Kat Moss stands in the middle of the hurricane, surveying her kingdom. It’s Manchester, June 2023, and her band, Scowl, are playing an early afternoon set at Outbreak Festival in front of thousands of people... and it’s all kicked off. Dressed in white, knee-high go-go boots, with her green hair and eyebrows glowing neon under the UV lights, she watches as crowd members flood the stage, cartwheeling past her and diving into the void. Sweat drips. The crowd bellow every word. In a chaotic 30-minute set, the Californian band prove exactly why they’re the most exciting new band in hardcore.
“We’d had a red-eye flight, got in a little late,” says Kat, recalling the gig today, via Zoom. “We all played that set off no sleep. I know my voice wasn’t the strongest. It was one of those sets where I had to suck in tears 10 minutes before I got onstage. But we went on, and everything clicked. I remember getting offstage and just being like, ‘I feel like fucking Dave Grohl right now. I feel like a rock star.’”
Things have been moving quickly for Scowl. Hailing from the same vibrant, buzzy Californian hardcore scene as Drain, Zulu and Militarie Gun, their sound is equal parts blistering and sun-kissed, segueing in the blink of an eye from ferocious punk to classic hardcore and 90s-inspired melodies. They are part of a new wave of hardcore bands, spearheaded by Baltimore’s Turnstile and Kentucky’s Knocked Loose, who are challenging the genre’s traditional sonic boundaries and taking it closer to the mainstream than ever before.
At the centre, Kat is their star, their MVP and a force of nature. Onstage, she’s a ruthless presence, empowering, fashion-forward and unafraid to embrace her femininity in the face of hardcore’s more masculine posturing. Offstage, she’s warm, open and enthusiastic. She’s speaking to Hammer today from the studio, where she and the band are in the middle of recording the follow-up to their blistering 2021 debut, How Flowers Grow.
“We’ve got the pre-production done,” she laughs, striped aquamarine and black hair tumbling over the collar of a bulky jacket. “We’re in the first week of official recording, but I don’t know how much I want to disclose!”
Scowl formed in 2019, releasing a self-titled demo later that year. It was the sound of a young band tearing out of the blocks, eyes wide open, teeth bared and full of potential, but it was How Flowers Grow that spinkicked their meteoric ascent into gear. Tours with Show Me The Body and Stick To Your Guns followed. Meanwhile, the band were handpicked by Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst as support for the nu metal veterans’ 2022 US tour. Kat had been pulling a late shift at a coffee warehouse when she saw the iconic frontman had messaged them directly on Instagram. “I was like, ‘What the fuck? That’s not real?!’” she recalls.
The tour saw them play their first ever gig in New York...at the 19,500-capacity Madison Square Garden. “It’s the stupidest thing that’s ever happened in my life,” she laughs. “A bunch of bullshit happened. Cole’s drums fell over, things like that. Just very punk, very hardcore.”
In the beginning, there was no grand vision or world- conquering explosion – just five friends in a room making an almighty racket. “I think most people aren’t prepared for a lot of what it feels like to experience some form of success,” she reasons, when she mulls over the level of attention the band have received over the last few years. “That’s not to say there’s a lack of ambition, more you don’t expect it. There was a while where I just disassociated through a lot of it and was trying to just stay grounded.”
After getting into punk, emo and hardcore as a teen, Kat became a regular at local hardcore shows when she was 18. She met guitarist Malachi Greene at a Vein and Harm’s Way gig at iconic Berkeley venue 924 Gilman Street in 2018, and drummer Cole Gilbert a few months later at a Knocked Loose show.
“It lit up my life,” she says of that time when she was content to just be “a face in the crowd”, elbowing her way into the pit. “Then I started to be involved more in DIY music, understanding how those shows were put together.”
It was at that point she decided she wanted to front her own band. “I felt like that was the most important thing to me, being involved in a scene that was so much greater than just me.”
Malachi and Cole had already played together in local band Jawstruck, putting out an album in 2019, but Scowl is Kat’s first band. As someone who has been grappled with anxiety and depression since her teenage years, learning on the job in front of an ever-increasing number of eyeballs has been a challenge she’s had to learn to deal with.
“Scowl gave me the opportunity to put myself in a position where I was being heard and perceived by everybody in the room,” she says. “That was something I ran away from for a long time.” As a young teen, art and music provided a haven. “I, not unlike many other people who had a troubled home life, have learned how to daydream really well,” she says, recalling time spent doodling on her schoolbooks and losing herself down the rabbit hole of online fandom for bands like My Chemical Romance. “Music and art were the avenues down which I could experience my fantasies and experience running away from the present.”
On the track Roots, from the band’s first self-titled demo EP, she alluded to her difficult upbringing, spitting out the words like bullets: ‘Never learned what family means, bottles tarnish what it could be.’ “I struggled with feeling that love, that family love, familial love I guess is the word, for a long time,” she says quietly and carefully, taking time to pull her thoughts together. While she doesn’t go into specifics, she states she “grew up around alcoholism”, admitting that it’s “hard to talk about”.
“I never learned what family meant. I didn’t understand how to make connections, because I wasn’t given healthy connections growing up. I remember when I first started going to hardcore shows and DIY and getting involved, it felt like I was starting to choose my family.”
The band’s early days were the epitome of ‘fake it ’til you make it’, and it took all the courage she could muster to play their first live shows. “Maybe that was rooted in experiences as a kid, feeling like I shouldn’t take up space and that I shouldn’t disrupt things. Scowl was my way of putting up the middle finger. I was so shy, and I had a lot of social anxiety.”
Today, her pugnacious stage presence is a combination of personal growth and studying performers like Billie Eilish, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way, although, even now, between-song banter is a challenge. “Sometimes when I talk into the microphone, I can feel myself not being convinced of myself, like, ‘I want to crawl into a hole today instead of playing the show,’” she admits.
That push and pull between her ferocious onstage persona (“That’s a version of myself that exists only there”) and the human who’s far more comfortable screaming at a crowd than talking to them is what makes Scowl so relatable. Talking about her personal experiences is still something she finds frightening: vulnerability was the driving force behind the personal lyrics on the band’s most recent EP, 2023’s Psychic Dance Routine.
“I think about the artists I’m inspired by and how they choose to navigate vulnerability. Maybe for some people that doesn’t seem that challenging, but for me, it’s very complicated.”
The summer of 2023 was massive for Scowl. As well as Outbreak and Sick New World, they played Coachella alongside peers Knocked Loose and Soul Glo – further proof that contemporary hardcore is moving into spaces it’s never had access to before. Following the lead of Turnstile, whose bright, soul/psych/alt rock mash-up has proven how much hardcore can thrive when the genre boxes are removed, Scowl’s choice to include an ever-growing melodic presence in their music has been a conscious one.
“Every release has had its own little inspirations and trickle-downs,” says Kat,
explaining that while punk and classic hardcore (ranging from early 80s bruisers Negative Approach to mavericks Ceremony) influenced the band’s grittier earlier releases, Scowl had started exploring new directions on the track Seeds To Sow from 2021’s How Flowers Grow.
“We were like, ‘I want this song to sound like The Stooges’,” she recalls. Originally, the song was supposed to be an interlude. “But then we talked about, ‘What if you sing on it, Kat?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know... I can try to whip up some lyrics...’”
Seeds To Sow became the catalyst for melodies that have taken Scowl’s career to new heights. "Screaming my head off is really fun. I think breakdowns can be really fun, but I also fucking love melody!” she exclaims. “I like choruses, and I like hooks, so fucking arrest me!”
It’s that outlook that has ensured Scowl’s name is front and centre when it comes to debating the future of hardcore, but for Kat, it’s not a competition. “I think there’s a lot of lifting each other up that happens in our scene,” she considers.“ I didn’t realise how competitive it can be in other scenes. People are fed this idea of starvation, and we don’t need to starve.”
