The North Carolina political hardcore icons return with their first new album in 24 years, and it’s exactly what we needed.
By Kim Kelly
The year I turned six years old, the world was consumed by scandal, violence, death, and destruction. President Bill Clinton was confronted with the first of his many sexual harassment cases, O. J. Simpson was arrested on murder charges, former President Richard Nixon, Kurt Cobain, and Jackie O. died, NAFTA came into effect, sectarian violence in the Balkans was at a fever pitch, genocide broke out in Rwanda, tobacco execs testified under oath that nicotine wasn’t addictive, and the goddamn Cowboys won the Super Bowl.
1994 wasn’t all bad, of course. Against an imposing backdrop of epoch-defining global change like the election of Nelson Mandela, a ceasefire between the Irish Provisional Army and occupying British forces, and the Zapatista revolution in Chiapas, a little band from North Carolina released their first demo tape. Fall was the world’s introduction to Catharsis, a scrappy collective of Southern anarchist punks who would eventually become one of the most revered entities in American hardcore.
Even on those early recordings, the passion and fury bleeds through, and over their next decade of activity, they just kept getting better. Two full-lengths, 1997’s Samsara and 1999’s Passion, were joined by a passel of splits with like-minded hardcore voices, and established Catharsis as one of the genre’s guiding lights, devoted to a radical message of liberation as well as the music itself. The band further burnished their uncompromising DIY rep by releasing their music via CrimethInc, a long-running anarchist media and organizing project founded by vocalist and guitarist Brian in the mid-90s that has since developed into a decentralized collective with a global scope.
