Is there a better unintentionally-appropriate name for a hardcore venue than “Bonk’s”? This “crabhouse and bar” is located on the corner between nothing and jack-shit in a well-littered commercial area just off I-95. The closest business is an auto-body shop that blares a looped female-voice recording when you hit the motion sensor: “this area is monitored by video”. The Bonk’s folks rent out the back enclosed patio area for private parties, a deal of which intrepid hardcore youths have taken advantage for all-ages hardcore and punk shows that probably cap out at around a hundred or so. On a Monday night immediately following a weekend-long hardcore fest in the same city (Breakdown, Underdog and Killing Time headlined), some kids remained insatiable, and I was glad to be among them.

The scene was lively and congenial upon arrival, and I would like to confirm that I had a crew of my own: three lifelong buddies / bandmates / ex-bandmates. If we were ten years younger, we still would’ve been the oldest guys in the room. I know how we got there – we drove – but the why we went remains a bit of a mystery, as none of these bands were a must-see for any of us. I think the most straight-edge guy in my crew (all three are edge but he’s the most by far) really wanted to see Life Force, as he had custom-ordered a straight-edge varsity jacket made by the singer. Before we knew it, we were eating delicious deep-fried vegan food at the weed-themed (but confusingly, not weed-infused) restaurant Blazerz Food Joint before heading over.

First up was Skives, whose name rhymes with “knives” and isn’t a misspelled old-timey term for underwear. Clad in all black except for the drummer (drummers are always the last to get the fashion memo), they rolled through their set of lengthy metallic hardcore-crust songs. Each song was stuffed with parts, from solemn intros to ugly half-time beat-downs to epic crust gallops… any sort of typical blackened metal/core influence was grist for their mill. Why they needed to stuff all of these parts into five-minute long epics instead of breaking them down into smaller songs, I do not know, but I appreciate that they came with their own perspective. Vocalist JL had a raspy sneer that reminded me of Stephanie McMahon when she would scream, and they kind of look similar to each other, too. I was pleased to learn that Skives are from the Lehigh Valley, which is also where I tend to claim as being from. I will keep an eye out for them the next time I visit my parents.

Up next we have God Instinct, repping Philadelphia hardcore, the first of the three bands bearing the New Age Records banner (yep, the very same New Age Records from the mid ’90s). While Skives received some modest, obligatory hardcore dancing, the room erupted for these local faves. The X’ed-up sound guy repeatedly ran into the pit, leaving his post to dance hard, and then would scamper back to the mixing board to play God Instinct’s interstitial atmospheric soundscapes. That’s called hardcore dedication! The singer wore a sick, beat-to-hell Words To Live By Words To Die For hoodie, which beat out the door-guy’s Shady Maple Smorgasbord hoodie by a hair as best of the evening. God Instinct’s hardcore was energetic and moshy, but not in an overtly tough-guy way; I had heard murmurings that today’s hardcore youth are getting sick of the chugga-chug crowd-kill vibe, and are leaning in a faster, more posi, more “old school” direction, which I certainly appreciate. Even so, the dancing was mostly a mix of sideways crowd-slamming and silly arm-flailing “karate” moves, but I have reluctantly accepted such foolishness as the typical modern standard, especially as the vibes here were communal and friendly. I had not (and still haven’t) heard studio recordings from any of the bands who played, but my one friend confirmed that God Instinct are a touch more melodic on recordings (he mentioned both Tragedy and Good Riddance as touch-points, interestingly enough). I’m glad their sound was scuffed up by the raw in-room sound and modest PA capabilities, and that the singer’s few attempts at “singing” were drowned out by the live noise. Someone ordered fries from the bar during this set, and the delicious smell quickly filled the room and lingered there the rest of the evening. Alongside God Instinct’s animated performance, it was impossible to not be appetised one way or another.

Moral Law followed, hailing all the way from Denver and again part of New Age’s present-day crop. They were proudly “militant vegan straight-edge”, and while I am none of those three things, I found no aspect of their performance off-putting (though I still can’t tell if the show-goer in the “marijuana kills” t-shirt was wearing it seriously or ironically… thumbs up either way). They could’ve bantered a bit more, considering their militant stance and all, but the fully torso-tatted singer was content to leave brief intros like “this is a vegan song” at that. Moral Law were the most metallic outfit of the night, akin to late ’90s Earth Crisis or late ’90s Cave In with Left For Dead’s crude guitar tone, though unlike those two metal-core icons, this drummer occasionally struggled to keep up (as did, let’s be honest, literally every drummer of the evening). I’m used to this sort of music operating with a pro-gear / pro-tude presentation, so the scrappiness on display here, with pedal configurations that weren’t labored over and the occasional flub here or there, was appealing and relatable. A far superior metallic hardcore experience to the outlandish polish of August Burns Red, who I saw last year at a festival outside of Copenhagen, performing with zero amps on stage and an engineer controlling the direct-input mix via an iPad. I wasn’t even sure if Moral Law’s bassist knew how to tune it, which was how hardcore should be. And speaking of bassists, I spied the Disclose-shirt-wearing bassist of God Instinct devouring a big, chewy chocolate-chip cookie on the edge of the pit during Moral Law’s set. I can only assume it was vegan, so on second thought, maybe it wasn’t that good.

Finishing off the gig around ten PM, Texas’s Life Force (AKA Life Force (9) on Discogs) quickly set up on much of the same shared gear as the other three groups. The singer of God Instinct played bass and the singer of Moral War played guitar, a compacted scab lineup to help enable Moral Law and Life Force tour Europe together in April. Maybe Animal Collective should share members with Life Force for an easier European touring experience? Vocalist Flint Beard (best cis-masc name I’ve heard in a while) commanded the proceedings, a vocalist sure, but an excellent public speaker first and foremost. I think the last thing anyone really wants is to be preached at by yet another self-assured white guy, especially in this day and age, but I found his presence and words to be heartfelt and thoughtful, aware of his privilege and passionate yet appropriately humble. The band gave him plenty of space between songs to rant against injustice, imperialism, transphobia, genocide, and other glaring American inequalities in a way that, while not revelatory, felt good to hear coming from someone at a hardcore show filled with a small-yet-diverse crowd suffering from similar and different forms of oppression. I saw Infest play with four other hardcore bands a few days after Trump was elected the first time, and was a little stunned that none of the bands (not even DC’s Pure Disgust!) had a single thing to say about it on stage. Life Force’s music was typical speedy, youth-crew posi-core, complete with one of the sloppiest renditions of “True Til Death” I’ve ever witnessed (which was also surprisingly the only cover of the entire evening). Beard confidently brought us all in with him, and didn’t even seem to mind that his bandmates could barely play their instruments. May they thrive in Europe and be allowed safe passage back to this godforsaken country.

Before leaving the gig, my crew stopped by the merch table (set up outside the venue as there was simply no room for a folding table inside) and each one of us bought the same item: a New Age Records t-shirt based on one of Unity’s classic designs, inexplicably sold by Life Force for five bucks a pop. I tried to get us all to put them on and pose for a pic together in front of the big New Age Records banner, but my friends refused to match my level of shamelessness. Sure, this was some comicon-level behavior I was pushing for, but the fun, goofy, hardcore friendship solidarity was intensely pumping through my veins, alright?

“Do you ever worry, when you tell someone you’re in a punk band, that they assume it’s like this?” My show-going companion posed this question to me during the third of four support acts for pop-punk legends The Queers at Backstage Bar & Billiards in Las Vegas last Friday night. I told him no, but that’s only because I’d only ever self-describe as “punk rock” for two different types of people: those who clearly understand which type of punk I meant, and those I hoped to scare off from asking any more questions. I would describe my relationship with the punk on display at this gig, nestled on the edge of the painfully-American Fremont Street Experience in Old Las Vegas, as similar to that of a tragic uncle. I feel bound by blood to this stuff, connected for life, but also deeply embarrassed by its stubborn lack of development (or even creativity), content to cycle through the same boob and fart jokes well into old age. Let’s head on in for the first band of the evening: Stagnetti’s Cock. Surprise! You’re allowed to smoke in here. It’s Vegas.

The first of four local openers, Stagnetti’s Cock was easily the worst by far. A peer-review of any dozen punks would surely conclude that this trio sucks hard, even if the band themselves were a part of the voting panel. Theirs was a cheap and unfriendly version of bad-joke punk, with their inexplicable on-stage existence the apparent punchline of the joke. The trio relied on language crude enough to guarantee an eighth grade detention and the singer/guitarist’s yacht captain hat to carry them through. Their sole strength is as a context-free sticker in the bathroom of a dive bar – a single quiet chuckle at best – and I witnessed one later that weekend, which would have been more than a sufficient understanding of their existence. As musicians, they were terrible, but that’s hardly a dealbreaker for me, as many of my favorite bands actively avoid virtuosity; it was their total lack of inspiration or follow-through that defined their sheer pointlessness as live entertainment. The Al Bundy-esque misogyny, just as often delivered by their female bassist as their male guitarist, had me feeling like I was trapped, Hellraiser puzzle-box style, inside a pair of novelty fuzzy dice. A sixteen-dollar Jack and Coke during their set had the opposite of its intended effect, sobering me up as I double-checked with security that re-entry was not allowed.

Up next were Gob Patrol, not to be confused with Fat Wreck Chords recording artists Goober Patrol. (The presence of Fat loomed large over this show, not only from the close proximity of The Punk Rock Museum and the sounds of the bands on stage but from the various t-shirts, pins and hats spotted in the crowd. 88 Fingers Louie, you remain alive and well in the hearts of your fans.) This group appeared to be the (comparatively) youngest and punkest on the show, brandishing half-and-half dye jobs, fishnets, spikes, smelly combat boots and a cabbie hat worn the way Tim Armstrong did in his Op Ivy days – all in all, the kind of punks Robocop is quick to exterminate. Gob Patrol were clear fan-favorites, rousing up a sputtering circle-pit for most of their set to songs in the key of spiky ’90s pop-punk-adjacent punk. I was picking up notes of Defiance, The Casualties, Moral Crux and even a little Filth, with shout-along choruses such as “I’m fucked up / I don’t give a fuck”, which I typed in my iPhone notes to remember later. The group hyped up their new CD at the merch desk, talked about maybe playing shows in Arizona and Texas someday, and laughed about how they have yet to “make it” as a band, all while two of their scantily-clad goth-cheerleader friends dutifully gyrated on stage. My favorite part was the singer’s constant drinking / regurgitating / spitting his Truly hard seltzer, like Darby Crash had he lived long enough to suffer through the corporate-ambivalent Liquid Death Era of punk. Not even God’s Hate could make those cans look anything less than dainty on stage!

Unlike the updated beverage choices, I was impressed by the fact that this generally older, mostly male, highly white crowd stuck with good old-fashioned cigarettes for their smoke of choice. I didn’t see a single vape, but every fifth guy clutched a Marlboro or a Newport between his crusty fingers, ensuring that I couldn’t wear my shirt again on this little trip without reeking of Backstage Bar & Billiards. It was through this grody haze that Battering Ham took the stage. I guess it’s a pun of sorts, but why? Why would a ham be used for battering? It’s likely I will never know, but this trio delivered a dad-rock form of EpiFat melodic punk, far tighter and better-rehearsed than the preceding acts. They leaned hard into NOFX’s antiquatedly-edgy brand of sarcasm, as well as NOFX’s speed-metal pop-punk riffing, blazing through a set that included a song about George Takei and a mash-up cover of Journey and .38 Special (imagine a Girl Talk remix of The Ataris’s perennial “Boys Of Summer”, if you will), and ended on “Hot For Preacher”, a Van Halen parody about the hilarious topic of child abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. Not to be outdone by Gob Patrol’s on-stage dancers and Stagnetti’s Cock’s horniness, Battering Ham brought out a fairly sophisticated Muppet-style female robot costume for their song “Sex Working Robot”. Assuming you’d like to take some Battering Ham home with you, I have some bad news – their sole Discogs entry is a track on the 2018 CD-r compilation Give Us A Future! entitled “Anarchopharm”. They confirmed that a new CD EP, however, is in the works.

Still with me? One thing that stuck out through all of these bands was how little it seemed to matter to the crowd what was actually happening on stage. The crowd was more arthritic than rambunctious, and seemed just as semi-satisfied by the wasted time of Stagnetti’s Cock as the rowdy pogo-punk of Gob Patrol. It appears they mostly just wanted to stand around in a room, holding a beer and smoking a cigarette indoors in proximity to “punk”, with the actual quality of the performers taking a secondary role. It’s hard not to feel like in 2025, civilization is kind of already over and we’re all just milling around until a metaphorical security crew chases us out of the venue (Earth) entirely, but this pungent sense of defeat permeated Backstage Bar & Billiards, like a prehistoric era where no one ever bothered to invent fire or the wheel and homo sapiens didn’t last long enough to leave a mark in the fossil record.

I was more than ready for The Queers, but show promoters “Big Daddy Carlos & Ava” decided a fourth opener was necessary. That’s where At Odds came in (pictured above), easily the least embarrassing group of the evening (for whatever that’s worth – Sockeye might be the most embarrassing punk band of all time and I’d sell a kidney to see them perform). This trio, as local as the other three, offered no bad jokes, robots or dancers. Rather, they blazed through the serious side of Fat Wreck Chords, something akin to the earnestness of Strung Out, Rise Against and Strike Anywhere. They announced that they loved Bad Religion right before covering a Bad Religion song, and later covered Face To Face’s biggest hit, “Disconnected”, to unanimous approval from the still-hanging-in-there crowd. They thanked their audience for being “great” multiple times – At Odds were the good-guy heroes of the night – and they seemed to mean it, too, thrilled to be playing on a real stage with a real touring band, and with each other. Let the other guys clown around.

And speaking of clowns, it was finally time for The Queers to take the stage. While I hold the music of The Queers near and dear to my heart, from the unparalleled idiot-genius of their first two self-released seven-inch EPs (does anyone have $8,000 I can borrow?) through their Beach Boys-inflected mid-’90s output, I am no fool – I know that bandleader Joe Queer is haplessly misguided as a person at best, and dismally bigoted at worst. I have run out of benefits of the doubt to give to what a friend called “all them idiot goth/punk ‘legends'”, and while I don’t think Joe Queer intentionally inflicts harm on the marginalized and oppressed, I sure as hell wouldn’t want him running for city council. I pondered his strained, sad legacy as I watched a young guy with an incredible ass-length ponytail line-check The Queers’ gear alongside a beefy, straight-faced drum-tech. Luckily for my lower back, I didn’t have to stand around waiting much longer, as Joe Queer appeared on stage and the two techs assumed the positions of bassist and drummer – they were his bandmates! I should’ve known that there would be no Tulu, no Hugh, no B-Face, but rather a couple of random stand-ins ready and willing to tolerate their lower castes so that they might add “The Queers” to their musical resumes. Cant blame them! And lucky for me, these two youngsters nailed it, running through the exact same songs I would’ve wanted to hear from a live Queers set in 1996, delivered in a rapid-fire medley style seamlessly chaining the songs together, the rhythm section’s energy propping up yet another frail-looking, disappointing American named Joe. I was afraid they might lean on more recent material (ie. from this current millennium), but Joe and Co. gave us the good stuff, “I Spent The Rent” into “I Hate Everything” into “You’re Tripping” with the benefit of a youthful rhythm section looking to prove itself worthy of the band’s heritage. I cannot confirm that they didn’t eventually slip into more modern material, however – I left after fifteen minutes or so, as I had plans to meet with the rest of my crew who had gone to see Pitbull instead (which, by all accounts, was a far more soul-sucking affair). Not since the George W. Bush administration had I attended a punk show with an estimated zero number of queer people in the crowd, for a band still calling themselves The Queers no less.