Descending into the UK’s new screamo-hardcore scene, which involves shows in burnt-down pubs, old Glaswegian tobacco factories, and maybe even illegal field festivals.
My journey to the squat is so convoluted it feels like I’m in a video game: a bus, a sweaty Jubilee line tube soundtracked by Oasis fans on their way back from Wembley, and a 28 Days Later-style walk through Canary Wharf and into the sodium-orange glare of the motorway. The location, dropped via Instagram, takes me to a burnt down pub, where I link up with my friends and prepare to descend into the madness. Decked out in black combat gear, a doorman bundles us through a locked side gate and into a beer garden that looks like it was destroyed in the Blitz. A Google search about the show I’m at tonight will only tell you that the “venue” it’s in doesn’t actually exist, or that its headliners are a zen indie puzzle game that’s yet to release on Steam. Welcome to London’s secret screamo scene.
The main room of the abandoned public house is lit by a single red light. Wires snake along dusty floorboards, bound by duct tape which runs neatly under a line of beat-up barstools. Without a soundcheck, bands flow onto a makeshift stage every 30 minutes and tear up their sets, flanked only by a slab of rotting wood covered in scrawls of “Free Palestine” and “Congo is bleeding.” A man screams into his mic and assaults a dying drumkit like Reading ‘91 Kurt Cobain. One of tonight’s bands, my tiny room, have launched into their latest single, “Walker,” and the crowd is moving with manic devotion. Denim kids that look like salvagepunk chevaliers crash into each other, jumping bald men clear out the center of the pit, enbies in Charli XCX shirts two-step aggressively, and teens chief vapes that look like extraterrestrial Tamagotchis.
The motley congregation have all made the midnight trek to this secret location in Docklands—a liminal stretch where London’s glass-and-steel corporate towers meet the derelict bones of the city’s shipping past—for the latest in a series of illegal screamo, skramz and hardcore parties across the UK. Although squat shows have long been a staple for scenes like jungle, grime, and drum ‘n’ bass, they’ve rarely been the preserve of guitar bands. For genres that formed in illicit or domestic spaces, like hardcore and emo, finding spaces to squat is tricky when most cities feel like corporate hellscapes. It also involves assessing the risks of what you’re doing—how it might reach the cops, if the building you’re playing in is safe and whether you’ve got an exit strategy in mind if things go south. But the return to squats in the UK is important because it not only feels like a revival of tradition, but it also like a sobering reminder that so much music has been left to rot in spaces that once gave it life. So what do you do in a country where DIY scenes feel as extinct as the dodo? You start up a rave crew or screamo band, obviously.
Theo, hardcore head and tonight’s orchestrator, has taken matters into his own hands. Twenty-something and tall, he cuts a figure like a punk Nosferatu and speaks with a heavy Mancunian accent. He also plays in his own London screamo band called Senrab. Theo tells me these renegade parties came out of dire necessity; Britain’s cost of living crisis makes mainstream nightlife impossibly expensive, and much of the music revolves around the same few bands, which some think have stagnated and narrowed the scene’s current sound. “I don’t give a fuck if you like black midi. I don’t care. Everyone likes black midi,” he says. “This country needs screamo and hardcore now more than ever.”
Theo first got into the scene as a teen through forest free parties and drum ‘n’ bass raves. When he moved to London at 19, his love of screamo music, fascination with abandoned architecture, and hatred of money-hungry gig promoters pushed him to descend into the movement. “In the ‘90s there were bands like Sonic Youth and Fugazi that were famous for playing these kinds of events,” Theo tells me. “But since the 2000s, in the UK especially, it’s become more of an electronic thing. There’s nothing for the hardcore genre. I wanted to rekindle what people in those bands were doing.”
The music was much more Fugazi basketball hoop punk than it was South London overtechnical art-prog. Scadenza, who were on just before my tiny room, dub themselves “dinosaur screamo”—an amorphous tag that spans everything from the drone-y stoner metal of bands like Sleep to the anxious pop of bar italia. The band start sets with a wall of noise and spectral female vocals to the tune of “Remember, remember the fifth of November,” a nursery rhyme about the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a failed attempt to commit regicide and blow up the House of Lords. At one point during the set, two girls lie on the floor screaming lyrics; even Theo is deep in the mosh, grinning wryly—probably proud of the raucous, unshackled night he and his homies managed to put together.
While Theo’s output is mainly London-centric these days, a cabal of other squat crews are pioneering a new kind of genre-colliding, uber-gritty party outside of commercial bounds—riotous crucibles where groups perform genuinely challenging art and partygoers can enjoy themselves without having to remortgage after their fourth drink. Since the scene exploded at the start of last year, there’ve been DIY shows in old Glaswegian tobacco factories, throwdowns in sheet metal workshops and, according to Theo, entire illegal field festivals in the north of England.
A slew of new bands have become infamous within this circuit of unruly shows, which reaches across all corners of both the British Isles and the hardcore genre. From Glasgow, Scotland, there’s emo outfit My Rushmore, who sound like Merchant Ships if they wrote about Celtic FC and Laura Palmer. Known for semi-legendary gigs at Glasgow venue The Audio Lounge, the band released their debut album last year, and have also put out a split EP with American troublemakers Dallas Cowboys. Hailing from Ireland, ”Non-Binary Nerd Rockers” Lip might be the most tinnitus-inducing band I’ve heard at one of Theo’s nights. There’s even screamo bands from Norfolk, the seaside UK county famous for King Charles’ summer home and fish and chips—Mountain Peaks chronicle the ennui and excitements from a place not particularly notorious for its hardcore output.
While other bands across the UK and Ireland feel more indicative of American skramz and emo, London’s got its own self-sufficient scene of grittier hardcore, which includes some of the night’s big players, like Scadenza, crap stallion and Sevy Verna. Out of all the London bands, my tiny room might be the first to have music you don’t need to break the law to hear, which has made them something of de facto scene leaders. Their drummer can’t even remember the last time they played an actual venue.
“We’ve played so many shows that have all been weird, random buildings and outdoor spaces,” Harry Haddon tells me a couple of weeks after the show. Extremely off the grid, he claims that none of them even have Instagram downloaded; though they gave in and made an account for the band because “we wondered if it was maybe shooting ourselves in the foot if we didn’t have something like that. But at the same time we just try to post pictures of like, poo and stuff.” When we talk, Haddon had just returned from another screamo show—a garden party in someone’s university house in Nottingham (archived on Instagram by its host, Harley, and DIY revival account @starsasmirrors_). “Everyone got there and no one had even played yet, and we were already getting noise complaints,” he says. “Their neighbors were like, ‘If you don’t stop by 7 we’re calling the police!,’ so we all had to kind of shrink our sets. They brought a mic and it didn’t work, so we were just screaming into the garden.”
Besides Haddon, the trio includes Shea on bass and Mem on guitar and vocals. Haddon and Shea were buddies and they met Mem through a flatmate. He cites friends, skate videos, and the legendary YouTube screamo archivist hotstuff productions as inspirations for his love for the music. The band wears their influences on threadbare sleeves: everything from Steve Albini’s colossal band Shellac to Merchant Ships and Rodan. The two that really stand out are Fugazi (“those cheap all-age shows in fucked places,” Haddon praises) and obscure math-rock hardcore band You Slut. With a penchant for finding the weirdest possible places to play gigs, chill and drink, what began as friends hanging out has morphed into a fully-fledged scene that’s inspiring other young upstarts. “It seems to be now that everyone’s playing—just this sudden explosion of hardcore bands,” Haddon says. “We put a night on at Bermondsey’s Avalon Cafe, and that was it.”
Haddon hypothesizes that more people are turning to hardcore because of its anarchic spirit. “Anyone can use these instruments to make something and anyone can find a random place to put on a show,” he says. “It’s so much more than that though. This music can be played in non-venue spaces, and I think the looseness of a non-venue space is just incomparable to having to play a gig somewhere.” Part of the allure is the real sense of community that the shows provide too, especially for a genre like screamo that most people on the other side of the Atlantic have only experienced by proxy. In between music, kids spark up rollies and conversations; there’s no designated smoking area, no overcrowded, expensive bar, and rarely a designated toilet.
Importantly, these are also often deeply political spaces committed to change: proceeds from the OTD fee and cheap drinks sold at the show tonight went to charities providing aid to Gaza. With the UK government declaring Palestine Action a terrorist group this year, and the arrests of peaceful protestors across the country, it’s no surprise that traditional venues are losing their status as grounds for real countercultural art and thought. “You’ll never get that anywhere else,” Theo tells me. “When there’s money to be made, people aren’t concerned with politics. That’s the fundamentals of it. Most venues are £12 or more for a few bands that don’t really work together. And that’s money to the pocket of the promoter, to the pocket of the venue, and whatever’s left to the bands.” Theo also thinks the pivot to heavier music is partly because of the current political climate. “Any resurgence of heavy music will always come during politically charged times. And we’re in dire, dire political times. People are just pissed off, and that’s why we did our show for Palestine.”
By the end of the night, everyone congregates on the squat’s roof: chatting, drinking and exchanging baggies covertly. There’s something beautiful—or maybe just plain ironic—about the view from Docklands. London’s financial district, which sits across the river from the squat, has just been recommended as a spot to revitalize the city’s nightlife sector—“Empty office lobbies become sought-after DJ booths […] any space that isn’t locked morphs into a dancefloor to create a sprawling web of passionate chaos,” the report goes. In such a horrific state of capitalist realism that it now seems like raving with yuppies in the HSBC building might be the answer to the UK’s nightlife problems, bands like my tiny room and community linchpins like Theo are tearing things up and starting all over again. As I sit on the roof, dwarfed by hulking high-rises, it feels like live music and counterculture might always prevail. In a world where it increasingly feels like there’s no space for anything anymore, we own everything inside the squat.
Some of the names and identifying details in this piece have been changed.
Sick
scadenza is some good stuff