Last fall, on the second-floor stage of a cramped tavern called Neck of the Woods in San Francisco, Kat Moss was throwing elbows, shoving men twice her size into a packed circle pit and screaming into a microphone.
Moss, the frontwoman for the Bay Area hardcore band Scowl, held her own. In the tight-knit circle of Northern California punks, this sweating, pulsing, tattoo-covered cluster of bodies were her people. Just before midnight, the crowd streamed out of the swampy bar into the cold air, bruised and smiling. In this crowd, stage diving, moshing and the occasional foot to the face all come from a place of love.
But as Scowl’s star has risen from a group of underdogs playing house shows across the West Coast to a broader national audience, Moss and her four bandmates have been engaged in a different kind of fight — one with the gatekeepers who believe the band isn’t hardcore enough.
The band was blasted on message boards and social media in 2023, accused of “selling out” when it struck a brand deal with a corporate sponsor. (Many hardcore contemporaries have done similar ones.) The group later took heat for putting out what some saw as pop sensibility masquerading as punk. Scenesters chafed when megastars like Post Malone and Hayley Williams of Paramore said they were fans of the group. And some of the most aggressive purists didn’t appreciate Moss’s proclivity for posting beauty tutorials on her personal social media channels. (Her mop of neon lime hair is hard to miss in a crowd.)
Scowl isn’t shying away from the conflict. Instead, its members want to push the limits of their sound and what they feel hardcore music can be. With Scowl’s second album, “Are We All Angels” out April 4, the group is moving from the stalwart hardcore label Flatspot Records to Dead Oceans — home to Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski. It has enlisted Will Yip, a producer known for broadening the sound of punk bands. And it has leaned more into a slower, heavier sound with grungy riffs and catchier choruses.
The result is a record that represents its influences beyond strictly hardcore — from L7 and the Muffs to Veruca Salt and Garbage — on an expansive, mature LP that embraces brighter hooks without losing the band’s early aggressive sound.
“We just knew going into recording that we wanted to do more melodies and harmony, to show off more of our musicianship,” Moss, 27, said on a sunny afternoon in the band’s hometown, Santa Cruz, last month, sitting on a stone picnic table outside the Capitola Public Library. “We wanted these songs to be the most mature thing Scowl has done. More emotional,” she explained. “I don’t want to just write traditional punk songs. Can we dig a little deeper?”
That sentiment may sound like heresy to the hardcore loyalists of the deeply insular scene. But even hardcore is starting to change. Groups like Turnstile bridged its early sound to a more mainstream appeal. Mannequin Pussy shifted toward shoegaze and spaciness in between the loud barks of its frontwoman, Marisa Dabice. And smaller groups like Angel Dust and Soft Play have added hooks, melody and even tenderness to their tracks.
The result has been a radical rethinking of what the genre can be, and how a wider swath of musicians and fans could begin to embrace it.
“We’ve gotten a little bit older, a little more mature, and we’re playing the music we want to play,” said Cole Gilbert, Scowl’s 27-year-old drummer. “It would be really boring to rerecord our first album and put it out again.”
Scowl’s Northern California hardcore roots run deep. In 2016, Gilbert and the guitarist Malachi Greene, 30, kept running into one another at rock shows around the Bay Area and eventually met Moss, who was bagging groceries in Sacramento. The trio recruited Bailey Lupo, a 31-year-old San Jose native they knew from the hardcore scene. Mikey Bifolco, who is 32 and lives in Philadelphia, joined after his previous band toured with Scowl and he began crashing in the group’s garage. They bonded over many of the NorCal bands that influenced their playing styles: Operation Ivy, Rancid, Ceremony, Trash Talk.
After gaining local traction with its first self-titled EP and a follow-up, Scowl put out its 2021 full-length album, “How Flowers Grow,” right when California hardcore was having a breakout moment. Young people were turning out to shows in droves after pandemic lockdowns lifted, eager for the energy of live crowds. Santa Cruz hardcore peers like Drain and Gulch started booking bigger tours. And down south in Los Angeles, upstarts like Militarie Gun and Zulu were seeing new fans flood in.
Two years later, Scowl started to experiment with songwriting that went beyond the growls and rapid-fire riffs of its first releases. The group linked up with Yip, a Philadelphia-based producer known for his work with Turnstile, Title Fight and other bands that have shifted from strictly hardcore songs to a broader audience.
With “Psychic Dance Routine” in 2023, Moss embraced more of her melodic side. The single was a hard left turn from the group’s usual punishing tempos, with a slower, shoegaze vibe and a catchy chorus replete with Moss’s dreamy vocals. It was a risk, but one the band was willing to take.
“They were just so open to making good songs, and not just spinning their wheels and worrying about whether they were hardcore or punk enough,” Yip said in a phone interview from his studio. “The second Kat started to sing melodies, I looked at her and said ‘you’re a star.’”
Moss is a frontwoman of contrasts. Growing up in small towns west of Sacramento, her introduction to music was largely through the Beatles before she discovered metal and pop-punk in her teens. She sometimes gets anxious before going onstage, but thrives on the energy and chaos of live sets. And she has said she embraces her sense of femininity along with her punk roots, mixing the vibrant aesthetic of inspirations like Billie Eilish with the riot grrrl vibes of Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna.
Over the last two years, bigger and better opportunities began to appear, and the band racked up miles in vans and airplanes bouncing between rock clubs and festival gigs. Fans started appearing from beyond the initial hardcore community that embraced Scowl.
And that was the moment that the hardcore scene turned on them.
After Scowl played a Taco Bell-sponsored halftime show during the women’s World Cup in fall 2023, hard-liners lit up hardcore message boards and social media, calling the band “sellouts” and giving Scowl the dreaded label of “industry plant.” Moss got the worst of it. Online trolls picked apart her appearance and stage presence, and chalked up Scowl’s rapid ascent to business executives who wanted a pretty face on album covers.
“If you’re a woman in a band who finds any kind of success in this scene, people often immediately assume you had it easy because you had a woman out front,” said Blair Tramel, the frontwoman for the punk group Snooper, in an interview. “Sometimes they lash out.”
Moss found the flood of criticism isolating at times, especially while the group was on tour and away from its largely supportive Bay Area community. The stress compounded the strained personal relationships and breakups they were enduring as the band’s following grew.
“It’s hard not to feel alienated in this transition we’re going through,” Moss said. “Being a lightning rod can hurt. But that hurt can also be something that puts life and energy back into this band.”
Instead of retreating, Scowl took all the grief it stored up over a rocky 2024 and brought it into the recording studio. “Are We All Angels” grapples with the band’s complicated feelings about the hardcore community, Moss’s struggles being a woman in a male-dominated industry, the group’s personal battles with mental health and the dizzying sense of loneliness that can come with success.
On tracks like “B.A.B.E.,” Moss is more explicit about the tumult of the past few years. “Everyone here could you please just shut up? I gotta catch my breath,” she sings in a poppy chorus, in between thick, staccato bursts of guitar. On “Not Hell, Not Heaven,” which has some of the catchiest hooks on the album, the group reckons with being victimized while still rejecting the idea of being a victim. Moss is adamant that despite the hardships of the past few years, the record is not just about taking grief from peers.
Earlier this month, Scowl took the stage at the grand Brooklyn Paramount, playing a brief, 30-minute opening set to a more sedate audience compared to the San Francisco clubs its members are accustomed to. The stages were getting bigger, their crowds more varied.
After their set, the five-piece sat on the cement floor of a cramped dressing room underneath the venue, their gear and clothes stacked in cases that filled half of the space. Chatting among themselves, they reflected on the energy of their crowds being hit or miss on tour, and that evening’s group was more muted than they hoped.
“No, wait, what about that one dude,” Lupo, the bassist, said, noting the lone crowd surfer who floated toward the stage during the end of their set.
Moss perked up in agreement. “Totally, thank God for that guy,” she said. “He was feeling it.”
