Crossover is the healthiest corner of this entire genre, and has been for twenty years, for one structural reason: it never depended on the metal industry, so it did not notice when the metal industry lost interest.
Municipal Waste
From Richmond, Virginia, formed in 2001 by people who came to this music through skateboarding rather than through metal. Hazardous Mutation in 2005 is twenty six minutes with no ambition beyond being extremely good at being extremely fast, and The Art of Partying two years later is better still.
What makes them work is that the joke never undermines the playing. The lyrics are about nuclear accidents and disastrous parties; the band are tight, fast and genuinely well written, and that combination is much harder to sustain than either half on its own.
Iron Reagan
Largely the same personnel, angrier and considerably more political. Where Municipal Waste are about the party, Iron Reagan are about the country the party is happening in, and the songs are shorter and less forgiving.
Enforced
Also Richmond, and the most serious of the modern crossover bands. Enforced play it straight: no jokes, no skate references, heavy riffs at hardcore tempos, and lyrics with no irony in them at all. They are the closest thing the current scene has to a direct continuation of what Cro-Mags and Nuclear Assault were doing.
Power Trip
From Dallas, out of hardcore, and the band who made the whole thing legible to people outside the scene. Nightmare Logic in 2017 is thirty two minutes that got reviewed by publications which do not acknowledge metal exists, because the band were using the form to say something current rather than to salute 1986.
Riley Gale died in August 2020 at thirty four and the band has not continued.
| Band | From | Start with | Year | What they are |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Municipal Waste | Richmond, Virginia | Hazardous Mutation | 2005 | The joke, done properly |
| Toxic Holocaust | Portland, Oregon | An Overdose of Death | 2008 | One man, doing Venom right |
| Iron Reagan | Richmond, Virginia | Crossover Ministry | 2017 | Angrier and political |
| Power Trip | Dallas, Texas | Nightmare Logic | 2017 | The one that broke out |
| Enforced | Richmond, Virginia | Kill Grid | 2021 | Played completely straight |
| Gel, Zulu and the current wave | Various | Anything recent | 2020s | The trade, made again |
Why this corner survived
Because it plays hardcore venues, hardcore festivals and skate events as readily as metal bills, which gives it a circuit that does not depend on any one industry's opinion.
A band like Enforced can tour continuously on rooms of four hundred people without a label deciding the genre is fashionable again. That is exactly the model the original bands were using in 1985, and it turns out to be considerably more durable than the arena route the thrash bands took.
What has changed
The audience is younger and considerably more mixed than the metal audience, because hardcore has spent the last decade broadening in ways metal largely has not. A crossover bill now draws people who would not attend a thrash show and would not describe themselves as metal fans at all.
The music has changed less. A Municipal Waste song and a D.R.I. song are separated by twenty years and almost nothing else, which in a genre this old is either a failure of imagination or evidence that the form was finished the first time. Given how well it still works in a room, the second reading is the fairer one.
Where the original version of this scene came from is covered in The Venice Scene, and the wider account is in Crossover: Where Thrash Met Hardcore.
The Richmond thing
Three of the most important modern crossover bands come from one city of a few hundred thousand people, and that is not a coincidence.
Richmond, Virginia has an unusually durable underground: a functioning venue circuit, cheap rent for most of the relevant period, an art school, and a hardcore scene with continuous history rather than boom and bust. Municipal Waste, Iron Reagan and Enforced share members, share venues and share an audience.
It is the same mechanism that produced the East Bay in 1983 and Belo Horizonte in 1986: a small number of people, in one place, playing to each other before anybody outside is watching. Scenes are still made in buildings.
What the modern records get right
Two things the 1980s bands did instinctively and the 1990s forgot.
They are recorded dry and close, frequently to tape or a tape emulation, with the takes kept rather than repaired. That is a deliberate rejection of the quantised, edited, over compressed production that dominated heavy music between about 1998 and 2010, and it is why these records sit comfortably next to Game Over.
And they are short. Hazardous Mutation is twenty six minutes. Nightmare Logic is thirty two. A genre that learned brevity from hardcore in 1984 and forgot it for twenty years has remembered, and the difference in how the records play is considerable.
What comes next
The current hardcore scene is producing a wave of bands playing downpicked thrash riffs at thrash tempos with no interest in the genre label, which is the third time this trade has been made and the least self conscious version of it.
Whether any of that gets called crossover is doubtful and mostly beside the point. What matters is that the mechanism still works: a hardcore band picks up a metal guitar technique, plays it for a room rather than for a critic, and something worth hearing comes out. It has happened three times in forty years and there is no reason to expect it to stop.
Where to start
Hazardous Mutation for the fun, Nightmare Logic for the seriousness, and Kill Grid for what the form sounds like played completely straight in the present. Ninety minutes, three bands, and a clear picture of why this corner is in better health than the rest of the genre.
One last note on the audience, because it is the most visible change. A crossover show now draws a crowd that is younger, considerably more mixed and noticeably less male than a thrash bill from the same week, and that is a straightforward consequence of hardcore having spent fifteen years broadening while metal largely did not. Whatever else the modern scene has inherited from 1985, the room it plays to is not the same room, and on the evidence of how these shows go that is the healthiest thing about it.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original releases. Riley Gale died on 24 August 2020.
