Last week's snowstorm has rendered Pittsburgh an undriveable hellscape, but it didn't stop me from driving 20 minutes outside the city to see a bunch of men in their 40s make a room full of teenagers fight each other for pleasure. The thing about this style of music, what people who are too physically and mentally feeble to approach it with good faith reductively call "tough guy hardcore," is that it's beautiful. And stupid. And dangerous. And therefore beautiful.

Death Before Dishonor -- essentially Boston's answer to Terror -- were really beloved in the 2000s and early 2010s but have waned in favor with the youth over the last decade. They're trying to make a comeback now and it's kind of working. Only like two old guys knew the words but the kids were dancing. Saw one get his gum busted til it bled and he smiled it off before heading back in.

Bayway are a newer band of older dudes from New Jersey. Their whole thing is embodying Jersey in all of its goombah glory; they open every set with the Sopranos theme and mine from the rap-core of E-Town Concrete and the thuggish beatdown of NJ Bloodline. A year ago they were kind of a mosher's band, but now they have this adjacent audience of super passionate teens who know all their words and are just there to have fun. Bayway singer Jay is a one-of-a-kind character. I think anyone, regardless of their hc familiarity, would enjoy this band live.

Shattered Realm are the old knucklers of tri-state mosh-core. "Bring The Violence Back" is their slogan. The internet has made it so that every genre is a "heads" genre now and it's no longer very novel to be the person who knows all the deepest cuts (see: Alison's Halo randomly being canonized as shoegaze royalty by zoomers). But hardcore has always been that way, and what I love about this genre is how deeply kids will revere older bands who paved the way.

Shattered Realm were notorious for violent sets in the first half of the 2000s where the spinkick/ninja warrior style of hardcore dancing was fully realized. Their music -- cold, spiteful, weathered by genuine struggle -- sounds super contemporary in that regard, so the pit was a pluralistic rainbow of limber old-heads, spry young bucks, and more than a few girls who were hand-springing and mic-grabbing just like da boys. Like I said, beautiful.

If you're gonna be dumb you gotta be tough

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If you're gonna be dumb you gotta be tough