The hardcore band in Westside Gunn’s viral video is ’80s Long Beach vets Dissension

Earlier this month, rapper and Griselda Records boss Westside Gunn made headlines for posting a video soundtracked by a song called “Black Hole” by a hardcore band called Dissension, which starred Oyat Otto, a former prisoner who went viral for posting videos of himself moshing and singing along to hardcore and metal songs in his prison cell. Westside Gunn referred to Dissension as “my band” and later wrote “I been keeping my guys a secret,” leading people to wonder if WSG was in the band, just releasing their music on Griselda Records, or none of the above. There are multiple bands with the name Dissension, and we originally assumed this was yet another newer one. The mystery of their identity has been bugging us, so we decided to do some more digging, and we were able to independently confirm that this is in fact the veteran Long Beach hardcore band Dissension, who formed in 1984 and released two albums on Metal Storm Records, 1986’s Why Work For Death? and 1988’s We The Fooled, before breaking up towards the end of that decade.

Dissension reunited in the 2010s and have since had a few new vocalists, including current vocalist Kevin Dean, who joined in 2023 and released the album Bought The Pharma with Dissension later that year. The band have since been teasing more new music and playing some new stuff live, including “Black Hole,” the song featured in that Westside Gunn video. As as far as we can tell, they haven’t released a recording of it, but they did play it at a hometown Long Beach show at Alex’s Bar this past July, and you can watch a video of their set from that show below (“Black Hole” comes in at the 11:42 mark).

We’re still wondering how exactly the Buffalo hip hop mogul is connected to this veteran Long Beach hardcore band, but we reached out to Dissension for comment, so stay tuned for any updates.

The Punk Rock Chronicles also interviewed Dissension at that same Long Beach show (at the 31:26 mark):

And Dissension went on the very first episode of The Punk Rock Chronicles Podcast (with then-singer Eric Salazar) back in 2020:

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