The success of Manchester’s Outbreak festival shows the appetite for the genre isn’t just healthy, it’s on the rise. Its organisers discuss the scene’s evolution, its fragility, and its (very loud) future

At the end of June this year thousands of people – from Scotland to Bulgaria, Chile to Singapore – gathered in an industrial estate in Manchester to boot each other in the head. That wasn’t the express purpose, of course, but a common side-effect of attending Outbreak, the hardcore punk festival that has become a flagship event for a genre experiencing an unprecedented moment of mainstream visibility.

Bursting out of the American suburbs in the late 1970s, hardcore was a response to the punk and new wave invasion that had dominated the years prior. Early bands such as Black Flag, Bad Brains and Dead Kennedys distilled the rawness of punk and pushed it to extremes, pioneering a do-it-yourself ethos, and a fast, frantic sound that became the definitive sonic kickback to a decade of Reaganomics and rising conservatism. Though the sound of hardcore has evolved over the decades, spawning various subgenres (screamo, queercore, powerviolence) and acting as the jumping-off point for many of the pop-punk and emo bands that defined the 2000s, that grassroots philosophy has been unwavering. It’s there in the origins of Outbreak, too.

(Jagjaguwar)
The Canadian indie-garage-rockers take the mickey out of pop, punk and the stories we tell ourselves, but strong feeling outweighs the cynicism

Trite metaphors, tortured similes and outright cliches are, ahem, ten a penny in today’s pop lyrics – so how refreshing to have Zach Choy, bandleader with Canadian indie curveballs Crack Cloud, writing with such wit, bite and the kind of perfectly scanning rhyme you get in the best sea shanties or children’s literature. That isn’t faint praise: it’s deceptively hard to write lyrics this rhythmic, this rounded, much less so while making trenchant comments about the very capabilities of art.

Crack Cloud have had a shifting lineup over the past decade and two previous albums, and the band match Choy’s ambition, playing a singular kind of maximalist garage rock decked out with synths, saxophones, strings and singalongs. Yet he remains at its centre, a drummer-singer with a history of addiction. “Road to recovery, an early talking point,” he notes drily of the press ( including the Guardian ) who latched on to this traumatic story when the band broke through around 2017, and Choy is so aware of how personal narrative and pop culture are constructed.

Hull’s David Remfry was ‘artist in residence’ at the legendary hotel, portraying dominatrixes, drag acts and rock stars – including an annoyingly twitchy Dee Dee Ramone in a room smelling of glue. He relives a ‘magic time’

Memorialised in song by former residents Bob Dylan , Leonard Cohen and Nico , New York’s Hotel Chelsea has housed an astonishing clientele of artists, writers and mavericks including Brendan Behan, Arthur C Clarke (who called it his “ spiritual home ”), Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. In 1994 the British artist David Remfry , then 52, joined this esteemed roll-call when he relocated to New York ahead of an exhibition of works he intended to paint in the city. He went on to spend 17 years at the Chelsea, drawing and painting its remarkable denizens. “I was in heaven,” he says. His pencil portrait of punk pioneer Dee Dee Ramone is part of this year’s Royal Academy summer exhibition.

Raised in Hull and now based in London, Remfry arrived at the Chelsea check-in desk that summer with “17 pieces of luggage, no reservation and no money. Stanley Bard, the owner, asked me, ‘David, how much do your paintings sell for? And how many do you paint a year?’ I think he was figuring out how much he could charge me.”

(BMG)
The punk-metal duo formerly known as Slaves offer sandpaper vocals, spine-tingling lyrics and sharp satire on their fiery fourth album

The fourth album from Soft Play – Isaac Holman and Laurie Vincent’s punk duo, formerly known as Slaves – concludes with one of the most extraordinary tracks of the year. Over a tinny mandolin riff and doleful violin, Holman employs his most abrasive hardcore rasp to lay bare a mind bludgeoned by grief. Everything and Nothing’s juxtaposition of sweetly jangling instrumental with strained, sandpaper vocals is spine-tingling enough, but the lyrics make it a masterpiece. Name-checking a late friend – while also seemingly alluding to Vincent’s partner, who died of cancer in 2020 – the pair tangle mundanity with utter desolation (“white knuckles on the counter in the kitchen”) to create a singularly beautiful and arresting portrait of loss.

Amazingly, Heavy Jelly also features one of the funniest songs in recent memory. Punk’s Dead, the Kent outfit’s ingeniously arch retort to complaints about their name change – a decision they arrived at after accepting Slaves’ problematic baggage – quotes from internet whingers. “Come and get a load of these PC babies,” shrieks Holman, churning satire into catharsis, before delivering a comically sublime line about Johnny Rotten.

They chronicled 1980s Los Angeles as a nihilist nightmare and became a key voice in the city. Releasing their final album, they recall the wild parties – and rocky romances

Los Angeles was so foundational to punk-rock pioneers X they named their 1980 debut album after it. For Brooklyn-raised bassist/singer John Doe, the city held all the promise of a new frontier. “I’d seen Talking Heads at CBGBs, the Heartbreakers at Max’s Kansas City,” he says. “I wanted to be in a band, and I packed up my shit and moved to LA because I loved movies and literature, and because there was no punk scene there, yet.” For singer Exene Cervenka, it offered salvation from a deadening existence in St Petersburg, Florida. Restless, an inveterate hitchhiker, she was “always searching, my antennae open, just looking to see what was out there in the world”.

At 20, Cervenka followed those antennae to Hollywood, where she met Doe and Illinois-born guitarist Billy Zoom, and they formed one of the first – and certainly the most enduring – of LA’s punk-rock groups, in 1977. Documenting a nihilistic LA, and soon namechecked in Bret Easton Ellis’s similarly minded Less Than Zero, they became local, then national punk heroes before losing their way amid friction, divorce and major label misdirection.

The Troxy, London E1
Undimmed by the decades, the Deal sisters mark the 30th anniversary of their classic album Last Splash with a masterclass in off-kilter melody

The first thing that twin Breeders guitarists Kim and Kelley Deal do when they hit the stage is begin feverishly adjusting their amps and effects pedals, calibrating their racket just so. The late Steve Albini, who engineered multiple albums for the four-piece, once noted band leader Kim Deal’s “absolute persistence in trying to achieve the sound in her head”. It was gushing hyperbole from a man known for his acid tongue.

The sound in Deal’s head remains both redolent of the grunge era, and gloriously, goofily free of it. The Breeders deal in bounding basslines, sticky guitars, weird noises and Kim’s own melodic vocals – all present on Saints , the band’s opening track tonight – and re-administered at various titrations across the course of 90 minutes. “Summer is ready when you are!” sings Deal sweetly, of the pleasures of going to the fair – her midwestern girl-next-door manner long providing camouflage for the obsessive sound architect within.

Band say they were unaware of stunt by artist until after their set headlining the Other stage

It has been revealed that the street and performance artist Banksy was behind a stunt during Idles’ set at Glastonbury, when an inflatable life raft holding dummy migrants was launched across the crowd.

Many in the crowd believed it to be part of Idles’ show, dovetailing with the Bristol punk band’s lyrics about immigration, criticism of rightwing governance and calls for empathy. But a representative for the band announced on Saturday that the boat was created by Banksy, and the band weren’t aware of the stunt until after the set.

My blood brother is an immigrant
A beautiful immigrant

My blood brother’s Freddie Mercury
A Nigerian mother of three

François Guillemot’s band, Bérurier Noir, wrote Porcherie in 1985. In the lead-up to a watershed election in France, its lyrics are making a comeback among the youth, politicians and celebrities alike

Ahead of this Sunday’s first round of France’s high-stakes parliamentary election, the slogan La jeunesse emmerde le Front national has been making the rounds on social networks. Young people are uploading clips of themselves singing it on TikTok, leftist MEP Manon Aubry has led chants of it at rallies, and actor Marion Cotillard has worn a badge with the sloga n. Where does it come from?

François Guillemot: The line is from the song Porcherie that I recorded with my punk band, Bérurier Noir, in 1985. The year before the far-right Front National party, then fronted by the father of National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie, had obtained its first strong result at the European parliamentary elections, gaining almost 11% of the vote. Porcherie starts with a sample of Le Pen addressing a rally in Belgium, predicting there would be a huge nationalist movement in that country too. We cut out the word “Belgium” and replaced it with “oink oink oink”.

Brighton Dome
Whether she’s dancing, eulogising Kurt Cobain or covering Lana Del Rey, Smith remains such a compelling and moving live performer

Four songs into her set, Patti Smith starts to cry: “First tears of the tour!” she sighs, wiping her eyes. They’re occasioned by the sound of the audience singing along to her 1978 track Ghost Dance, a sound you would assume she’s heard before in the years since she wrote it. Perhaps in Brighton they are even more reverential than those Smith usually faces, 60 years on from her debut single. The first but not the last loud scream of “I love you Patti!” rings out before she’s even played a note; people throw roses and leave cards on the stage.

The object of their affection should, by rights, have long ascended into the realm of legendhood, where people buy tickets simply to be in proximity to an icon and the music is a secondary consideration. At 77, however, Smith remains a genuinely compelling performer. Music seems to have a transformative effect on her. Between songs she’s far goofier than her reputation as the epitome of New York punk cool suggests, but once her band kick into the Velvet Underground -ish chug of Nine or a surging version of Pissing in a River, she appears to be genuinely transported. She dances with an enviable insouciance, and as her eulogy for Kurt Cobain, About a Boy, collapses into abstraction, she appears to be close to speaking in tongues.