hardcore

On a recent Friday afternoon in London, Jarvis Cocker, 62, is musing over the suit he’s just picked up from the Portobello Road Market: “I’m quite pleased with it,” he says.

He’s also grabbed some clogs — not to wear but to look at — and he notes that his wife “hates them,” but he’s happily in awe of the pair.

The outing represents a blissful break for Pulp’s leading man; it’s been a little more than two months since the group’s eighth studio effort, which debuted at No. 1 on the U.K. album charts. “More” comes more than two decades after their last project, “We Love Life,” released in 2001.

“I’ve come to realize over 24 years that I enjoy making music,” Cocker says. “It’s a main source of enjoyment. I mean, I enjoy being with my wife and stuff like that. But in terms of creativity, it’s my favorite thing to do.”

When Cocker first started making music — around “15 or 16” — he saw forming a band as a way for him to “navigate the world at a safe distance.”

“I was always quite a shy kid, so it was difficult for me to talk to people,” he recalls. “To talk to people from a stage, rather than to their faces… that worked to a certain extent.”

Though generally considered the “underdogs” of Britpop, Pulp produced some of the most intriguing sounds of the ’90s.

(Tom Jackson)

But the band’s early attempts to make the grade had fallen flat on its face. Unlike some of the group’s Britpop peers, Pulp had been around since the ’80s — Blur, Oasis, and Suede all released their debuts in the first half of the ’90s.

“It” came out as a mini-LP of sorts, under Red Rhino Records, with a short 31-minute run time over eight tracks.

“It was a deafening silence,” Cocker says of its reception. “It really didn’t sell anything at all … We played a few concerts, and then the band fell apart.”

He adds that at that point, he was considering giving up music, shipping off to Liverpool and studying English. He’d been offered entry into a program there, but two months before he was due to start, he got a call from Russell Senior.

“[He] asked me what I was doing, and I said, ‘Oh, I’m giving up music, it’s not working out’” he says. “We had a rehearsal just him, me, and Magnus Doyle [brother of Candida Doyle, Pulp’s eventual keyboardist], and it was exciting.”

Notably, he remembers thinking, “I don’t want to go read English. I’m going to stay in Sheffield and see what happens.”

Though the group would inch closer to what we now know as Pulp’s lineup, the musicians faced similar problems: They “didn’t sell anything” and were “quite ignored.” In fact, it wasn’t until Cocker went off to college to study filmmaking at Central Saint Martins — taking a sabbatical from Pulp and then returning in 1991 — that the band was asked to play a concert in ’92 and gained some traction.

Later that year, Britpop fame followed, as they were asked to play a Parisian festival alongside some would-be familiar faces: Blur and Lush.

“It was like we had some friends at last,” he jokes.

A historic run of releases came in the following decade, with “His ‘n’ Hers,” “Different Class” and “This Is Hardcore” all concocted in a period of four years.

“Having been a real … wilderness for a long time, and feeling very out on a limb … to be considered part of a movement, at least at first, was exciting,” he recalls.

“Once we actually got a chance to become popular, especially after ‘Common People’ had been a hit … then we had to record ‘Different Class’ very quickly to kind of capitalize on that.”

But the grind began to slow down to a halt. He confesses that after Pulp released “This Is Hardcore” in 1998, he began contemplating whether he “should still be in a band.” In the face of growing popularity, Cocker’s image became more well known, and the lens began to close in.

“It just put me into a different kind of social situation that I didn’t really enjoy,” he remembers. “So, I was conflicted.”

Around 2002 — one year after the release of “We Love Life” — the group quietly disbanded. In the more than two decades in between, Cocker positioned himself as a bit of a renaissance man, while pulling away from the Pulp lifestyle and delving into a solo career.

He waded into broadcast media, serving as a host on BBC Radio 6 Music’s “Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service,” wrote a memoir titled “Mother, Brother, Lover,” and made a cameo in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” in 2005 as part of the fictional band the Weird Sisters. His bandmates? Jonny Greenwood, Jason Buckle and Pulp bass guitarist Steve Mackey.

“I have written a book, and I presented radio shows, and I enjoy those. But music, to me … it’s a way of me making sense of what has happened to me in my life,” he says. “I write about things that have happened, and I, in a way, dramatize them by putting music to it.”

“I fell in love with music at a very early age, and so it feels like a magical thing to be able to make something that you like so much,” he adds.

In this lengthy love affair with music, it was inevitable that he would return to his first love: Pulp.

“More” returns to the band’s sonic roots, with thoughtful tunes such as “Grown Ups” and “A Sunset.”

(Tom Jackson)

When the band began working on “More,” Cocker’s main concern was that his bandmates would have thought they were “being sentenced to three years’ jail time.”

“I was loath to say to the band, ‘Let’s make an album,’ just because the last two Pulp albums that we’ve done, ‘This Is Hardcore’ and ‘We Love Life,’ had taken so long to record,” he explains.

For further context, “This is Hardcore” took around three years to record. “More” would only take three weeks and was released on June 6.

“There were songs that I knew could be good, but we’d never managed to realize them properly,” he says. “And then there were newer songs, and some songs that I’d done that I tried to play in the band, “Jarvis,” but hadn’t quite worked out.”

“The thing that makes a song good … You can’t control it, and sometimes it works easily, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all … we were just lucky, maybe because we’d left it for a long time.”

He also credits the album’s swift completion to working with music producer James Ford, who previously refined tracks for a seemingly endless list of artists. Some recent highlights include Blur’s “The Ballad of Darren,” Fontaines D.C.’s “Romance” and “Forever, Howlong,” by Black Country, New Road.

“He created a really good environment for us to record in, and everybody felt quite relaxed,” Cocker says. “It seemed like it was ready. So, it was just, ‘OK, it’s ripe. Just pick it from the tree and eat it.’”

Fresh off the June release, Cocker also kick-started a tour with dates across the U.K. and Ireland. In September, he landed in Atlanta for its North American leg, which features two shows in Los Angeles.

In particular, these stand out because Pulp will play alongside LCD Soundsystem at the Hollywood Bowl on Thursday and Friday. Simply put, Murphy said, “We’re playing at the Hollywood Bowl, would you like to come play with us?” — to which Cocker replied, “That would be good.”

It’s all been going relatively swimmingly for him, who simply sticks to his ways. But who is Jarvis Cocker in 2025?

He pauses a moment before speaking.

“It’s hard to put it into words, but I came to the realization that I wanted to live, or attempt to live, more in a world of feelings than in a world of ideas,” he says, thoughtfully. “So yeah, that’s my experiment at the moment. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

For much of the first 30-plus years of its existence, hardcore music was, for the most part, predictable. While there were outliers such as Bad Brains and Orange 9mm, many acts never veeredfar from the sound set in place by bands like Minor Threat in the early 1980s. Subgenres like metalcore (and other styles of music with “core” added) blossomed into their own scenes and sounds, but the central tenets of hardcore remained fairly constant — often with hordes of angry fans deriding anything that stepped too far in one way or another.

But over the last five to 10 years, the latest generation of musicians from punk rock’s slightly more aggressive cousin has expanded into new sonic territory. Bands like Baltimore’s Turnstile, Kentucky’s Knocked Loose and Santa Cruz’s Scowl have pushed the genre in new directions — gaining acclaim and popularity outside the hardcore scene, sometimes at the expense of its die-hard fans.

“It’s very awesome to be a part of that wave,” Knocked Loose vocalist Bryan Garris says. “I think there are a lot of bands that are bringing in new things and opening a lot of doors for everybody else. It’s like the generic saying, ‘A rising tide raises all ships.’ I truly believe there’s room for everybody to win, so it feels really good that all these brand-new opportunities are opening for everyone. You see younger hardcore bands really going for it right off the bat, and we’re very fortunate to be a part of the era that’s taking it to new heights.”

That’s why it’s only fitting for Knocked Loose to be headlining this weekend’s Sound and Fury Festival, bringing two full days of the best modern hardcore to Exposition Park. Since its inception in 2006, Sound and Fury quickly established itself as the event for hardcore and hardcore-adjacent music (from the heavier side of emo bands like Anxious to more extreme, metal-leaning acts) first in Los Angeles and then across the country. Just as the festival’s lineup and footprint has expanded both in size and musical variety over the years, Knocked Loose has seen its own popularity skyrocket as the band has continued to push the boundaries of what hardcore could be.

“From a sonic perspective, all these bands bringing in new influences to hardcore was pretty polarizing at first,” Garris says. “You had all these bands that toured and participated in the hardcore world but didn’t sound like a traditional hardcore band — and people really made that extremely controversial for an annoying amount of time. Once that barrier was broken, it allowed for so many unique artists and bands to bring new things to the table. Bills and touring packages became more diverse, and I think the coolest thing is when you put a tour package together that makes sense on paper but sonically makes no sense at all. It keeps things interesting and doesn’t create such a monotonous atmosphere at a show.”

Kentucky hardcore band Knocked Loose headlines this year’s Sound and Fury Festival

(Brock Fetch)

For Knocked Loose, one of the biggest steps outside of “traditional hardcore” it could possibly take was collaborating with pop-turned-metal artist Poppy on last year’s “Suffocate” — a gamble that paid off handsomely, introducing the band to a whole new audience and earning the group its highest-charting single and a Grammy nomination for metal performance. It’s a track that Garris still considers “definitely one of [his] favorite songs” while also allowing the band to get “weirder” and experiment in ways it might not normally consider.

While the band is already considering how it can continue to push the envelope even further without losing what makes Knocked Loose work at its core, the group is mindful of its history in the hardcore scene both as fans and artists. No scene is quicker to disown an act for its commercial success, and Garris (along with guitarists Isaac Hale and Nicko Calderon, bassist Kevin Otten and drummer Kevin Kaine) is fully aware of the line the band walks.

“We’ve never been writing a song and felt like we had to check in with how [hardcore fans] would feel about it, but when it comes to how we present the band, that’s where we keep hardcore in mind,” Garris says. “That’s where we come from and what we’re used to. Even though we know the band is obviously not going to be playing crazy small DIY, no-barricade hardcore shows anymore, it allowed us to create an experience on a much bigger stage. Then we do things like play Sound and Fury or put hardcore bands that we like on our bills because we still feel very passionately about these things. We’re very fortunate to be able to play these massive shows and have conversations about [pyrotechnics] and lights, but we’re still hardcore fans and that’s never changed.”

With acts like Knocked Loose, Scowl and England’s Basement on the bill this year, Sound and Fury continues to show why it’s arguably America’s preeminent hardcore festival, bringing together dozens of rising bands with just enough nostalgia acts (such as this year’s Forced Order reunion and Poison the Well) to remind the younger generations of those who came before. It’s a lineup you won’t see anywhere else, with a DIY hardcore vibe that fit just as well when hardcore fans and artists Sean Riley, Robert Shedd and Todd Jones held their initial event at the Alpine in Ventura 19 years ago.

“There are a lot of festivals in the mainstream rock atmosphere where the lineups are essentially the same,” Garris says. “For example, two years ago or so, every major rock fest in America was headlined by Metallica. That’s no diss at all, but Sound and Fury is such a different thing and the lineups feel so organic and exciting. They’re very good about scratching an itch that you didn’t know you had.”

“I think [hardcore fans] are seeking more context than what they’re getting from the mainstream — and since most of the people here arrive through that filter, it makes for a very open and welcoming space,” Riley adds. “So whether it’s being straightedge and eschewing drugs and alcohol, or whether you are someone who likes wearing corpse paint in public, or you’re a person who likes to dance at shows, this is a place you can come and be yourself without judgment. Combine that with hardcore shows being, in my opinion, the rawest form of live-music experiences you can find, it’s a freeing experience.”

Although Riley is the only one of the three original founders still working on Sound and Fury — currently teamed with Martin Stewart and Madison Woodward — he’s made sure to keep it as true to the hardcore ethos as possible year after year. Despite numerous venue changes and growth that many corporate festivals could only wish to have, Sound and Fury today is as instrumental to and beloved by the hardcore scene in Los Angeles and beyond as it’s ever been. It’s found a way to speak to multiple generations of hardcore kids (and adults), and now some of its biggest fans are the ones onstage.

“[Sound and Fury] has never been our ‘day job,’ but more of something we do in our off time that can hopefully inspire people — knowing how empowering and meaningful this DIY world has been for us and our lives outside of this music scene,” Riley says. “We’ve seen attendees start bands that play the fest, put out zines that they sell at the fest, start businesses or become food vendors that operate at the fest, and even people who now help us run the fest and have actual ownership stakes in the festival. Seeing it grow year after year in a very organic way really validates our approach and hopefully means it’s serving its purpose.”

“When we were preparing our year, [Sound and Fury] was one of my most anticipated shows of the year because I am such a fan of the festival,” Garris adds. “I’ve gotten to watch the festival grow from a fan’s perspective, and I remember going to the fest when it was like 1,000 people total. To see what it is now is amazing. It’s setting the bar for hardcore every single year and taking it to new places, because it was never supposed to be that big. The people that put it together care so much to protect the festival and to scale it to these unimaginable places — all while keeping it feeling DIY and like a hardcore festival. We’re just so excited to be a part of it.”

Or, as Scowl vocalist Kat Moss put it, “I would argue Sound and Fury is the best hardcore festival ever.”

Terry Brunk, the professional wrestling pioneer known to fans as Sabu, has died at age 60, World Wrestling Entertainment announced Sunday.

No cause of death has been given.

The nephew of WWE Hall of Famer Ed “The Sheik” Farhat, Brunk wrestled on several circuits, including a handful of appearances with WWE (then known as World Wrestling Federation, or WWF) in 1993. He then rose to fame with Extreme Championship Wrestling, for which he was a two-time champion.

Known as an originator of hardcore wrestling, Sabu often leapt from chairs and threw his opponents through tables and barbed wire. He signed with WWE in 2006 as part of the company’s ECW revival and competed against Rey Mysterio for the world heavyweight championship and against John Cena for the WWE championship.

He and his fellow ECW Originals (The Sandman, Tommy Dreamer and Rob Van Dam) defeated the ECW’s New Breed (Elijah Burke, Kevin Thorn, Marcus Cor Von and Matt Striker) at WrestleMania 23 in Brunk’s hometown of Detroit.

Sabu left WWE in 2007 and continued to wrestle in various leagues, including All Elite Wrestling in 2023 and Game Changer Wrestling, for which he wrestled his final match last month.

“AEW and the wrestling world mourns the passing of Sabu,” AEW wrote on X. “From barbed wire battles to unforgettable high-risk moments, Sabu gave everything to professional wrestling. Our thoughts are with his family, his friends and his fans.”

GCW posted a tribute video to Sabu on YouTube.

“He was an outlaw and a gamechanger,” the organization wrote in the caption. “He inspired so many that stepped inside a GCW ring and he will continue to inspire for generations to come. His legacy will last forever and he will never be forgotten.”

Van Dam also posted a tribute to his longtime friend on X.

“Sabu was as irreplaceable in my life as he was in the industry,” the WWE Hall of Famer wrote. “You all know how important he was to my career, and you know how much he meant to me personally. He’s been a tremendous influence since I was 18 years old , when I met him.

“Learning to be an adult, while you’re in the crazy environment of this business can go several different ways. I’m proud to have been able to carry on so many of Sheik and Sabu’s values, both in and out of the ring. Sabu helped make me the wrestler I am, the person I am, and I’ll always be proud of that and grateful.”

Many others from professional wrestling paid their respects on social media. WWE star Sami Zayn wrote that Sabu belongs in the organization’s hall of fame, calling him a “one of a kind, absolute legend and a true game changer for professional wrestling.”

Longtime wrestling announcer Tony Schiavone called Sabu “an incredible talent that will obviously put someone through a table in the afterlife.”

Mysterio posted on Instagram: “Feel truly honored to have shared the same ring with you many times and even more to have called you my friend. Always had me on my toes. … You will be missed.”

Retired WWE wrestler Marc Mero wrote that Sabu “was not only a remarkable performer but also a gracious and engaging person.”

“Sabu’s wrestling style was fearless and relentless,” Mero wrote. “From his intense barbed wire battles that tested the limits of both his body and spirit, to his high-risk maneuvers that left audiences in awe, often deafening in their excitement. He truly gave it all every time he stepped into the ring. His dedication, courage, and passion for wrestling have left an indelible mark on the sport and its fans.”

Fellow retired WWE wrestler Jake “the Snake” Roberts wrote: “He was a pioneer in our business, a talented performer, and most importantly, a good man.”