Last June, Scowl set up their gear at Centrala, the intimate 100-capacity DIY venue that’s a cornerstone of Birmingham’s hardcore punk scene. Hanging behind the Santa Cruz band was a spray-painted sheet reading “Fuck Barclays” and a Palestine flag. Scowl – along with Speed, Zulu and Pest Control, whom they shared the bill with – were supposed to be playing one of the biggest shows of their career that night at Download Festival. Instead, they dropped out in protest of festival sponsor Barclays, and its ties to weapons companies supplying Israel. This stacked, sold-out show was hastily pulled together by local collective Birmingham Hardcore Shows, with all proceeds going to relief for Gaza.
“I’ve been poor my whole life. I grew up with no money, and I learned how to live. No amount of money’s gonna make me do something I can’t sleep with at night,” guitarist Malachi Greene says now on a call with NME. His bandmates – vocalist Kat Moss, second guitarist Mikey Bifolco, bassist Bailey Lupo and drummer Cole Gilbert – chime in with agreement from their respective Zoom windows. “When it comes to tough decisions in this band, it actually isn’t that hard,” Moss affirms. “We all have the same vision about where our values fucking lie.”
Scowl come from the underground world of hardcore punk, where collectivist, community ethics drive everything. Since the release of their 2021 debut album ‘How Flowers Grow’, they’ve jumped into a mainstream sphere dictated by festival appearances, arena tour opening slots, advertisement syncs and label meetings. Their integration into that world is set to ramp up further with their long-awaited second album ‘Are We All Angels’ and their signing with Dead Oceans (Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski) – marking the first hardcore act to join the label.
But in everything they do, Scowl insist, the spirit of their punk background guides them. They also cancelled appearances at South By South West and Welcome to Rockville last year over US army sponsorship of both festivals, and more recently played a Bay Area benefit for the Los Angeles wildfires, postponing a single release to amplify resources for its victims. (SXSW dropped the US army as a sponsor in January, while Barclays pulled out of Download, among other festivals, following the band boycotts.)
“I feel like we’ve all kinda had that [question of], is this affecting my integrity? We’ve all had that inner struggle,” says Gilbert. “But I personally can say I don’t think we’ve ever done anything that I walked away from and thought, ‘No, that was the wrong thing to do’. I don’t think we’ve ever done anything to change who we are.”
“Some of the most catchy music you ever heard in your whole life is punk as fuck” – Bailey Lupo
Scowl began when Moss, Greene, Lupo and Gilbert met through hardcore shows in the Bay Area (Bifolco was a later addition). The members had limited experience with their instruments, and Moss had never been in a band before. It didn’t matter; the point was just the pure, instinctual catharsis. “[It was] pretty primal,” Greene says. “Being in an environment [where it’s] hard to pay rent and the world is fucked up, you wanna send a message and be a part of something.”
What followed, from their early demos to ‘How Flowers Grow’, was traditional, heavy, pissed-off hardcore. But the song that became the key to Scowl’s creative identity was a complete outlier: ‘Seeds to Sow’, which featured a saxophone and clean, serene vocals by Moss. It flipped a switch for the band: despite their relative inexperience and their surroundings in the often-hardline punk scene, they were capable of exploring sounds beyond that.
They tried that out on the 2023 EP ‘Psychic Dance Routine’, a game-changing 10 minutes that blended hard-as-ever hardcore with shades of Blondie and the Breeders, and saw Moss becoming one of the genre’s most confident and capable frontpeople. ‘Are We All Angels’ expands on that. The yells are few and far between, the heavy riffs mixed in a way that smooths and redirects them to propel Moss’s vocals. Produced by scene legend Will Yip, the record is certainly radio-readier than their previous work and more reminiscent of grunge and alt-rock bands like Hole or L7 than it is hardcore. It’s not lost on the band that that could be controversial.
“[Punk has] always been about release and catharsis, and if you’re like us and you grew up on that shit, it’s always in the back of your fucking brain,” says Lupo. “But some of the most catchy music you ever heard in your whole life is punk as fuck, and people might not wanna admit that sometimes. Look at Hüsker Dü – they made poppy, catchy, punk as fuck music. I could rant about Ceremony or AFI – bands that are just doing themselves, and that’s punk as fuck too.”
“I love melody, and I feel like we would be doing ourselves a disservice by not utilising it,” Moss adds. Yet she makes clear that Scowl are no less pissed off now – it’s just that in-your-face aggression has been replaced by a slower simmering rage. On ‘Are We All Angels’, she wanted to write about “systems of abuse and the way that they control us”, both personal and societal. That insidious frustration bubbles through everywhere, from the sneer of ‘Special’ to the cool control of ‘Tonight (I’m Afraid)’. “When you’re a woman or a feminine person, [when you’re angry] you’re called crazy, you’re called a bitch,” Moss says, growing animated. “I can’t absolutely snap – I would love to. And there’s almost a little bit of spite in that for me.”
She adds: “I [have become] a really big fan of Radiohead the last couple years, and something about Radiohead that I really like is the fact that it’s oozing with vitriol. There’s just so much scathingness to it. That was really inspiring for me.”
“It is very frustrating that women constantly have to prove their credibility” – Kat Moss
That sense of rage has become ever more urgent now, in the first weeks of Donald Trump’s second term. Our conversation takes place three days after his inauguration, and he’s already signed off on extremely ominous legislation around DEI and trans rights. In times like these, the band say, the sense of physical, in-person community that hardcore scenes offer is crucial.
“People are being radicalised in real-time every second, every day. There’s a lot of good coming out of [that] that you see only in the streets and not on the internet or TV,” Lupo says. “Infighting about identity politics and bathrooms and immigration are distractions from a larger capitalist power that controls us every day and from creating a working-class movement to fight that. A lot of the political extremism from the right [wing] right now is coming at a time when the cracks in their system are the biggest they’ve ever been. So I’m kinda hopeful.”
While the darkness of life under American capitalism is a backdrop to ‘Are We All Angels’, some of the other forces Moss targets on the album are closer to home. Two years ago, shortly after Scowl appeared in a US Taco Bell advert, Moss posted a long message to social media in which she hit back at online commenters who labelled Scowl as sellouts or “industry plants”, identifying a double standard in how women in punk bands are scrutinised which generated much discussion in online hardcore circles.
“The patriarchy exists in the world and our greater systems, but the way it funnels down and is fed through our subculture that claims to be so open and understanding and educated, it’s frustrating,” Moss says now. “I’m close with my scene, I love hardcore, I’ve spent a lot of fucking time going to shows and being supportive and making sure shit was taken care of, and I don’t think there’s really any cred that I have to prove. But it is very frustrating that women in these spaces constantly have to prove their credibility.” On the dreamy, detached ‘Fantasy’, she writes about feeling alienated in a community that means so much to her, while the band’s next single, the punky, high-octane ‘B.A.B.E.’, asks, “Why does the good stuff never last? / Everything sacred finds its way to filthy hands.”
“There’s always going to be a group of people that just do not fuck with Scowl’s success, and I’ve accepted that,” she says with a wry smile. “But when I do the deeper work and the unpacking, it feels pretty awful still. You know how much time I’ve spent wishing I would wake up and just be a dude in a band? It would be so much fucking easier.” Yet, the band emphasise, anyone who knows them knows the hours they’ve put in – sleeping on floors and going hungry on tour, booking DIY shows, turning up to watch local bands five nights a week. The key, they say, is to stay focused on that (and to not read the comment sections). “There is no controlling your own narrative for people who are not interested in understanding you or letting you breathe,” Moss says. “There’s a level of self-preservation that you have to enact.”
This goes back, the band say, to that Birmingham show back in June. As they go forward, exploring new sounds, saying yes to more opportunities – and maybe more importantly, saying no too – there’ll undoubtedly be plenty more people having their say about the band. But no matter what, Scowl remember where they came from. “Playing on the floor, being in a room full of like a hundred people, and the room is sweating from the ceiling: that is why I wanted to play music,” Moss says. “Yeah, now we have ambitions and we have goals, but the reality is, I don’t care if we’re playing small rooms or we’re playing Coachella. I just wanna play shows with my friends.”
Scowl’s new single ‘B.A.B.E’ is released on February 11 via Dead Oceans. ‘Are We All Angels’ follows on April 4.
Listen to Scowl’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Mia Hughes
Photography: Malcolm Squire
Label: Dead Oceans
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