“We’ve got a couple of dancers out there!”
Kat Moss of Scowl is hovering over the front rows from a stage built along the perimeter of the ancient Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, but it’s not exactly clear if the singer is talking about a random couple swaying to her bright vocal melodies, or the circle pit spinning to the band’s hardcore riffs. Either way, Moss looks pleased.
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The clear message is that Scowl’s songs are meant for dancing, moshing, whatever. And onstage, Moss is in constant motion—running, jumping, kneeling, kicking, stomping, strutting—as she screams and purrs with hooks and feeling. In her signature bright green hair and a shirt emblazoned with a matching green butterfly, she sings a speedy new song called “B.A.B.E.,” an acronym for “burned at both ends.”
The tune is definitely autobiographical, describing the fast lane that Scowl has been on these last few years, facing excited audiences far outside their hardcore comfort zone in city after city. Moss sings, “Everyone here could you please just shut up?/I gotta catch my breath!”
While this was the final night of their tour in support of the hardcore bands Movement and Citizen, there is little down-time ahead. In about 24 hours, Scowl would be on a cross-country red-eye flight to New York for an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, to perform another raging new song, “Tonight (I’m Afraid),” in their first-ever TV appearance. Like a lot of things connected to the release of a new album, Are We All Angels, they are aiming big.
The album was just released a few days earlier, revealing new depth to the band’s songwriting, while aiming to maintain the immediacy of hardcore in songs “that slap you in the face,” as Moss has described it.
“I’d say melodically, it surprised me,” Moss says of the album. “I think it surprised everybody, but there was a loose expectation that we were gonna write more melody-driven songs. But the volume of the melody and the harmonies and layers on the top line—I’m like, ‘Whoa, I didn’t expect it to be that much.’”
After their set, Moss is in the band’s dressing room trailer at the Coliseum, preparing a turkey sandwich with Swiss cheese, mayo, and mustard. Guitarist Mikey Bifolco joins her and sits on the floor, back against the mini-fridge. The rest of the band—guitarist Malachi Greene, bassist Bailey Lupo, and drummer Cole Gilbert—are outside, decompressing from the show beneath the stadium’s Olympic torch burning high above.
“I couldn’t not look at the torch the whole time,” admits Bifolco jokingly, dressed in black windbreaker, hair still soaked with sweat. “The whole time I was just thinking about how lit the set was, and the torch was lit.”
Scowl emerged from the Bay Area hardcore scene, specifically the coastal college town of Santa Cruz, California. They’ve since grown as part of a wave of modern hardcore acts—led by Turnstile and Knocked Loose—bringing that sound and ethos into the mainstream. Scowl has likewise shown an increasing gift for pop hooks amid Moss’s screams and loud guitars.
There have been predictable naysayers, self-appointed gatekeepers of what is and isn’t true hardcore. That kind of talk only accelerated when the band left the hardcore label Flatspot Records for the broader horizons of Dead Oceans, home to Phoebe Bridgers, Bright Eyes, Japanese Breakfast, and Toro y Moi. There was also their 2023 appearance in a Taco Bell commercial. The most lasting impact of that experience are fans who still ask if they get free tacos for life. (They don’t.)
Moss remains a true believer in the scene that launched Scowl and the ethics of hardcore. At times, the criticism has weighed on her but evidence of a band selling out its founding philosophy is thin. A close listen to the band’s 2021 debut LP, How Flowers Grow, shows a band with both muscle and musical ambition. While the balance has shifted, all the elements are there: muscular punk rock, screamed vocals, and melodic vocals, with a clear gift for surprising hooks rising from the noise. The new album further refines that early sound, as Scowl grow more confident in their writing and performing abilities.
“It’s weird because nobody knows what to do with it,” Moss says of hardcore’s crossover moment. “So there’s a lot of panic, there’s a lot of confusion, there’s a lot of emotion about it. And that’s understandable because the fundamental aspect of hardcore is to question things, and punk is to question things. For us, it’s important to question ourselves.”
Moss and the others are also students of that history. Back in 2022, she interviewed hardcore originator Keith Morris, the founding singer for first-wave hardcore acts Black Flag and the Circle Jerks and more recently the acclaimed Off!, for an online video created for the Trust Records label.
“He’s a punk rock god,” she recalls of that interview. “I felt like I was meeting my esteemed grandfather who had fought in a really big war or something. I was so nervous, not only because of the esteem at which I hold him. I love hardcore, so of course it was a big deal.”
For Scowl, Bifolco adds, “Hardcore was the gateway drug” to other musical possibilities.
The new album was recorded at Studio 4 in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, co-owned by their producer Will Yip, and less than an hour from Philadelphia. That happens to be Bifolco’s home state, and is where the guitarist further cemented his friendship with the band, while they were recording the 2023 EP Psychic Dance Routine. A former member of Philly hardcore acts Chemical Fix, Drowse, and Fixation, the guitarist officially joined Scowl later that year.
Are We All Angels opens with the aggro beats of “Special,” as swirling guitars roar and Moss performs layers of vocal parts, from relaxed and melodic to biting screams. The jagged riffs continue the attack on “Not Hell, Not Heaven,” as Moss sings: “Now the rage starts to eat at me/Bite that tongue, disconnect it/Should I learn how to shut my mouth?”
Scowl has also been a band comfortable amid different kinds of crowds, with a diverse series of festival gigs in recent years: from the U.K. hardcore-focused Outbreak Festival and the Las Vegas heavy metal summit Sick New World to the high-profile crossover line-up of Coachella and last year’s classic punk gathering (Misfits, Iggy Pop, Social D., L7) at No Values in Pomona, California.
As a young band in the insular Santa Cruz hardcore scene, Scowl’s members never expected to appeal to anyone beyond angry punks.
“Hell no,” says Moss, who has been as surprised as anyone. “I don’t understand it still, but it’s really cool. There’s no expectations. It’s such an organic surprise constantly.”
Bifolco looks up from the floor and adds, “This group of people is very down for the challenge of, who can we get in front of to change their mind? Who can we convince?”
Band members sometimes look to the example of Green Day, a legit punk rock trio from the Bay Area with no expectations of superstardom who somehow exploded into a massive pop success with Dookie in 1994. Ever since, Green Day has weathered the same kind of criticism from punk purists as the modern hardcore acts now crossing over.
“I read every interview with them ever since I was 6 years old,” says Bifolco. “I just know that the same thing happened and they were just like, ‘Well, fuck you. We’re gonna do what we want to do.’”
While Moss is quick to say her band isn’t on the kind of fast-track that Green Day experienced in the ’90s, she still sees similarities in what Scowl is going through now. “They’re also iconic and it’s so easy to see from the outside why that makes sense … but from inside I’m sure it’s awfully confusing. I wish I could have a conversation with them and be like, ‘How did that feel for you?’ I feel like we relate, like, ‘Can we talk about this?’”
With a busy year ahead with Scowl, Moss remains proud of her earliest days playing to tiny crowds of like-minded punks at the local anarchist community space SubRosa. She is the only original Scowl band member still based in Santa Cruz. Greene relocated to Salt Lake City to launch a tattoo shop with his cousin, while Gilbert moved back to San Jose. Appearing on network television and touring the world has been an exciting ride, and she’s ready to follow Scowl’s path into the unknown.
“I don’t have any expectations for what happens here at all,” she says of the immediate future. “‘High hopes, low expectations’ is what I always say. Doing those things is just to me, like, oh, those are big bucket-list moments. I don’t know what comes after that and it’s not my business.”
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