Post Orgcore is Here to Stay

New Junk City, Spanish Love Songs and The Jack Knives all release brand new albums on Friday, November 6. Three bands with the same roots, but very different destinations, and that's the best news this scene has had in years.

New Junk City release Where Could I Go? on Lauren Records. Spanish Love Songs release Future Nausea on Pure Noise and The Jack Knives release Negative Spaces on Fumie and SBAM Records. Play them back to back and you'll hear a scene that has grown up, spread out and changed the rules. Shall we call it post-orgcore?

Nobody ever wrote those old rules down, but everybody knew them. Flannel and a beard. A voice that sounded like it had been gargling gravel since the last Fest. Songs about bars, bridges and getting older. No synths, no outside producers, no straying too far from the formula. Hot Water Music, Lifetime, The Lawrence Arms, Iron Chic and The Menzingers built something real, and for a long time, many bands who followed colored inside their lines and the scene went stagnant.

Post orgcore is what happens when bands keep the values and drop the rules. Do it yourself, look after each other, mean every word, that part isn't up for debate. Everything else is. And on November 6, three bands prove it by charging off in three different directions at once.

New Junk City: Where Could I Go?

Atlanta, GA - Lauren Records

Of the three, New Junk City sit closest to the classic blueprint. Gruff, melodic punk with a 90s alt-rock streak running through the guitars, and a list of influences that runs from The Weakerthans to Fucked Up to Green Day. They've been compared to The Menzingers and The Gaslight Anthem for years, and they've earned it.

The new record was cut at Standard Electric with longtime collaborator Damon Moon and produced by Tyler Bisson. What's different is where they point the camera, inward, at work, love and the cost of keeping a life together, without losing any of the authenticity that made their name.

That's orgcore's oldest subject matter, written by people who are now living it at a different age. It isn't nostalgia. It's the next chapter of the same story.

Spanish Love Songs: Future Nausea

Los Angeles, CA - Pure Noise

Spanish Love Songs have long been the scene's resident chroniclers of dread, and No Joy already pushed them toward synths and new wave textures. Future Nausea goes bigger still. Produced by former Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla alongside Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties, it borrows heartland rock's scale (ringing guitars, driving rhythms, huge choruses) but turns that sound away from the rear-view mirror and toward a present nobody feels sure about.

Dylan Slocum has called it the band's least sad record and its angriest, a record about politics, power and isolation, and the small human connections that get you through it. Synths, an indie rock producer and a heartland makeover: three things the old rulebook would never have allowed.

If New Junk City is orgcore looking in the mirror, Spanish Love Songs is orgcore looking at the newspaper.

The Jack Knives: Negative Spaces

Orange County CA - Fumie Records / SBAM Records

Of the three, The Jack Knives are the loudest and the rawest. Negative Spaces was cut in ten days at Little Eden Studios in Asbury Park with Pete Steinkopf of the Bouncing Souls producing, and it sounds like it, guitars turned all the way up, nothing polished off, a band playing like they mean it. It sits somewhere between The Menzingers, The Gaslight Anthem and the Bouncing Souls, with major-key choruses built to be sung back from the floor. And even a spoken word cameo by Tom May of The Menzingers.

What holds it all together is sincere storytelling. It's a record about life, about making it this far and taking stock of where we stand in America today. It goes to some dark places, but it never loses its optimism.

Spanish Love Songs aim squarely at the state of the world. New Junk City write about the kitchen table. The Jack Knives turn the amps up and tell their story straight from the heart and lessons of life.

Even the way these records were made tells the story. One cut in Atlanta with an old friend behind the desk. One handed to an indie rock lifer and a producer from a completely different corner of the music world. One made in Asbury Park with a Bouncing Soul at the controls. Three different routes, and you could put all three bands on the same bill tomorrow and the crowd would know every word by the second chorus.

A scene that only makes one kind of record eventually stops making new ones. For a while, orgcore risked becoming a costume, the right shirt, the right rasp, the right number of songs about drinking on a porch. We love those records and plenty of us wouldn't be here without them. But November 6 shows a scene that has moved on without leaving anything behind. The DNA is the same. The destinations aren't. A record about growing older. A record about a country on edge. A record about holding on to hope and all three belong, and all three push the scene somewhere it hasn't been.

That's how a scene stays alive. So do yourself a favor and buy all three. Put Where Could I Go? on in the morning, Future Nausea on the drive there, and Negative Spaces on the way back. Notice the differences. Notice the common ground. Then go and see all three bands in a small room while you still can.

Three independent-minded bands. Three very different records. One scene, and it's in better health than it has been in a long time.