Thanks to new venues like The Lab and promoters like Hot Stuff Booking, there are now local hardcore shows almost every week, with wildly energetic bands and youthful crowds mosh-pitting while supporting the arts.
One of the newest additions to the rising tide of Coachella Valley hardcore is KILLFLOOR, a band that pours desert-rat pride into their hard-hitting brand of hardcore punk and heavy metal, known as beatdown. KILLFLOOR features Jack Harris on vocals, Macoy Crabtree on guitar, Michael Barsoumian on guitar, Sean McCune on drums and Christian Romero on bass. Their debut EP, 760 DEMONSTRATION, was released May 24 and features Coachella Valley shoutouts, ferocious drumming, fiery down-tuned riffs and powerful vocal performances. (Warning: explicit lyrics.)
During a recent Zoom interview with Harris, Crabtree and McCune, they reflected on the large amount of support they’ve received since debuting as a band in February.
“We definitely have momentum coming up in this desert,” Crabtree said. “… I’ve been going out to Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and the (Inland Empire) foreverm just trying to catch hardcore beatdown shows. and I wanted to bring something out here that we could listen to—and the momentum and the hype is real right now. Everyone’s loving it.”
KILLFLOOR tears down the house during every live performance. Harris paces back and forth menacingly, enticing the crowd with his lyrics and screams, while other members fire through their two-minute punk jams with force and emotion—and the mosh pits never stop. Receiving this adoration from the local scene added some pressure when it came to recording their songs in the studio.
“Obviously there was some stress (over whether) we can live up to the hype of people waiting for our music,” Harris said. “We really just took how we wanted everything to sound and sat in the studio and thought about which of these lyrics would make these kids be super-stoked to scream and sing up onstage with me: ‘What’s the most relatable thing?’”
760 DEMONSTRATION features many lyrical moments that embrace the tenacity of hardcore. “STEP INTO MY WORLD” repeats the line, “Step into the pit,” and “FAKE” points the finger at hypocrites and phonies with the chorus, “You’re so fake.” “BITCH MADE” is a favorite among local crowds because of the opening line: “You’re just a bitch made!”
Harris said all of the lyrics stem “100% from real events.”
“All that stuff is about someone or something that I deal with in my life or have dealt with in the past, especially with ‘Fake’” he said. “I’ve dealt with a lot of fake people and still continue to do so, and that’s one thing that makes me super angry, because I try to be a 100% real person as much as I can. It just really bothers me when people put on this fake face and say whatever they think you want to hear and shit. With ‘Bitch Made,’ that song is inspired by some people that I’m not very fond of.”
Pouring anger into the lyrical and compositional aspects of the songs help both the members of KILLFLOOR and the audiences work through their troubles.
“It’s a good outlet for the kids listening to it, and us making it,” Crabtree said. “It’s a good way to get out the anger. When you hop in the pit, and you could relate to those lyrics in that song, you just let that shit out. You don’t take it out on anybody; you just let it out in that pit, and that’s what I like about it.”
Just because KILLFLOOR’s music is angry doesn’t mean it is full of hatred. While Harris’ lyrics and the brutality of the instrumentation could be viewed as violent, the reality is that it is rooted in dealing with frustration.
“A big theme when it comes to hardcore music is letting out your frustration in, I believe, a healthy way. … All that stuff, a lot of the time, has to do with wanting shit to be right and not wanting it to be wrong,” McCune said. “There are a lot of people in the world who are wrong about shit and do wrong shit. I don’t know if I speak for everybody when I say this, but it’s almost like justice in our way to write those situations into real life and speak about some shit that we think is fucked up, and make it into a piece of art.”
There’s also a sense of pain behind KILLFLOOR’s lyrics.
“I know that a lot of people in the scene have gone through a lot of pain, and that’s one thing that I tried to relate to as much as possible,” Harris said. “Not all of our songs are about, ‘Fuck you,’ and, ‘You’re this.’ I’m also writing about some real shit that I’ve been through as well—stuff that I’m sure some other people can relate to also.”
Naming their EP 760 DEMONSTRATION was an important to the group of guys, all of whom have intense pride in being from the Coachella Valley.
“We’re out here trying to have that pride for where we live and have that honor from where we’re from,” Harris said. “This is our first EP, so we’re just trying to rep where we’re from, and the title being 760 DEMONSTRATION just adds to it. We really wanted to keep that the Coachella Valley is where we’re from, and this is how we’re going to do shit.”
Harris argues that the most important aspect of the desert’s heavy music scene is love.
“Even though a lot of our songs are angry, I want people to know that hardcore and the scene is based around a lot of love—and we feel a lot of love,” Harris said. “We just want people to know that they’re accepted, and whoever the hell they are, they can come to our show. It doesn’t matter who you are, what color, race, nothing—you are 100% accepted. We love everybody, and even though our shit sounds angry, we don’t really be hating on nobody.”
McCune expressed gratitude toward the local hardcore fans who show up to shows.
“We’re always grateful to those people, and that’s why it’s so important that we rep that 760, because there are people who give a fuck about this place,” he said. “When I grew up, a lot of people didn’t give a fuck about being here and didn’t really care about being here, and everybody wants to leave. To put the counterculture out there and be like, ‘Hey, we love our music scene; we love living here. This is our fucking city; this is our area,’ is a huge thing to me, because I’ve always loved living here. I feel like it’s now becoming a lot cooler to do that, so to be a part of that movement of people who are just like, ‘Fuck yeah, let’s rep where we’re from,’ is a really cool and important thing to us.”
Added Crabtree: “This desert has so much opportunity. It’s like a gem hidden in the middle of nowhere, and people just don’t see that. People don’t know what they have until they lose it, so when people leave the desert, they don’t know how valuable it is until they’re out of it. I think we have a very valuable thing going here. A lot of fresh opportunities and new things are coming, and I’m just super excited to see the future.”
For more information, visit instagram.com/killfloorhc.
