NEW FOUND HOPE RECORDS SUMMER 2026 COMPILATION
Music fans of a certain age will remember and often love compilations as one of the primary vehicles for discovering new music. Today, in the age of streaming, social media, et cetera, compilations have declined precipitously in centrality and importance as a means of music discovery, and consequently in appearance, but comps are nevertheless still often-vital collections of music and showcases of artists, and they have their place, albeit an altered and, alas, diminished one in the musical landscape.
Here we have the New York-centric Summer 2026 hardcore comp from New York-based New Found Hope Records, what founder Greg Dimech told me is his “first release after a break of about 25 years doing this thing called parenting.” Fittingly, Born’s “NEW FOUND HOPE” from their 1998 New Found Hope release Raging leads off the comp, representing the label’s roots and setting the tone with a clip from a live show condemning violence and featuring a great message and call to arms to unite hardcore. Also appropriately, the comp’s other bookend is from Point Blank NYHC with “Back to Square One,” which makes sense thematically as well as musically. Point Blank NYHC features Dan Derella, founding member of Underdog, on guitar, and long-time NYHC stalwart the KwE on vocals; according to the band’s Spotify page, they “formed by a chance comment on Facebook in 2014…[and] the band brings to mind the energy and fun of old school NYHC without feeling old or nostalgic.”
New York is, as mentioned, well-represented. We’ve got: A Breed Apart’s “Our Way / In My Head,” some old-school-style NYHC; We All Die from Queens’s “Poison Tongues,” a track that channels Madball; “THEY SPEAK IN TWO” by VIPERS IN THE GRASS’s straight forward hardcore punk with some metallic flourishes on the guitar; and the Bronx and Brooklyn’s Xtinguish the Code’s “Despair.” As vocalist Bernard told me in our interview, “The overall theme of the conflict [of the band’s LP The Conflict, from where “Despair” was sourced] is the journey of a citizen reaching their breaking point. From beginning to end of the record, we wanted to portray this person’s struggle, and by the end, we all bear witness to the culmination of their pain…[On “Despair,”] the citizen starts looking for answers and discovers them in much different places than they were expecting.” Bernard and company sound a lot like Ice-T on the mic for Icepick here, and the band seriously grooves. Even non-New Yorkers in Pittsburgh’s Brick Shot get in on the New York action by channeling their inner Agnostic Front on “62nd Street.”
Speaking of Agnostic Front, Dead Blow Hammer, formed in 1996 as Against the Grain by bassist Rob Kabula (who played on Agnostic Front’s Victim in Pain—which Terror’s Scott Vogel as Hardcore Personified said “should be the starting point for anyone first getting into hardcore”—and Cause for Alarm) and guitarist Carlos Diaz, contribute “So Sick,” a catchy, straight-ahead number. The pit-ready metallic hardcore of Silence Equals Death’s “Blinded” follows on the tracklist, which is fitting as Dead Blow Hammer guitarist Gary Yosco described them as the band’s “brothers” in a 2019 No Echo interview.
The opposite coast is also represented with HAND PAY doing their early-80s SoCal hardcore thing on “Invisible Threat,” and another SoCal outfit Human Issue’s “In Flesh” reminded me a bit of Paint It Black.
New Jersey’s Robots and Monsters contribute “It Gets Worse,” one of my favorite songs on the compilation, which hearkens back to the heyday of mid- to late-2000s Southern metalcore, and Confront Stage, a band founded in 2013 in the Ukraine but based now out of St. Petersburg, Russia, bring their instrumental metallic hardcore number “The Rise from a Fall” to the table.
The comp can be streamed on Spotify here; there’s also a limited run of cassettes.