If 1991 was the year that punk broke, then 2009 is most certainly shaping up to be the year that punk-goes-prog. Led by bands like Mind Eraser, Iron Age and most notably, Fucked Up, the face of hardcore has been changing over the past few years, embracing a new ideology, one that favors lengthy interludes, actual singing, thematic songwriting and epic push-pull crescendos over moshy breakdowns and gruff shouting; call it the school of The Mars Volta, if you will. Baltimore’s Pulling Teeth clearly prescribe to this aesthetic, and their third album, Paranoid Delusions Paradise Illusions is a kaleidoscopic conceptual journey that takes their modern slant on the hardcore idiom and refracts it through a distinctly Floydian lens.
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By Jason Jackowiak

This week on the Singles Collection, we’re delving into some of the best hardcore America has to offer. While everything on offer is, in one way or another, indebted to the DC scene — whether it be aesthetically, sonically or just in terms of pure work ethic — each of this week’s bands has taken those original sounds and ideals and transformed them into something definitively their own.
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