Even the album artwork suggests this is an album that rejects hardcore's macho posturing.
The album is dark, heavy, and whiplash-inducing like its predecessor, but it also has a warm, welcoming feeling with crisper production and a more melodic approach to the genre. Their 2001 debut album Background Music set the tone for this new sound, but their second and final pre-reunion album We're Down Til We're Underground (released when they were briefly called Give Up The Ghost due to legal issues surrounding the name "American Nightmare") perfected it. It was a new version of hardcore that a new generation of kids could call their own. The result was something too innovative to be called a revival, and too rooted in tradition to be accused of abandoning hardcore completely. They embraced the dark, metallic tone and goth-inspired lyricism that had been entering the punk vocabulary, but they did so in a way that honored the short, fast, and loud template that the original hardcore bands had designed. American Nightmare-who formed in the late '90s with guitarist Tim Cossar of "youth crew revival" band Ten Yard Fight and that band's roadie Wes Eisold on vocals-kind of existed right in the middle. I did stay away from post-hardcore and metalcore, but you can read about '03 classics like Every Time I Die's Hot Damn!, The Movielife's Forty Hour Train Back to Penn, Thrice's The Artist In The Ambulance, and Thursday's War All The Time in our list of post-hardcore albums turning 20 this year.Īmerican Nightmare/Give Up the Ghost - We're Down Til We're Undergroundīy the turn of the millennium, you had some bands trying to bring hardcore back to the sound of its '80s origins, and others pushing it in so many different directions that you couldn't really call it "hardcore" anymore. These records range from metallic hardcore to melodic hardcore to classic-style hardcore to boundary-pushing records that don't fit neatly into any particular subgenre. With all of these albums coming out during the post-9/11 Bush administration, there was a darkness, negativity, and societal anger that informed several of the albums on this list. There's a reason that so many people who came of age in the early 2000s hold bands like the ones on this list near and dear-this was a great time to find hardcore, and there were so many excellent bands that new generations could latch onto. It was an era that a lot of great bands got back in touch with the sound and ethos of hardcore's foundational '80s era, but the best bands did it in a way that was entirely their own. 2003 was an especially great year for hardcore various offshoots like metalcore, post-hardcore, and emo were at peak popularity at this point, and bands in the hardcore underground were either embracing, rejecting, or straight-up ignoring that to varying degrees. The focus of this article is 2003, in honor of ten classic albums from that year that celebrate 20th anniversaries this year. It's changed a lot over the years, but it's always been there, and its various eras have all been exciting for different reasons. Whether or not hardcore is having a big moment in the public eye like it is right now, hardcore has and will probably always be a strong, tight-knight, thriving community.
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