My experience of an existential Hell would be a lot like L Magazine’s most recent “8 NYC Bands You Need to Hear” issue, but I am both biased and have a huge chip on my shoulder.

With eccentric, harmlessly twee indie pop and art-rock party music receiving the lion’s share of “New York music scene” media coverage, certain species of music fans wonder whether the city that spawned the Ramones, Agnostic Front and Biohazard still has any vinegar and fury left. To paraphrase a friend, now that we live in a Code Orange world, where the threat of actual suicide bombings surrounds us, has the notion of moshing away your youthful angst has lost its luster?

In fact it hasn’t; not long ago I saw World/Inferno Friendship Society pack in Bowery Ballroom, where, despite the fact that the Inferno employs keys and a horn section, the teenage audience broke into circle pits and crowd surfing, cheering on sentiments like “Fuck the police!” The only difference between that and a punk or thrash show of ten, twenty, thirty years ago is the relatively benign musicality of the band. A lot of music tagged “violent” in the 1970s—90s was a localized reaction to jitter-inducing social conditions, paired with the musical generation gap reinforced by other new forms of personal expression like spiky jackets, face piercing, and slam dancing. From the 50s through the 80s, similar fear mongering over the Communist Menace informed the average American that devastating global nuclear war was possible (and maybe even likely). It was a recurring lyrical theme of waves of American punk and metal bands from both coasts. So today we have 9/11, European train bombings, and continuous Middle Eastern war. In the past half century America and Europe experienced ebbs and tides of urban decay, recession, spiking national crime rates, riots, wars and international tension. And it seems decline is on the rise again. Why would angst-driven Western kids or adults give up harsh or rebellious music now as opposed to any other time?

So, it’s still possible to find hardcore punk rock, thrash or death metal shows in New York, but you have to train your eyes to see. Metal and other heavy music is still popular nationally and globally. Metal and metalcore bands have cracked the Billboard charts, and the kids still love it—some writers would even tell you that there is a “New Wave of American Heavy Metal.”
The shrinking visibility of genres like punk and metal in New York City has more to do with real estate and residential demographics. If the Bowery has been re-engineered into the newest millionaire’s neighborhood, then hardcore and death metal matinees at CBGB just don’t fit in the picture anymore.

So I set out to track how the underside of New York’s music scene is realigning in the wake of Manhattan’s gentrification. Though not completely subterranean, what’s easy to find is more like the tip of a submerged iceberg; aspects of sub-scenes remain insular. One of my sources asked he not be named, worried that some bands might not consider him “true metal” if too much of his prior musical activity could be traced online. Though currently working with metal bands on the industry side, he had past ties to indie rock.

Aside from occasional industrial and metal shows listed at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill and the omnipresent fliers for punk and metal shows at Greenpoint club Europa and Staten Island’s L’Amour, media-visible gauges for the state of heavy music in New York are Brooklyn-based music writer Brandon Stosuy, who writes the “Show No Mercy” column for Pitchfork, and the specialty store/record label Hospital Productions, run by Dominick Fernow, also mastermind of the abrasive noise band Prurient.

A young man covering the counter at Hospital Productions (located literally inside and underneath the Jammyland record store on East 3rd) told me a lot of things I already knew: that New York is an expensive place to live and rehearse, and that rising rents and an already high level of city scrutiny around venues are making it hard for bands to get off the ground, get booked, or even put on loft shows for their friends. New York remains an important stop for established touring bands but is increasingly inhospitable to growing its own indigenous scenes. Regarding Hospital, he said that the store was geared towards a specialized niche of the music scene into noise and death metal. Rather than diversifying, the shop’s survival is based on catering to its niche/cult audience.

On another visit to the shop, I found it was already crowded with three people (young men, always young men). Furnow, small, intense, dressed in black—and who I initially could have mistaken for another young counter guy—was there but too busy packing boxes and writing invoices to talk long. He expressed that venues are, as usual, in major jeopardy and alluded to shows at underground spaces—but didn’t elaborate for fear of worsening already shaky legal situations.

Stosuy was more candid once I could pin him down.
“Right now there are definitely cool bands in New York (some favorites include Krallice, Theater of the Absurd, Ash Pool, the Howling Wind, Villains, Unearthly Trance, Copremesis, ASRA, Dysrhythmia, and Behold… The Arctopus plus old-school guys like Mortician, Malignancy, Immolation, and others if you venture into Yonkers)” he wrote in an email. “But I’m not personally interested in charting an overall metal scene, per se.”

Stosuy referenced BB King and Europa’s metal shows, Hospital, anywhere DJ Teeth (a.k.a. Pat from Villains) is spinning, the “Precious Metal” night at Lit lounge and Duff’s bar in Brooklyn as hang-outs where he was likely to see familiar faces.

“These all point toward some overall community of folks engaged on one level or another in extreme music, but it’s pretty disparate, which is part of what makes it interesting.”.

“Rent sucks just about anywhere in this city, so maybe folks just find ways to make things work where they can … and these little pockets show up across all the boroughs.”

He said his column keeps him in touch with what the younger kids are into, which is often more extreme metal and noise. “I get letters wondering where they might go musically after listening to Emperor and Burzum or Xasthur or whatever. I also know these younger folks who make noise. They send me their cassettes and CDRs and things. There are a bunch across the States doing amazing things in noise and metal.”

For another angle on displaced scenes, I spoke to Jake Casualty of long-running New York/New Jersey punk band The Casualties. This is a band that is constantly on the road, but whose hometown shows had slowed to a trickle.

“It’s better than it’s been in the last three or four years as far as people being interested in shows,” Jake told me. “Punk rock seems to be coming back and touring bands are coming back. People are starting to have that sound again, wearing leather jackets, not as worried about looking like Morrissey; they just want to see bands and get trashed.”

He ran down a list of receptive venues, saying that Knitting Factory picked up slack with both small and large punk shows after CBGBs closed, and that Brooklyn (outside Williamsburg) harbored New York’s older punk crowd. Cake Shop and Europa came up as friendly, stalwarts like ABC No Rio continue to book crust punk, and some shows were even migrating back to the venerable Pyramid Club for lack of alternate venues. True to some punk’s teenage suburban roots, all-ages shows continue at basements and VFW halls in the boroughs, a reliable information source being the “NYC Punk” Myspace page.

Greg at Level Plane Records offered the small label perspective. Though as the years pass he’s increasingly removed from New York’s live band scene, in addition to running his own label Level Plane (which releases the output of hardcore, post-hardcore and metal bands), Greg works a day job in the mail-order division of metal label Relapse. About both Level Plane and Relapse, he said the key to survival in the present climate was low overhead and keeping a niche market serviced. “I’m happy if I sell out pressings of 1,000,” he laughed.

“Metal and heavy music in general has been awesome. I’ve been leaning towards putting out metal/grindcore myself because it’s what I’m more excited about—that’s not to say there aren’t millions of bands doing good stuff [in punk hardcore], I’m just not coming across them.”

Regarding public perception of the scene, he commented, “It comes in peaks. It gets people’s attention for a while and then it fades, but it never really goes away.”

So it seems that these scenes, punk, hardcore, metal, noise, are still alive outside the public eye, and kept that way by the people who remain passionate about them. At worst the genres may be self-parody, but at their best they’re public-opinion proof, property of a committed, if marginalized, cult audience and speaking more directly and enduringly to plebian frustration than the over-hyped college radio music of trustafarian hipsters. As Stosuy wrote: “Mainstream and hipster culture is really weird when it comes to metal. It’s often seen as a punchline. To me, it’s one the last relevant forms of music being made. Or, at least, one of the last forms of music that genuinely moves me, makes me feel something.”