Now Hear This: Henry Cox on the best new post-punk, powerviolence and post-hardcore

Like a lot of people, I mostly discover new music through streaming. I think that's just kind of the way the world works now. I’ll find an artist using the Discover function on Spotify once I've finished listening to a record and it'll play similar artists. But a lot of my musical discoveries come from word of mouth. I’m lucky to have a lot of friends who have a cool taste in music and they’ll recommend me things. And then generally, if I see a name or a record cover that interests me, I'll try and find it on Spotify.

But a lot of the time I'll be in a certain mood one day and I'll just be like, ‘I want to listen to something that's like kind of jazzy but [a certain] type of jazz and [a certain] type of era and I'll just look for that and the algorithms find for me what I’m looking for. If I want to find a powerviolence band after the year 2005 Spotify will be like, ‘Here you go, this is Regional Justice Center.’ I think if you know what you want you can find it these days…

Everybody’s talking about Loathe at the moment so I think half Kerrang!’s readers will probably already be familiar with them. They’re amazing if you haven’t checked them out yet. They’re a band from Liverpool who make awesome, dreamy experimental metal that goes all the way from Deftones – which is probably a comparison they get quite a lot – to elements of The Dillinger Escape Plan. Even so, they’re still kind of finding their own sound and there isn’t anybody that sounds like them at the moment. They’re fucking awesome.

They’re a wicked band from Bradford and they’re bringing a bit of a new variation on the classic post-hardcore sound. Olli, their singer, is a bit of a creative genius – he’s definitely got his fingers in a lot of pies and he can bring something unique out of all his projects that he sets his mind to. He’s done a lot of visual stuff with Loathe and Creeper, and he was going to do one of our videos but there were some scheduling issues so it didn’t happen. They’re still in the very, very early stages of their career, so I’m quite excited to see where they’re going to go. They’re definitely going to do big things.

I don’t know how you’d even begin to describe them – they blend elements of punk and rock and electronica and indie and all sorts of stuff. It’s a super-unique sound. They’re from Venezuela via Blackpool, and they’re friends of ours. They’ve just put out a record which is fantastic, and they’re a really good live band. I think they’re going to be doing a lot more touring soon and you can see a lot more of that band in February.

They have a close relationship with Strange Bones, too – they all live together and they all make music together. They sort of run the bands together. They live down the road from where we grew up, I grew up with Strange Bones and I know them really well. Those two bands are almost like one band in a way and it’s quite interesting, the way it works. Definitely give Calva Louise a go.

They’re from Santa Cruz and they’re a sick kind of mix of Oi! punk, grindcore, a bit of powerviolence, it’s a pretty interesting mix. It’s its own distinct thing, for sure. It’s kind of Converge-like at times, and they share members with a load of other great bands like Drain and God’s Hate. They’re really awesome. They put out a record in the pandemic that fucking exploded; I think it’s on its sixth or seventh pressing already. For a band that sound that extreme – they’re really, really heavy – it’s pretty remarkable.

I went to see them the other night and they were amazing. They’re a really sick post-punk band from Dublin. I feel like a lot of kids in the rock and metal world would probably really quite like them. Post-punk is kind of the big genre at the moment and they’re from the same place as Fontaines DC, who are kind of already one of the biggest bands at the moment but The Murder Capital do something a little bit different. It’s a little more atmospheric, and there’s some ballady stuff on their most recent record too. It’s super intense music, very dramatic, and they’re sick live as well. I think I read somewhere that their first album is about the suicide of a mutual friend of all theirs. For quite a new band, that’s quite heavy ground on which to start. The singer’s read a lot of James Joyce and Yeats and Irish poetry. It’s very artsy, but also very heavy as well. They create a very potent atmosphere.

Boston Manor's single Algorithm is out now

Read this: The story of post-hardcore in 14 songs