10 Best Punk & Hardcore Albums of 2024 So Far

To go along with our list of our 40 favorite albums of 2024 so far, we’re also posting some genre-specific lists and here’s our list of 10 punk & hardcore albums from the first half of 2024 that are not to miss. It ranges from street punk to metallic hardcore to a variety of different genre-blurring records in between, with a mix of rising bands, reunited veterans, a star-studded supergroup, and more. Defining similar subgenres always gets kinda tricky, and if you’re looking for stuff more on the emo/post-hardcore side, we also posted a list of 10 emo & post-hardcore albums from 2024 that we love. Read on for the punk/hc list, in alphabetical order.

Candy – It’s Inside You
Relapse

Candy got a little industrial in their hardcore on 2022’s Heaven Is Here, but now they’re all in. Highlights of their new guest-filled album It’s Inside You include “You Will Never Get Me” (with Trapped Under Ice/Angel Du$t vocalist Justice Tripp), “Love Like Snow” (with Fleshwater vocalist MIRSY and LA electronic musician mmph), and perfectly named songs like “Dancing to the Infinite Beat” and “Hypercore,” all of which sound like they could’ve been minor hits during the ’90s industrial boom–especially the strangely infectious “Love Like Snow.” But Candy is still a hardcore band, and even on those songs (two of which get assists from Integrity’s Aaron Melnick and Trash Talk’s David Gagliardi), they sound like one. It’s Inside You makes more of a seamless evolution than a drastic pivot, and it’s got plenty of straight-up metallic hardcore mosh fuel to balance out the more electronics-assisted moments. I compared the genre-blurring on the last album to Full of Hell, but now Candy are starting to remind me more of Ceremony or the aforementioned Angel Du$t, bands with fearless ambition who will always be hardcore even when they’re navigating “non-hardcore” waters.

The Chisel – What A Fucking Nightmare
Pure Noise

We’re in the midst of (another) Oi! revival, and UK band The Chisel (not to be confused with Ted Leo’s ’90s band Chisel) have had more than a little to do with that. Their 2021 debut LP Retaliation (originally released on UK label La Vida Es Un Mus Discos) helped breathe new life into the genre, and their Pure Noise debut What A Fucking Nightmare takes it to a new level, transcending the “revival” aspect entirely. The Chisel are still operating in an anthemic, no-frills punk realm, and they’re still writing face-value lyrics “about dickheads, working class people, punching people, getting punched,” but they’re doing a lot more than just mining a specific subset of influences. WAFN owes as much to UK street punk pioneers like Sham 69, Cock Sparrer, and Cockney Rejects as it does to The Replacements, and like all of the above, they just write catchy punk songs that beg to be shouted along to. With its undeniable choruses and sharp production–it was produced by Fucked Up’s Jonah Falco, mixed by Uniform’s Ben Greenberg, recorded by John Atkinson, and mastered by Arthur Rizk–What A Fucking Nightmare feels like as much a modern revitalization of street punk in the 2020s as Rancid and Dropkick Murphys were in the 1990s. The Chisel clearly love the past but they’re not stuck in it. They feel like the street punk band that a young person could call their own.

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Gouge Away – Deep Sage
Deathwish Inc

Deep Sage is Gouge Away’s best album yet, and it almost didn’t happen. As they were demoing the followup to 2018’s Burnt Sugar, COVID lockdown hit and the band was forced into hiatus. The band wasn’t sure what would end up becoming of the material they’d been working on, but they finally regrouped and started writing again at the literal tail-end of 2021 (on New Year’s Eve), and then they made a surprise return to play two songs in the middle of a Militarie Gun set in Portland just over a year later. The energy from that show convinced them to finish the record, and now their masterful, wide-ranging third LP is here.

The 11 songs on Deep Sage seamlessly weave between abrasive hardcore rage, catchy anthemic choruses, indie rock melodicism, grungy dream pop, and the sprawl of post-hardcore and Sonic Youth-y noise rock, and every song sounds like a crucial part of one complete whole. The four pre-release singles successfully showed off the album’s range, but it’s less about the musical variety itself and more about the way everything comes together when you listen to Deep Sage in its entirety. It’s a journey through hardcore-informed, ambitious guitar rock that scratches so many different itches at once. The band’s knack for genre-defying experimentation was already clear on Burnt Sugar, but they really tie it all together on Deep Sage in a way they never have before. It’s an album to bounce around and shout along to as much as it’s an album to sit back and lose yourself in; an album with purely infectious moments as well as moments that might provoke or challenge. There’s darkness in both the music and Christina Michelle’s lyrics, and Gouge Away navigate darkness and contradictions and mood shifts in a way that’s an absolute joy to listen to.

The Hope Conspiracy – Tools of Oppression / Rule by Deception
Deathwish

It’s been 18 years since The Hope Conspiracy released an album, but now the Boston hardcore band is back with a vengeance. Vocalist Kevin Baker has long been known to write music that directs his anger towards the state of the world, both in this band and All Pigs Must Die, but with the way things have been going lately, it’s no surprise that he sounds more direct than ever on Tools of Oppression / Rule by Deception. Right from the start of the album, he growls that “profit is everything amidst a crumbling vial decay,” and goes on to take aim at capitalism, war profiteering, genocide, fascism, and more, before declaring that “the west is dead” on the penultimate track. Having pushed the musical boundaries of hardcore on 2006’s more experimental Death Knows Your Name, this new album (which includes half of last year’s Confusion/Chaos/Misery EP) goes in a heavier, more bludgeoning direction that matches the subject matter. The Hope Conspiracy aren’t back to reap the benefits of nostalgia; they’re back because they’re fed up.

Knocked Loose – You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To
Pure Noise

You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is only Knocked Loose’s third album in a 10+ year career, and it’s their first in five years (though it does also follow 2021’s A Tear in the Fabric of Life, a 21-minute EP that feels as monstrous as plenty of full-length albums), so I get the sense that Knocked Loose are the type of band who only want to drop an album if they know it’s a step forward, and You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To absolutely is. They made it with producer Drek Fulk, who works with massive heavy bands like Papa Roach, Disturbed, and (past Knocked Loose tourmates) Motionless In White and A Day To Remember, and the album also features two mainstream-metal-friendly guests: Poppy and Motionless In White’s Chris Motionless. Guitarist/backing vocalist Isaac Hale also promised when the album was announced that the album goes “the fastest we’ve ever gone” and “the scariest we’ve ever gone,” as well as “the catchiest and the most melodic that we’ve ever gone,” and vocalist Bryan Garris spoke in a recent interview with New Noise about Knocked Loose being “heavy music for normal people” and feeling that it was “very important for all of us to maintain accessibility.” So, with that producer, those guests, and promises of catchy melodies and accessibility, it might look on paper like Knocked Loose are finally making the radio-friendly jump that so many heavy bands have made before them, but that isn’t the case at all. Drew Fulk’s production has a definite shine to it, but in a way that somehow makes Knocked Loose sound even more abrasive, and the guest appearances from Poppy and Chris Motionless are just as brutal as Bryan’s shrieks and Isaac’s death growls. It’s not that the album goes from being catchy to being scary; it’s the catchiest Knocked Loose album and the scariest Knocked Loose album at the exact same time. They’ve funneled all of their brutality into the leanest, most concise songs they’ve ever written. It’s catchy just in how it’s structured, not because it has even a single clean, singalong chorus. “Heavy music for normal people” is a good way of putting it, and I’d also just add that it’s heavy music for everyone. You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is the dose of brutality you need in your life, even if you’d never identify as a metalhead or a hardcore kid, and it’s also music for metalheads and hardcore kids. If you think you’re too evil or too punk for Knocked Loose, you’ve got it backwards.

Mannequin Pussy – I Got Heaven
Epitaph

As the opening track, title track, and lead single of their fourth album, there was no better way to introduce this new era of Mannequin Pussy than “I Got Heaven.” It’s a punk rock battle march that finds Marisa Dabice shouting her way through rage and desire, and it culminates in a shiny, glossy chorus that sounds like it would fit on a late ’90s Garbage record. Obviously a song that wonders “what if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch?” is making a statement, and this song very much does. It sets the stage for the rest of the album, which ranges from dream pop to hardcore punk with moods and thoughts and feelings that have just as much variety as the music itself.

Marisa has said that, if 2019’s Patience is a breakup record, then I Got Heaven is a record inspired by living with your loneliness and solitude and really getting to know yourself, and all the ups and downs and indecisiveness and contradictions that come along with that. From a couplet like “I want to be a danger/I want to be adored” to the collage of music genres, I Got Heaven pulls you in multiple different directions at once. Thanks in part to new guitarist Maxine Steen (who also plays with Marisa in the side project Rosie Thorne), the album has a greater use of electronics and it finds Mannequin Pussy living out their pop music dreams in a way that they only hinted at in the past on sweetly melodic songs like “I Don’t Know You” and “Sometimes.” But it also has some of the most intense hardcore songs they’ve ever written, like “OK? OK! OK? OK!,” “Of Her,” and the especially groovy “Aching.” It’s a record that refuses to be pinned down or stereotyped, and it’s refreshing in a world that too often wants to fit things into neatly organized boxes. There’s really nothing neat or organized about Mannequin Pussy; they’re a mess, and messes are way more interesting.

For much more on this album, read our Mannequin Pussy cover story from the first issue of the new, free BrooklynVegan digital magazine.

NØ MAN – Glitter and Spit
Iodine

Reviews of NØ MAN albums will probably point out that three of the band’s four members were also in the influential screamo band Majority Rule and vocalist Maha Shami guested on Majority Rule’s “Packaged Poison” from their 2003 split LP with pageninetynine (like I am doing right now), and even though NØ MAN are six years and three albums in at this point, but if you didn’t know any better, you might mistake Glitter and Spit as the work of a rising new band. NØ MAN sound as fired-up on this LP as Majority Rule did over 20 years ago, and it registers as one of this year’s most impactful punk records regardless of any context beyond the music itself. Maha, the daughter of Palestinian refugees, fuels the album with anger directed at the violence that her family escaped–particularly on the show-stealing “Can’t Kill Us All”–as well as various other political, social, and economic systems put in place to fuel moral and ethical corruption. Her fury is palpable, and she delivers it with concise gut-punches that are impossible to hear and not scream along to.

Pissed Jeans – Half-Divorced
Sub Pop

Pissed Jeans are back with their first album in seven years to remind you that no one does sludgy noise punk and sardonic humor quite like they do. They also sound extra fired-up on this one, with a higher dose of short, fast, classic hardcore-style songs than ever. The eternally-sneering Matt Korvette tackles the kind of shit that people deal with on a daily basis–debt, finding a place to live, parenting, targeted ads, the tragedy-ridden news cycle–and almost every word out of his mouth is fully drenched in sarcasm. Half-Divorced turns dread and mundanity into fun, funny punk songs that are an absolute blast to listen to. They’re also gnarly and fucked up and bending the “rules” of punk and hardcore, just like Pissed Jeans have been doing for 20 years straight. Down to its title, Half-Divorced reminds you that punk doesn’t have to be a young person’s game to be this reckless.

SECT – Plagues Upon Plagues
Southern Lord

SECT’s fourth album gets its title from “the literal pandemic, and the metaphorical plague of the political state and the rise of fascism,” but it’s not a protest album. Instead, it’s an album that captures the mournful hopelessness you feel when protesting just seems futile. Vocalist Chris Colohan refers to it as “a funeral rather than a trial.” You can hear in Colohan’s grizzled growls how disappointed he is in humanity, and it’s all set to a sludgy, crusty hardcore backdrop that sounds just as dark and depressing as what Colohan is singing about. It’s some of the most impactful songwriting yet from this supergroup-worthy lineup, and it’s an album that really holds a candle to the members’ multiple canonized projects–Colohan has fronted Cursed, Left For Dead, Ruination, and more over the years; drummer Andy Hurley hails from Fall Out Boy and Racetraitor; and other members have done time in Earth Crisis, Catharsis, Undying, Day of Suffering, and more. (Not to mention Converge’s Kurt Ballou stepped in to mix.) A lot of recent albums have captured the anger, confusion, and unrest that’s been increasingly widespread throughout the first half of the 2020s, but few have captured the utter dread the way this one does.

Spaced – This Is All We Ever Get
Revelation

After a series of increasingly promising EPs/singles, Buffalo hardcore band Spaced release their first full-length for the legendary Revelation Records. Citing hardcore bands like Gorilla Biscuits, Suicidal Tendencies, and The Rival Mob as influences alongside more experimental bands like Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, The Cure, and Swans, the resulting LP ends up in a similar lane as the faster deep cuts on Turnstile’s Time & Space. Their “far out hardcore” formula never takes them too far away from hardcore’s time-tested short, loud, and fast formula, and they find ways to inject that formula with some psychedelic effects without ever toning down the fury. These are also by far the catchiest songs Spaced have written yet, without ever really veering into “melodic hardcore.” Vocalist Lexi Reyngoudt just really focuses and streamlines her shouted one-liners to the point where you can’t help but shout along.

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* Our 40 Favorite Albums of 2024 So Far

* 25 Best Metal Albums of 2024 So Far

* Indie Basement: Best Albums of 2024 So Far

* For more punk/emo features, track reviews, and more, browse the In Defense of the Genre archives

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Top photo: Gouge Away at Bowery Ballroom by Amanda Hatfield. More here.