Supergroups don’t always get the best reputation, and it’s not hard to see why. They can be better on paper than in execution, they can be a breeding ground for egos to clash, and they can rely too much on celebrity instead of on what’s really most important: having great songs. In punk, which can often be even more of a young person’s game than other genres, the word “supergroup” tends to induce images of “old guys trying to relive their glory days.” Plenty of punks shudder at the thought. But, there are also plenty of great examples throughout punk history of established musicians coming together in new bands that are just as worthy as the ones they were already famous for. There also happens to be plenty of worthy punk supergroups active right now, and I’ve put together a list of 10 that you should definitely be following.
Just like our ‘Best Punk Albums of the Year’ lists, the word “punk” in the headline is a catch-all that includes emo, hardcore, post-hardcore, and other adjacent subgenres that fall under the umbrella of punk. All the musicians on this list come from a punk background, and while some of these supergroups find those musicians doing what they do best, others find them dipping their toes into new territory.
Every band on this list either put out music in the past year or have shows/tours coming up. And narrowing things down to a list of 10 wasn’t easy; there are a lot of great punk and punk-adjacent supergroups out there right now, these are just 10 really good ones.
Read on for the list…
Be Well
Brian McTernan fronted the ’90s hardcore band Battery before taking off as an in-demand producer who’s since worked on classic albums by too many bands to count (but, to name a few: Converge, Cave In, Hot Water Music, Strike Anywhere, Bane, Fairweather, The Movielife, Thrice, Circa Survive, Darkest Hour, Polar Bear Club, Balance and Composure, Turnstile), and after two decades, he returned to the mic with Be Well. The lineup is rounded out by musicians from bands he’s produced over the years–Darkest Hour’s Michael Schleibaum (guitar), Fairweather’s Peter Tsouras (guitar) and Shane Johnson (drums), Bane’s Aaron Dalbec (guitar), and new bassist Zachery Crockett–and the band leans into the kind of melodic hardcore influences that have been formative for Brian since he was a teen, like 7Seconds, Rites of Spring, Gorilla Biscuits, and Turning Point. Those bands’ classic records are all about 30-40 years old, but Be Well aren’t doing a retro thing; they’re continuing the conversation. The band released their debut LP The Weight and the Cost in 2020 during COVID lockdown, and they’ve become a full-time force in the years since live music returned, with the Hello Sun EP in 2022, a two-song single this year, and tons of touring. The band has become an outlet for Brian to open up about some of his most personal struggles, and it’s pretty impossible to hear his impassioned delivery and not feel something. The new songs are some of their best yet, proving yet again that this is a band who just keeps pushing forward.
Better Lovers
Every Time I Die and The Dillinger Escape Plan both broke up at the peaks of their powers and left some pretty big voids to fill, and now, members of both bands have started to fill that void themselves by coming together to form Better Lovers. The band features almost the entirety of ETID’s final lineup–guitarist Jordan Buckley, bassist Stephen Micciche, and drummer Clayton “Goose” Holyoak–and on vocals is DEP’s Greg Puciato, who uses Better Lovers to return to a more aggressive singing/screaming style, after exploring some lighter material with his solo project. Rounding out the lineup is guitarist and in-house producer Will Putney (of Fit For An Autopsy and END, the latter of which is also a great supergroup that would fit on this list), who produced the last two Every Time I Die albums. Their debut album Highly Irresponsible drops on October 25 via SharpTone, and it probably comes as no surprise that a lot of their new material sounds like it could’ve been written for a followup to ETID’s swan song Radical, with the Southern rock-infused metalcore riffage that Jordan has been busting out for over 20 years and the stomping rhythm section that coalesced once Goose joined the band. Add in the charismatic, shapeshifting vocals of Greg Puciato and Better Lovers turns into a new beast entirely. The band induces a certain sense of nostalgia for people who came up on 2000s metalcore, and it also reminds you that ETID and DEP were both bands who made it out of the 2000s alive and put out some of their best material in the decade (or decade-plus) that followed.
Deaf Club
Deaf Club isn’t even the only supergroup that Justin Pearson (of The Locust, Swing Kids, Retox, and much more) is currently part of–he’s also in Dead Cross with Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle) and Dave Lombardo (Slayer)–but Deaf Club are a little more active right now, so Deaf Club it is. Justin takes lead vocals and keeps alive his chaotic, “annoying” hardcore style that’s influenced too many bands to count. The lineup is rounded out by members of ACxDC, The Manx, Squid Pisser, Run With The Hunted, Weak Flesh, and more, and everyone comes together to make blasts of discordant fury that often clock in at under two minutes each. Their latest release is this year’s split with Fuck Money, on which both Deaf Club songs are collaborations with queer-grindcore collective HIRS, including a frenetic cover of Nirvana’s “Tourettes.” They’re doing a Europe/UK tour in November, and we expect that to be just as crazy as it was the last time we saw them.
Hard Chiller
Hard Chiller just came together this year with From Indian Lakes leader Joe Vann on vocals, Steve Choi (RX Bandits, The Sound of Animals Fighting, The Chinkees, etc) on guitar, Roger Camero (No Motiv, The Warriors, etc) on bass, and Casey Deitz (The Velvet Teen) on drums, so it’s basically Peace’d Out with Joe Vann singing instead of The Movielife/I Am the Avalanche’s Vinnie Caruana, but this band sounds entirely different. Joe and Steve connected over a love of heavy, spacey stuff like Deftones, Hum, Failure, and The Smashing Pumpkins, and they bring their own flair to that across their four-song debut EP Heavy Cell. It’s not as traditionally “punk” as some of the members’ other bands, but in an era where shoegaze bands are regularly playing hardcore festivals, Hard Chiller would be perfect for the current punk community, even if their lineup wasn’t this super. They also happen to be very good at this kind of music, which they haven’t really made in any of their other bands.
Human Impact
After leading the massively influential NYC noise rock/post-hardcore trio Unsane for 30 years, Chris Spencer left/ended the band in 2019 and teamed up with members of fellow NYC noisemakers Swans and Cop Shoot Cop in Human Impact. Then, in 2021, Chris re-activated Unsane for live shows with a new rhythm section: Jon Syverson (ex-Daughters) on drums and Eric Cooper (ex-Made Out of Babies) on bass. And now, Human Impact’s lineup was reconfigured to feature Chris on vocals/guitar, Jim Coleman from Cop Shoot Cop on noise/electronics, and the rhythm section of Jon and Cooper, turning it into a supergroup that represents two generations of post-hardcore and noise rock at once. Stylistically, Human Impact pretty much picked up where Unsane left off, and Chris says this new lineup is “more of a band instead of me and Jim writing stuff and bringing it in.” The material from their upcoming album Gone Dark is even more caustic-sounding than their debut LP. It sounds like it’ll really explode when the band hits the road, and it looks like the band is locked and loaded. “I can’t wait to fucking play this live,” Chris said when Human Impact announced the new LP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1ABKh6fUtc
L.S. Dunes
When L.S. Dunes introduced themselves to the world in 2022, it was an early 2000s post-hardcore/emo fan’s dream come true. The members all came from some of the most beloved bands of that genre/era–with Anthony Green (Circa Survive, Saosin, The Sound of Animals Fighting) on lead vocals, My Chemical Romance’s Frank Iero and Coheed and Cambria’s Travis Stever on guitars, and Thursday’s rhythm section (bassist Tim Payne and drummer Tucker Rule)–and their first single “Permanent Rebellion” sounded like something that would’ve been a scene favorite in that era. It wasn’t a fluke; their debut album Past Lives had much more where “Permanent Rebellion” came from, and followup singles (including this year’s “How Dare You”) have been just as fiery. It’s still impossible to talk about L.S. Dunes without talking about the very famous bands the members all also play in, but as they’ve continued to tour and release music, L.S. Dunes have started to feel less like a “supergroup” and more like just a great band whose members happen to have all had music videos on cable television 20 years ago. At this point, the best part about L.S. Dunes isn’t the star-studdedness of the lineup; it’s that there’s an active, ongoing band making great new music in a style that so many of us still love.
If you’re reading this before October/November 2024, catch L.S. Dunes on tour with Rise Against.
Open City
In 2023, Paint It Black returned with their first album in 10 years, Famine, and it wasn’t exciting because of how long it had been; it was one of the best punk/hardcore albums of the year in general. It was also one of two albums that Paint It Black’s Dan Yemin and Andy Nelson released together last year; the other was the new album from Open City, Hands In The Honey Jar. With vocalist Rachel Rubino (who fronted Bridge and Tunnel, currently fronts the On the Might of Princes reunion, and more), and drummer Chris Wilson (Titus Andronicus, Ted Leo + the Pharmacists), not to mention Dan’s résumé also including Lifetime and Kid Dynamite and Andy’s also including Ceremony, Open City’s lineup is very super. But, like every band mentioned in this blurb so far, they operate and exist on their own terms. They’re a great band whose members just so happen to play in other great bands, not one whose appeal stems from any celebrity factor. The band’s two albums mark the first time that Dan Yemin has played guitar on a record since Lifetime’s 2007 comeback album, and the new album is the first written collaboratively with Rachel, who joined after the music for their debut LP had already been written, and who brings deep lyricism and a lot of her own style to the table. The band’s influences include Swiz, the Faith/Void split, Lungfish, Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Chain of Strength, Embrace, Pissed Jeans, and more, and Open City know exactly how to nod at their favorite records while keeping everything wholly original.
SECT
Punk and hardcore are full of protest albums that react to the sad state of the modern world, but SECT’s new album Plagues Upon Plagues stands out because, instead of fighting for a better world, it comes from a mournful, hopeless place of feeling like the fight is already over. It’s wisdom that feels earned coming from a group of musicians who have made political punk music for decades. Vocalist Chris Colohan has fronted Cursed, Left For Dead, Ruination, and more over the years; drummer Andy Hurley hails from Fall Out Boy and Racetraitor; and other members have done time in Earth Crisis, Catharsis, Undying, Day of Suffering, and more. Even SECT has been around for a minute now–Plagues Upon Plagues is their fourth album since 2016–which makes it even more remarkable that the new album is one of their best. With a slower, sludgier side that makes Plagues Upon Plagues as good of a metal album as it is a hardcore album, SECT continue to push forward on both a lyrical level and an instrumental one. Their live shows are few and far between, and SECT are a force on stage so catch them if you can. (If you’re in Brooklyn or Cambridge, you can see them in late August.)
Skullpresser
Mannequin Pussy and The Wonder Years both have ties to hardcore and varying degrees of hardcore in their own music, and it’s a thrill to hear bassist/vocalist Bear from the former and drummer/vocalist Mike Kennedy from the latter fully explore that side of themselves in Skullpresser. MP and TWY are the marquee names, but everyone in this band is a veteran of the Philly hardcore scene: lead vocalist Jared Birdseye and guitarist Dan Zimmerman both played together in early ’10s-era band Burdens, and guitarist Sam Tropio did time in early/mid aughts-era metalcore band One Dead Three Wounded and in No Roses after that. They self-released their self-titled debut EP last year, and they’re about to put out a new one, Positions of Power, on 9/6 via Born Losers Records (paired with the S/T on vinyl), and both EPs are absolutely menacing. They’re heavy, hard-hitting records that take aim at police violence, elected war criminals, and all types of other corruption within our political and economic systems. They sound as pissed-off and ruthless as any great political hardcore band should, and I haven’t seen them live yet, but I have a feeling they’re gonna tear shit up as the heaviest band on The Wonder Years’ Loneliest Place On Earth fest this year.
Suburban Eyes
Every member of Suburban Eyes played a crucial role in shaping ’90s emo–guitarist/vocalist Eric Richter in Christie Front Drive, bassist/guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Jeremy Gomez in Mineral, and drummer/keyboardist/percussionist John Anderson in Boys Life–so it’s interesting that their self-titled debut album sounds more like a different side of the ’90s: the jangly alt-rock and power pop that made its way onto the radio, and a little of the hazier shoegaze/dream pop stuff too. “I think that all three of us are far enough removed from our past projects at this point,” Jeremy says. “That’s not to say that you don’t continue to carry those things with you, but creatively speaking, none of us even gave [our previous bands] any thought, good or bad, when working on this project.” Just going by the music this band makes, it’s not exactly a “punk supergroup,” but it’s also a dream for punk/emo fans to hear the chemistry that these three have together, and it also reminds you that, depending on which way you squinted, ’90s emo and ’90s alt-rock weren’t all that different in the first place.
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