TOP FIVE PURE NOISE RECORDS RELEASES
Pure Noise might be a relatively young label, but it quickly became—and remains—one of the best on the scene today, with a stacked roster currently featuring artists such as SeeYouSpaceCowboy, Koyo, Bloom, the Bouncing Souls, UNITYTX, Year of the Knife, ‘68, the Amity Affliction, and more! On this Top Five, we consider (using the highly subjective metric of my taste, as pretty much always) the very best full-length albums Pure Noise has released since its inception. Without further ado…
5. State Champs-The Finer Things (2013)
Narrowly edging-out Four Year Strong’s fantastic self-titled 2015 offering, this is to me the peak of the pizza, friends, and floral print era of pop punk. Youthful exuberance and passion meets crisp songwriting packed with hooks. If I were to make a Top Five for my favorite pop punk albums of all time, this would at minimum be in the conversation for Honorable Mentions.
4. Terror-Pain Into Power (2022)
Terror is for me tied with Hatebreed as the greatest hardcore band of all time. Vocalist Scott Vogel has been in the game a long time and he sounds as pissed as ever here. The band’s streamlined approach with less than half of the songs even cracking two minutes in length means we’re in, we’re out, and it’s all killer no filler. Songs like "One Thousand Lies" stack up among their best; the recording quality is noticeably rough, but I feel like this was an intentional move along with the brevity of many of the songs, the songwriting itself, and black-and-white videos like "Pain Into Power" to evoke an earlier era of hardcore. It’s kind of like an OG mic drop.
3. Knocked Loose-Laugh Tracks (2016)
Two words: "ARF ARF!" and things were never the same. 2014’s Pop Culture EP had already created a ton of buzz for this band, and when I saw them live for the first time around when this album came out along with Eternal Sleep and Harms Way opening for Every Time I Die in Portland, Maine, the crowd was going absolutely berserk. I haven’t seen too many crowd reactions that fervent in almost twenty years of going to hardcore shows (Foundation’s set on one of the last dates of Have Heart’s farewell tour in I think Massachusetts with Cruel Hand and Crime In Stereo, and Harms Way themselves one of the last years of Warped Tour are two others that come to mind—where and when I don’t remember, I want to say Hartford, Connecticut?). Bryan Garris’s high-pitched and frenzied, nervous-breakdown-like vocals are an acquired taste for some, but in contrast with the death metal-inspired backing vocals paired with insanely heavy music is a lethal combination that’s continued to catapult this band to the A-list of hardcore and beyond. Really any of their full-lengths could’ve gone here, but if I had to pick one the jump from the already-good Pop Culture, the more memorable songs, and the freshness of their sound here makes Laugh Tracks my pick.
2. Four Year Strong-Brain Pain (2020)
Spoiler alert: I will go into more detail about this album on my Top Five Albums of the 20s (so far) in the Honorable Mentions, but this is an excellent record full of standout songs that in some ways continued in the direction of Four Year Strong’s post-In Some Way, Shape, or Form re-birth while accentuating both their hardcore influences and the 90s alternative rock influences that had clearly always been a touch-stone for the band. As catchy as ever, but in said accentuation of these elements, a fresh new sound emerged that I call 90s Rock-core. The breakdown at the end of "It’s Cool" bears special note here as it is, indeed, very cool.
1. First Blood-Rules (2017)
The title says it all: First Blood does, indeed, rule. Typically I don’t care for sloganeering and being hammered over the head with politics in music, but somehow it’s a thing of beauty when First Blood does it. Sort of like Emmure, the rules don’t really apply to them (see what I did there?). The energy First Blood manages to capture in recording—aided by all of the gang vocals and said sloganeering functioning as call-outs—with just nasty breakdowns aplenty is consistently impressive for the band that self-identifies as "straight-forward metal-edged hardcore mosh." Peak camo cargo short hardcore, these guys are legends and one of my all-time favorite hardcore bands.