Review by Walker Price, photos by Frida Martinez
February in the bay area is unpredictable. The sky is fickle, shedding light on you even as it plans to open itself upon you mere hours later. Winds bite through cableknits until suddenly it’s sweltering. Uncertainty is inherent to opening one’s door. Perhaps it was an attempt to harness this only constant that led Ceremony’s Anthony Anzaldo to the fourteen bands and two solo artists comprising this year’s Homesick Festival lineup. Relocated transbay from last year’s home at Berkeley’s UC Theatre, the Regency Ballroom played host to 2024’s barrage of curveballs.
Friday night began promptly with gauzy atmosphere provided by Los Angeles’ crushed, featuring Temple of Angels’ Bre Morell. Quickly, however, the fog lifted on Philadelphia’s Poison Ruïn, whose visage and guitar tones conjured up hopes of a hardcore band before disabusing the crowd of any such notions by playing the same four melodies buoying lighter vocals, leaving at least one breakdown to be desired. This thirst was, however, quenched by Atlanta quintet Upchuck, whose overt politicism and dynamic beatdown riffs cast due attention upon the burgeoning hardcore underground the American south fosters, and which is so often ignored. Harm’s Way, Upchuck’s successors, can only be described as meathead hardcore. The Chicago straight edge project’s metallic hardcore straddled the jagged fence between powerviolence (not fast enough) and deathcore (not melodic enough), but even still a meager circle pit finally began to form. 
Run For Cover darlings Narrow Head were next to be thrown at the walls, and for once the crowd’s enthusiasm began to wax in favor of the band on stage – it became immediately clear that this was a band people had come here to see. They interrupted their own set midway through, frontman Jacob Duarte ceding his Les Paul (and the band’s emo genre tag) to fully commit to the heavier underpinnings holding Homesick Festival aloft as the band wove through cacophony. Run For Cover’s hands, still firmly on the steering wheel, jerked the Ballroom leftwards as Tiger’s Jaw alum Wicca Phase Springs Eternal (accompanied by Cage World’s Ava Smith behind the laptop), walked onstage. The unassuming and eternally self-referential GothBoiClique proponent and founding member elicited further enthusiasm from the crowd as he rapped lines that were, at best, cliche in a pop-punk band, and harder to swallow in emo rap format.
Local heroes Spellling were a welcome respite not only from their predecessors but from the onslaught of distortion that the night had otherwise held. Shrouded in synthetic and sonic mist, the genre-benders’ set was almost exclusively new material, forcing the crowd to simply listen, no solace would exist in finding yourself singing along. While mastermind Tia Cabral paused often to address the crowd as if an old friend, she paused the set about three quarters of the way through to express solidarity with the people of Gaza and of Palestine as a whole, to the people of Congo, and to all people experiencing genocide worldwide. And so Spellling became the first band to speak for marginalized people at a festival predominantly highlighting ‘punk’ bands.
Shoegaze powerhouse julie made urgently clear why they were Friday night’s headliner. There was, from the moment Spellling made their way off the stage until thirty minutes later when it was finally once again occupied, a consistent buzz from the standing room, ranging from a consistent murmur to a dull roar as different members of the Los Angeles art collective made brief appearances to tape over brand names on their amps or rearrange the assortment of offset guitars on a carousel occupying the space where other bands’ drummers had sat. julie operated horizontally, only taking up a single physical plane for the three-piece’s grungy, textural soundscape of a set. Heckles and pleas erupted from the crowd between songs, but the band refused to deign to acknowledge their presence, much less their volume.
Saturday night began once again with startling punctuality. At 5pm sharp Richmond, Virginia’s Dazy were linechecking. The three-piece’s fifteen-minute set of plaintive pop-rock lasted exactly as long as it should have, neither dragging on nor leaving the still-sparse audience craving more songs that sounded like the eponymous song from the film Footloose. Next at bat was Los Angeles’ Kumo 99, the festival’s second solo artist, once again joined by a computer-operating DJ. Kumo 99’s dynamic breakcore and rare shrieks drowned the too-still audience in energy. As local Twelve Gauge grinders WORLD PEACE began setting up, one important question arose – where was their guitarist? A pair of bassists flanked their vocalist instead, trading breakdown after breakdown of intense, straightforward powerviolence. 
Hattiesburg, Mississippi’s MSPAINT also lacked a guitar, opting instead for a synth maneuvered by a member of the four-piece wearing a shirt emblazoned with the words “SYNTH PUNK,” a harbinger of the next twenty-odd minutes of fantasizing about what Turnstile would sound like if they weren’t trying to be America’s most commercially marketable band. MSPAINT’s eclecticism was apt preparation for what was in store – Los Angeles’s ZULU. ZULU, one of the greatest hardcore bands of the 21st century, has been touring almost nonstop on the laurels of 2023’s A New Tomorrow, a sub-30-minute exercise in powerviolence, sampling, and the Black experience beyond the fetishization of pain so often the prevalent narrative thrust upon Black Americans. ZULU’s melodic, intense set let up only for a few moments, though you wouldn’t have known it from the crowd, still almost entirely without motion.
The final gen z starlets of the night were the Bay’s SPY, whose brand of hardcore fits neatly into the echelon dubbed RBS (real bay shit), a mantle similarly borne by contemporaries SUNAMI and erstwhile heavy-hitters Gulch. SPY, facing a crowd littered with teens wearing their merch, was in many ways a holotype of hardcore at the moment: rapid, quasi-indistinguishable bombast that ended far under what presumably was their allotted set time. A mass exodus began as SPY broke down their equipment and a sea of most under-25 inhabitants of the Ballroom filtered out.
Homesick festival’s penultimate band was Fucked Up, whose classic Canadian hardcore held aloft the now five-band-long run of growled catharsis. Fucked Up was a band who dressed like they didn’t give a shit. Vocalist Damian Abraham, whose sweatpants often fell down enough to show the crowd his tie-dye spangled ass before he pulled them back up, used the cutting-edge technology of air suction to secure two plastic water bottles to his scalp, conjuring images of Beelzebub, had he two kids at home instead of the kingdom of darkness. Fucked Up’s Merge labelmates and touring partners Superchunk began the final leg of 2024’s Homesick Festival, and there was immediately a visible demographic shift as the crowd donned fewer metal-font longsleeves under Carhartt jackets and more skinny jeans and shortsleeve button-ups. Superchunk has often been ignored in conversations around the resurgence 90s indie is revelling in now, but as their set drew on, it was clear they deserved the same treatment Stephen Malkmus and his associates are having put upon them by the Tiktok governing council.
