and their stage mates, Pool Kids) are at the forefront of its terribly named subgenre, “weedmo”. They occupy a transitional style following the twinkle-obsessed Midwest emo revival wave of Algernon Cadwallader and Grown Ups but before the experimentalism of its COVID-era fifth wave. Their upbeat, pop-punk-inspired tone and alternating nasal and gruff vocalists pull the audience together for the first sing-along of the weekend with closer “Two Beers In”.
Love Rarely
Friday’s second stage emphasises a more intricate, mathy take on emo. Love Rarely are by far its heaviest act. They use the capoed, sometimes funky, twinkle guitars of Hail the Sun’s swancore but put a greater emphasis on their more extreme parts. It creates a math-based sound that borders on the mosh-heavy yet remains emotional and cinematic, like what Counterparts or Hundredth were doing a decade ago.
Joyce Manor
Piling on other audience members to shout lyrics into the microphone is a classic part of Outbreak (as it should be for any hardcore show). With no barrier and a dedicated lower stage for crowdsurfers, it’s a natural continuation for sing-alongs to take place on the lower stage. Traditionally, stage invasions occur only for one song per set, often the closer.
With Outbreak’s live videos staining YouTube recommendations, its crowds at times become a parody of themselves. This year, some sets had as many as six stage invasions. Brian Seller, vocalist of Friday headliners the Front Bottoms, even complained it occurred so often he couldn’t breathe. While many of the following hardcore bands continued to encourage it, by Sunday the stage backdrops read “no stage invasions”. They continued, but at a lower frequency.
Nowhere was this more obvious than with Joyce Manor. Their bass-heavy slacker take on emo-pop-punk includes so many sing-alongs, it’s hard not to belt them back. Much of the set consisted of their classic self-titled and Never Hungover Again albums. The remaining songs were mostly from their recent effort, I Used to Go to This Bar, with all tracks sounding strikingly like the record. When coupled with their frequent internet virality, half the set was spent with large chunks of the audience on stage. If not a crowd, at the very least, a few camera-app-wielding videographers were filming themselves singing as security attempted to shoo them away.
Static Dress
On the Outbreak Festival app, the set time for Saturday at 15:00 on the main stage simply read “???”. This garnered discussion of secret sets from Guilt Trip, Drain, even XweaponX. Those made some sense, but there were some ridiculous guesses. The most prominent was a Title Fight reunion. It seemed obvious this was a joke.
As the hour came, the kick drum head changed to an image of two white-haired women in a car. A drummer sits while a guitarist plays the opening notes of “Safe in Your Skin” by Title Fight. A logo appears based on that band’s album, Floral Green. It reads “Static Dress“, then disappears into CRT static.
“What’s up, we’re Guilt Trip,” says vocalist Olli Appleyard, before the CRT(e)mos head into “Nostalgia Kills”. Static Dress’ set tailors for the heavier audience, playing mostly their stunning new album Injury Episode, as well as their breakdown-centric standalone single “Death to the Overground”. In a moment of calm, Appleyard gives thanks to Higher Power for providing them with an entry point into the hardcore scene. They break out into a cover of that band’s flagship song “Can’t Relate”.
In the following days, Static Dress’ tongue-in-cheek Title Fight cover caused threats of boycotting from some of that band’s overly precious fans who felt tricked. Static Dress, you trolls.
Touché Amoré
Touché Amoré‘s anniversary performance of their heartbreaking fourth album Stage Four (2016) was hotly anticipated. Before beginning, the band invited a representative for Rise Above Cancer to make a speech. There were already visible tears in attendees’ eyes. They began with a backing track of “What Sarah Said” by Death Cab for Cutie, the song that vocalist Jeremy Bolm lists as “too hard to hear” on the album track “New Halloween”.
As they break into performance, Bolm smiles through it all. Their uncharacteristically clean guitar tone, for their screamo-melodic hardcore style, lends an indie rock feel. The soft, sung segments of “Water Damage” and “Skyscraper” expose the gothic country, Nick Cave-isms of Bolm’s “secret voice” croons. Upon completing the record, they are only halfway through their set time. They continue with their greatest hits.
High Vis
As High Vis took the stage, it began to rain, a breath of fresh air in the heat. It’s that classic festival format, and there is no UK hardcore band of the past ten years more appropriate to bask in it. The audience choir proves this when the scallies break into “Talk for Hours”. Much of the set is made up of their post-COVID material, which saw them switch into the jangly, pseudo-psychedelic and danceable instrumentals of baggy and Britpop. However, their more overtly post-punk early work is still present. What is never lost is hardcore’s rhythmic sensibilities and vocalist Graham Sayle’s Scouse-accented shouts unchanged since bruisers Dirty Money.
I Promised the World
While Outbreak Festival’s lack of barriers and the subsequent frequency of stagedivers give onlookers the illusion of constant crowdsurfing, in reality, people are very rarely caught. The few who attempt a surf often end up with their faces on the floor. Or, their face on somebody who attempted to catch them, who in turn, is on the floor.
“Come forward, we’re catching crowdsurfers,” says I Promised the World’s Kerouac-lookalike vocalist. It’s the Texans’ first overseas performance, and already they may well be this year’s most hyped band in hardcore.
As Asian Glow and Ben Quad have bucked the supposedly declining fifth wave of emo in favour of pop screamo revivalism, I Promised the World are already on their way to jumping ship from the trend they helped initiate. Half of their setlist consists of their Sinema-era pop-screamo material. With their post-name-change work, they stand playing a progressive emo-metalcore style that more closely resembles Misery Signals or Hopesfall. For so long, mainline emo and screamo fans tried to deny their connection to pop screamo, and it’s refreshing to see it emerge again in the same way.
Unlike much of the festival, I Promised the World attract a younger crowd, averaging late teens. Even a number of swoop-fringed, neon-clothed, scene subculture revivalists take the stage for dives. Towards the end of the set, security attempt to cut sound while ambulance workers rush stage left to collect an unconscious crowdsurfer, blood pouring from his head. I Promised the World do not stop.
Loathe
When Loathe first played the Outbreak Festival in 2022, it was jarring. They had spent the 2010s associating with post-scene metalcore bands and the atmospheric sound of Dreambound bands like Holding Absence. Their world existed totally separate to the mainline hardcore scene that Outbreak centralised. Now, on their fourth appearance, it feels much more natural. Loathe-osphere acts Static Dress, Killing Me Softly and Love Is Noise litter lineups and have all but converged with real hardcore. Were it not for the exponential growth that Loathe have seen since the release of I Let It In and It Took Everything (2020), perhaps Outbreak wouldn’t be at the size it is.
Their post-metal take on baritone, djent-riffing gloom moves the crowd despite the incongruity of its mechanistic rhythms. During the build-up to the breakdown of the third song, “Aggressive Evolution”, an audience member was injured, and the set was briefly stopped.
With their fourth album, A Stranger to You, less than three weeks away, the only teaser is the interlude “ثينا”. Its singles “Gifted Through Strength” and “Revenant” are played, but both have already graced Outbreak’s speakers in past years. There is no sign of its smoother, soul-inspired third single, “Fangs”.
Alexisonfire
Alexisonfire’s three vocalist-dynamic has always been fascinating. While many of their pop screamo peers used both a singer and screamer, nobody had the fully-chested, Neil Young-esque tone of Dallas Green. The occasional interjections by Wade MacNeil, with his Hot Water Music-inspired gruff punk voice, emphasised an influence buried among their contemporaries.
Today, they perform their third album Crisis (2006) in full, a transitional record. The performance still contains Pettit’s screamo-inspired vocals, but he shows the growing interest in the gruffer delivery he would use on its follow-up. Bassist Chris Steele flails across the stage like his mouth is about to foam. “You Burn First” and “Rough Hands” are the most overt representations of their other times subtle, cinematic post-rock qualities. On the latter, MacNeil takes lead vocals, calling it a tribute to Gared O’Donnell of Planes Mistaken for Stars, who tragically passed away five years ago.
Initiate
The Outbreak Festival never has an issue with queues. However, on Sunday morning, an hour after doors were supposed to open, entry snaked around five corners of the industrial estate. A bin lorry broke down, blocking access to the site and causing many to miss the day’s openers. Much of this year’s early afternoon sets were made up of melodic hardcore bands, ranging from the grungey youth crew of Turn of Phrase to the more metallic, Tragedy-inherited apocalypticism of Still in Love.
Initiate are rooted in the fast, sometimes groovy, chugging take on the genre that Count Me Out or Final Fight blazed in the 2000s. The centrepiece of their sound is Crystal Pak. It’s hard to be struck, three days into a hardcore festival, by how enraged a vocalist sounds, but Pak’s tooth-bearing, straining overtones are by far the weekend’s angriest.
A few of their songs veered into dreamier, chimerical moments, leaning them towards the wave sound of Touché Amoré. In the case of “Too Much”, they pushed that even further into a Deafheaven– or Svalbard-bred wave-effected blackgaze. They also teased two new tracks, “Delusions” and “Numb the Pain”, stating that they will be released in the coming weeks.
Dynamite
To keep the Outbreak Festival this size while also encouraging the more reckless behaviour that defines hardcore’s live shows, the standing area for each stage is split into a “safe zone” and a more intimate “mosh zone”. At the gate, upon agreeing to take responsibility for injuries you may sustain or inflict, audience members are given an additional wristband jokingly called a “mosh licence”.
In other styles of music, what makes a live set impressive largely depends on the ability to sound like the record or on grand stage shows. In hardcore, the audience reaction is just as important as, if not more important than, the music. In that respect, Alex Cheung and company were on a hot streak this weekend.
Their side project Turn of Phrase opened Saturday as the first hardcore band of the weekend and were welcomed by waves of crowd surfers. Dynamite’s sound is certainly similar, but less melodic. Their meat-and-potatoes brand of youth crew with a tough-guy groove is reminiscent of the early 2000s Lockin’ Out Records lineup. With only 30 minutes, their energy never lets up. There’s a reason their merch was strewn across half the festival’s backs.
Haywire
Haywire’s reputation for relentless touring and furious live shows precedes them. Despite falling behind at the beginning of the decade, they’ve played fast catch-up in their so-called “skinhead revival” (half of these bands have hair). Over the past two years, they’ve been by far the most talked-about among that wave of street punk bands. Alongside the Chisel and Skinhead, it acts more as a loose collective than a real wave, somehow trading members despite residing on different continents.
It’s funny, Haywire’s modern hardcore-indebted street punk is fairly unremarkable on record, but live, they’re a monster. In part, this energy could have been explained through one of vocalist Austin Sparkman’s many mid-set stories. During a prior tour of the UK, he forced a member of Depize to watch him snort cocaine for hours. Now sober, Sparkman shows that it was never the drugs that made him charge across the stage and command the crowd like a volatile drill sergeant.
No set proves better how indicative oi’s football-chant choruses are of live sets. However, they also expose a lyrical vulnerability that deconstructs Haywire’s tough-guy exterior. Sparkman pushes these buttons further when he asks the audience if they like pop-punk; he receives little response. Then, he asks who likes oi. The audience roars. He claps back, “When you grow up, you realise oi is just pop-punk for adults,” breaking into their already classic cover of Title Fight’s “Shed”.
Trash Talk
“If you’ve seen us before, you have to be over 27,” jokes frontman Lee Speilman. Trash Talk haven’t set foot on the sceptred isle in over a decade. Once, they were set up to be everything that Turnstile are today. They had broken out of hardcore and were increasingly associating with rappers, particularly Odd Future, then its frontrunners. By 2014, they seemed mostly separate from hardcore, and their activity slowed. Nonetheless, the worshippers of their skate-ready, blazing fast hardcore still manage to front new waves of the genre (looking at you, Gel).
Speilman finds every opportunity to climb on as many people or objects as possible. He joins the pit, climbs barriers and forces others to follow. It’s frequently a struggle even to locate him, but he never seems to miss a line. The set ends with half the band throwing themselves into the crowd, passing a snare drum around as audience members rush to punch it.
Trapped Under Ice
Trapped Under Ice very rarely perform live anymore; festivals are often the only chance. Today, they are surrounded by classic Outbreak Festival bands like Higher Power and Gridiron, as well as some who aren’t on the lineup, like the Flex and Last Wishes.
Vocalist Justice Tripp still struts and windmills to the tough hardcore grooves as he did during the group’s early 2010s salad days, but the past decade singing in Angel Dust has transformed him into a hardcore version of Elton John. Both Alex Money from Dynamite and Franz Lyons from Turnstile appeared as featured artists on songs. During closer “Reality Unfolds”, the side-stage musicians form their own pit.
Glitchers
At the end of the industrial estate that houses Bowlers Exhibition Centre, feedback sounds, and a crowd gathers. There, stand Glitchers, performing their fuzzy, scrappy punk style. Their guerrilla gig antics were hard to avoid for the year or two following lockdown.
Festivalgoers clearly weren’t partial to Sunday’s early finish, as they broke out hardcore dancing, crowd surfing and later a circle pit. February’s van even stopped by, with vocalist Rila Ogawa sitting out the window to watch and cheer. During Glitcher’s final song, their vocalist/guitarist, Jake Haden, tossed his guitar through his amp, then the kick drum. The crowd chanted “one more song”, so they repeated their opener.