100 Words Or Less: The Podcast

Rise and Fall's Bjorn Dossche joins the show to talk about leading Wrong Man into their Deathwish full length debut, and the conversation goes deeper than expected. He breaks down why the mix is where a record actually lives or dies, not just the songs underneath it. He talks about watching hardcore cycle back around on itself generation after generation, and why that's never bothered him. And he opens up about mortality being the unlikely thing that pulled Rise and Fall back together after all these years.

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Ari Katz has spent over three decades inside hardcore and punk, first as the singer of Lifetime, the New Brunswick band that quietly rewired what a hardcore song could be about, then through Zero Zero, and later behind the counter at Black Cat Records. On this episode of 100 Words Or Less, Ari looks backward: the DFA scene, the New York hardcore bands that set the bar in the late '80s and early '90s, and what it took for a band from Jersey to write something personal in a scene built on toughness. A conversation about influence, lineage, and the records that made this whole thing worth doing.

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Bryan Garris, vocalist of Knocked Loose, one of the most talked-about hardcore bands to come out of the last decade. He first sat down on the show in 2017, when the band was still an "upstart" fielding as much online debate as praise. Nine years later, they've released a Grammy-nominated record, toured arenas with Metallica and Gojira, collaborated across genres (Poppy, Chris Motionless, Denzel Curry), and become one of the rare hardcore bands to break through to a genuinely mainstream audience, controversy and all. Along the way there's also been real physical toll: a van accident on tour and a bout of Bell's Palsy that he pushed through mid-run. This conversation revisits where he started and checks in on what's changed.

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Eric Stenman has spent three decades on the other side of the glass, quietly shaping records for Deftones, Weezer, Thrice, Dashboard Confessional, and Senses Fail, while building AWOLNATION's entire catalog alongside Aaron Bruno since 2011. Before any of that, he was a teenager in Sacramento, self-funding vinyl pressings on his own credit card inside a scene that also produced Deftones, Far, Will Haven, and Death Grips.

Now he's finally the one holding the guitar. The Barbarians of California, his band with Bruno, released their debut album And Now I'm Just Gnashing My Teeth and is about to open a couple of dates on Guns N' Roses' 2026 tour, a long way from a home studio with barely any gear in it.

We get into the Sacramento scene that shaped him, the reunion with Bruno after a decade apart, his stories from recording Cake, what it means to walk onto a stadium stage after thirty years of building other people's.

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Mike Morales grew up skateboarding and playing in a power violence band in Lompoc, a small Central Coast town far from any real scene, before those friendships pulled him into Initiate. We trace that path into the band, into writing Cerebral Circus (the record where Initiate let acoustic guitars and huge choruses sit next to their heaviest material), and into what it's like touring with a band now spread across three states. Mike also gets into the gap between what a band looks like online and what it actually feels like from inside the van, plus watching hardcore grow up around Initiate since 2016.

Long Live Andy Williams

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Christine Goodwyne has been building Pool Kids since she was two people short of a band, booking backyard shows in Tallahassee before there was even a name on the flyer. Nearly a decade later, the group has a Hayley Williams cosign, a flooded studio they somehow saved, a hardcore alter ego born as an April Fool's joke, and three albums that trace a path from math-rock tangents to pop hooks, most recently Easier Said Than Done on Epitaph Records.

This episode, Christine sits down to talk through the parts of the story that don't usually make the press cycle: what it actually takes to survive as an independent band inside the modern music business, what made Florida's DIY scene both a launchpad and a complicated place to come up in, and yes, an honest attempt at ranking math rock bands, because someone had to ask.

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Robin Staps started The Ocean in Berlin in 2000 as a revolving cast of musicians before locking into the band's most stable lineup in 2009. Twenty plus years and seven albums later, the group's blend of post metal, prog, and sludge has taken them from Siberian squats to European festival mainstages, and Staps runs Pelagic Records, the label he built alongside the band that's become one of Europe's key homes for post metal and post rock.

In this conversation, Robin talks through The Ocean's first ever full US tour, what it's like bringing a band built on European infrastructure and audiences into American rooms for the first time, and how the reception compares to what he expected. He also runs down his all time top five European hardcore bands, tracing the records and scenes that shaped him before The Ocean existed. And he gets into creative balance, how he manages songwriting, running a label, and touring without losing the thread on any of it.

A look at two decades of restless work from one of European heavy music's most consistent architects.

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Brian Gorsegner has spent his life circling the same scene from every angle. He fronted Night Birds until the band's final show at the end of 2022, books tours for acts like Alice Bag Band, Career Suicide, and Generacion Suicida through his company Wired Booking, and sits on the town council in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. But most people know him as the guy behind Ancient Artifax, the Instagram account turned archive turned book that's been unearthing punk history since a single Big Boys 7" post back in December 2016.

In this conversation, Brian talks about booking bands for a living versus collecting the artifacts of a scene that existed decades before he could buy a ticket to it, the strange economics of Discogs and what a first pressing is actually worth once nostalgia and scarcity collide, and what's sitting in his "fire box," the small stack of records he'd grab first if the house was going up in flames. He also opens up about the human side of building the Ancient Artifax book, tracking down items through people like John Brannon and Nathan Strejcek and hearing the stories behind them firsthand.

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Before Springfield, Illinois had much of a scene to speak of, Ladd Mitchell was already building one, first with Park, then Tiger Tank, logging years on the road during the golden run of early-2000s midwest emo. We talk about joining Park mid-formation and becoming the one constant across four lineups, chasing a deal all the way to a small Santa Barbara label, and what a yearlong nonstop tour actually does to a band. We also get into the breakup, the return, and how the same restlessness that wrote songs on tour eventually turned into his first novel. This one's about staying creative no matter what circumstance you're handed: van breakdowns, lineup changes, or a blank page twenty years later.

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Adam Rubenstein has been making music since he was a teenager in Indianapolis, when he and his bandmates formed Split Lip on Christmas Day, 1989. Drawing early influence from Burn, Youth of Today, and Endpoint, the band became a cornerstone of the Midwestern hardcore scene. They released records on Doghouse before most of them could drive, and landing a track on the landmark 1996 Anti-Matter compilation alongside Quicksand, Farside, Snapcase, Strife, Lifetime, and Mouthpiece which was and is a document of everything that mattered in that moment.

By 1995, Split Lip became Chamberlain, and the band pivoted toward a rootsier, more expansive sound that would go on to influence a generation of bands from Dashboard Confessional to Rise Against to The Gaslight Anthem. After Chamberlain went on hiatus in 2000, Rubenstein built a parallel career as a film composer, scoring acclaimed documentaries including Night School, 9-Man, Kid Danny, By Sidney Lumet, and Medora.

After more than two decades in New York, Rubenstein made the decision to leave the city and relocate to Ohio — a move that became the emotional backbone of his new album Firebreak, his first solo record in a decade. We talk about where it all started, what it meant to be on that Anti-Matter comp, the long road from hardcore basements to film scoring, and what it looks like to start over when you've already built something.

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