NEWSLETTER

Maybe the reason a lot of hardcore bands scream about a stagnating scene is because the hardcore scene is really, really stagnant.

Over the past 20 years, although there were a handful of light-in-the-darkness bands, the majority of hardcore groups/kids/zines have been copycat losers, a zillion times removed from the founding principles of the movement. Haven’t you kids even read Steven Blush’s American Hardcore?

Thank God for Stockholm’s X More Than Zero X. They’re one of the most important hardcore bands to come out since Born Against. They’re taking the original ethos of the genre—angry outsider kids with nothing to lose screaming about stuff—and twisting it into an angry, relevant alternative to the dross you fuckers buy up like 99 percent of the sheep on the cover of the second Minor Threat album.

Vice: What led you to hardcore?

Eva Unnes (vocals): My brother was into heavy, politicized grind hardcore. G-Anx, Anti Cimex, Doom... They all seemed so much more honest than straight-edge wankers like Earth Crisis.
Finding a video of Siege rehearsing in some shithole studio in Boston in my brother’s bedroom changed my whole perspective on hardcore. From then, I got into bands like Negative Approach and Infest.

This sounds a little odd coming from an 18-year-old. Aren’t you supposed to be all into No Doubt and stuff?

Funny you should say that, because I met Gwen Stefani when they played in Stockholm recently. I gave her a copy of our first seven-inch, With Meaning/Destroy the Scriptures.

You’re the only woman in a band full of men.

Yeah, but I treat them like bitches. It may sound egotistical, but our band is like if Negative Approach and the Poison Girls were heavily into early Neurosis. Plus I think we’ve got something to say.

Which is what?

That it’s time to steal the term “realness” from rappers and put it back where it belongs: In hardcore.

JIMMY SHITS
X MORE THAN ZERO X’s third demo tape, Outpatient Waiting to Die, is out now through www.morethanzero.se

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