“Why did we leave for here so early?” My friends and I pondered this as we killed time in an alley behind St. Stephen-in-the-Fields. Doors were at 6:30, but we arrived at 6:00 and had nothing better to do than shoot the shit and listen to the pulse of the underground. We posed for an Instagram story and argued about which ledge was vomit-free enough to perch on. We listened in as a group chat came together for the night, compliments flowed freely between new and old friends, and strangers offered assistance in getting a buzz. We watched smoke billow from the mouths of twentysomethings while meticulously drawn faces double and triple-checked their eyeliner in their phones and some assholes’ tag slowly took form (c’mon y’all, respect the venue). Eventually, calls that the doors to the church had opened would fill the alleyway, getting us off our butts and into the venue. We filed in, paid our dues to RAINN and Women for Women (the beneficiaries of the charity show), and scouted the place out. To the left was the tribune the bands would soon perform on, populated with numerous amps and mics. On the right were the merch tables, stacked with pins, shirts, and zines galore. Stairs led up to an elevated box of pews that would double as a viewing area for mosh-averse concertgoers. Between our exploration and our fraternizing (sororizing?), the clocks wound down quickly. As we scurried to the front row, well, you already know what it was time for.

That’s right: soundchecking with some Tool. The bassist of Baby Seal Club seemed fond of the band, frequently noodling the intro of “Schism” during intermissions (though maybe not fond of the math behind them, having recited the Fibonacci sequence as going 9, 8, 7…) Once the set had actually kicked off, though, it set the tone for the entire night. Baby Seal Club opened with a song titled “Fuck You Far Right,” quite appropriately for a festival organized in response to ongoing attacks on women’s rights in the US, Palestine, and countless other locales. As I swerved in and out of the rapidly formed pit, I was sorely reminded of just how fecking terrible I am at two-stepping. I frequently retired to the front row to avoid embarrassing myself dancing to Baby Seal Club’s classic ‘80s-inspired hardcore sound. This allowed me to get a better look at screaming, stumbling, and shirtless rolling around of vocalist Will, evocative of iconic frontmen like Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye. This was some proper LA stuff, proper D.C. stuff. Baby Seal Club’s lively energy immediately spirited the crowd. Someone even found it funny when I asked for “Schism” while the band was tuning. The best part? None of my friends fell over in the pit. None whatsoever.

Next up were Mosaics, which— look, they were really good! Their three guitars intertwined and bounced off each other in a pretty engaging way, the lyrics were heartfelt, everything was quality. They just… weren’t… heavy? Nor do I think they’d claim to be, honestly. Their product was pretty squarely rock. Well done rock, at that: the whole crowd enjoyed it, myself included. It was just curious to see the same faces who were moshing and two-stepping minutes ago closing the pit and swaying back and forth.

On the other side of the billing decisions coin was Dambe, who were an ideal fit for this festival. Their vicious downtuned auditory assault is exactly what you picture in modern hardcore. Being female-fronted doesn’t hurt either, given the cause of the festival. Dambe had the whole building enraptured by everything they did. Successive shoutouts to women, Black women, and Black lesbian women elicited increasingly raucous responses from the crowd. And when they actually started playing, that pit was beyond rowdy. I mean, that pit was full-on Ryan John Tellez. When Dambe was cranking out lightning-speed riffage, they had the entire room two-stepping and windmilling in a frenzy. Slow it down, and bodies would fly wall to wall. I’m pretty sure I took a stray leg to the groin. Dambe were commanding a proper hardcore experience.

It’s no surprise that punk has had its fair share of demographic problems: namely, too many cishet white men. Maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise given the vocal politics of the show, but it was enormously refreshing to see a variety of genders and racial identities represented on the floor of St. Stephens. A major way in which power is performed is through the restriction of bodies in space. Minoritized bodies are made to retreat, to be polite or unimposing, whereas the hegemons are permitted to exist conspicuously. An underappreciated reality of mosh pits is that they afford an opportunity for bodies to occupy space in very literal fashion. A pit can therefore be a microcosmic method of escape, whereby marginalized bodies are afforded the opportunity to establish themselves and even obtrude. This can, indeed, translate to a larger act of resistance when this learned behaviour is applied to society more broadly and these bodies no longer yield their space. I know you’re begging me to put down the copy of Discipline and Punish I don’t own, so I will leave you with just one more note on this set: Dambe is a band I would love to see perform again in the near future.

The first thing I want to mention about the next performers, Ants Are Plants, is that to my recollection they were playing their second show of the night, so massive props to them. The second thing I want to mention about Ants Are Plants is that I still haven’t figured out what to make of them. My initial impression of them is that they were ‘90s grunge revivalists, creating a hard-soft-hard-soft pattern to break up the night. This was soon disproven when the band ventured far enough into crusty sludgy territory to open up the pit. This cycle would repeat throughout the night. The moment I was ready to write off Ants Are Plants as derivative Cantrell wannabes, they would put me in my place with an injection of hardcore ethos. When I got too used to the punk rhythms, they’d reprise the delectably gritty crooning. Their opening tune could have been found on a Bush album and their final song reviling a certain alcohol thief from a prior show had almost entirely moved on to harsh vocals. The set rotated between these two modes in a way that never felt abrupt, but never felt quite expected either. I still haven’t figured out how this performance made me feel. If you like surprises, then Ants For Plants may just be the band for you.

I heard some buzz around the venue about Klokwise before the show started. A couple people were having a conversation about their vocalist that was cut off before I could figure out where it was heading. I quickly figured out what they meant when the band took the stage. Jesse Turnbull had damn near the entire floor hopping up and down within minutes. His epitomic nu-metal white-guy-rap antics were impossible to resist, especially with the quintessentially noughties riffs to boot. This entire set was a window into being a teenager in 2000 when Coal Chamber or Static-X were coming to town. On “DGAF,” Turnbull queried the crowd on whether they gave one, two, or three fucks, with each inquisition receiving a resounding “no way.” If you weren’t picking up on it already, Klokwise have enough f-bombs in their arsenal to bring Al Pacino to tears. They used the word to tongue-in-cheek threaten the crowd into jumping, denounce “the governing bodies of Israel,” and just about everything in between. They even brought a second white guy with a mic on stage to do the whole Fred Durst-ian hand-motioning, prancing around routine. Was this cheesy? Extremely. Was this fun? Absolutely. Klokwise gives Gen Z a taste of shenanigans otherwise reserved for the millennial generation. 

Hey… hold on, sorry, is that the guy from the Tokyo Police Club??? Playing bass in a nu-metal band??? What? The hell? You know what, good for David Monks, man.

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I’d love to tell you more about Man is Five, I really would, but at this point in the night I was exhausted. Moshing and Pogoing and two-stepping for hours on end had drained my stamina. It felt like there was no air conditioning in the church, creating a stuffiness only exacerbated by the immense body heat radiating from the floor. These factors combined to leave me parched. The water pitcher was knocked over at some point during the Dambe set, and while the show had set up bottles of juice at the front table, they had run out of solo cups by this point in the night. I could not go on like this; I was desperate. I needed to get resourceful, and I had only one idea. 

The bathrooms at St. Stephens were down a hallway behind the stairs to access the pews, connected to an unlit room that had been tabled off. I shouldered my way around some bodies to open the unlabeled red door where I had found a toilet and sink earlier in the night. Locked. I turned 90 degrees to an identical postern, finding within… two people (very sorry about that y’all!) I resigned myself to the back of the line to use the stalls. Minutes ticked away to the muffled hiss of screams and overdrive as my procession inched closer to the fated portcullis. Eventually it was my turn to access the promised land of milk-coloured tile and graffiti that I cannot compare to honey. I sized up the state of the porcelain sink. The drain held some paper towel detritus and a slug of wet, nondescript powder. Not the worst risk to take for some H₂O. I washed my hands, then kept the tap running and got to business. My hands moved to cup the icy liquid and frantically throw it into my gob. Maybe it was the dehydration, but this was the crispest water I had ever tasted. Each lap gave me new life as I rushed to replenish as much fluids as I possibly could before bystanders would get suspicious of the suggestive noises emanating from the sink. I spent what felt like an eternity delighting in my newfound refreshment. Perhaps this whole ploy was not the brightest of ideas, but I’m still kicking and have yet to develop any hives or rashes around my mouth, so I’d say it worked out okay. When I finally re-emerged onto the floor, Man is Five were nearly through their set. What I did get to hear was some solidly grimy punk rock, though.

My restroom escapades may have restored my hydration, but they did nothing to ease the exhaustion of being in a three-hour-long hardcore pit. Maybe it was just my angle from the front row of the pews, but it seemed a lot of showgoers shared my sentiment, as the pit appeared a little sparser as the evening drew to a close. Which is a shame, because Dear Evangeline were playing one of the best sets of the night. Vocalist Kiki flashed impressive versatility, on some songs opting for straight HxC sounds and on other tracks careening between a haunting spoken traipse and outright screaming, drawing comparison to Otep Shamaya. The musical similarities are otherwise scarce, with Dear E leaning away from nu metal and offering as crushing a hardcore backbone as any festival performer. Their output is imminently movable, making it all the more disappointing that the audience had tuckered themselves out. Big ups to those who stuck the whole show out though, including the dude in an MCR t-shirt who always managed to keep their fedora on while spin-kicking and throwing punches and the person in the green flannel who was slowly gaining confidence throughout the night (awesome to see!).

If the crowd had enough mojo to get properly flowing, they surely would’ve for the appearance of “What You Want,” which would be released the Friday after the event. The song, per the band, decries the “perverts who fetishize lesbian relationships and lesbian women.” The chorus, sarcastically asking if “you think it’s not natural,” incited about as large a response as the crowd could muster. Noise is much easier than motion, though, and Kiki’s recounting of her experiences as a survivor of sexual violence elicited a resounding show of support from the crowd. Absolutely gut-wrenching, and clearly difficult to express. Dear Evangeline were the most powerful group on the lineup, and it’s no surprise that they headlined — it’s just a drag that meant they played at the end of the show.

My group and I said our goodbyes to St. Stephen-in-the-Fields and began to trudge along College and up Spadina to the station. We were drained, but grateful. To see a huge faction of the Toronto underground show out for a cause, backed by a thorough gamut of local punk? Now that’s worth running early for.