XCOMM: Rebuilding LA Hardcore on Their Own Terms with Authentic Sound

A s XCOMM log onto Zoom from Los Angeles, 14-year-old drummer Revel Ian is still recovering from three consecutive nights seeing revered hardcore punks Terror . “I was stage diving all night,” he laughs. “Now I can barely move my legs.”

It’s the sort of detail that explains XCOMM perfectly. They don’t just admire hardcore culture from a distance – they live inside it wherever they can, sneaking into shows with fake IDs, building their audience online and throwing themselves into the same sweat-soaked chaos that shaped the music they love. Their songs carry the same feeling as stumbling out of a tiny venue at midnight: ears ringing, body aching, adrenaline still rushing through your system.

What makes XCOMM feel important right now, though, is that they aren’t interested in preserving hardcore’s past. The Venice Beach five-piece (19-year-old frontman Michael Gatto, 14-year-old drummer Revel Ian, 16-year-old bassist Adan Escoto, 15-year-old guitarist Jay Vargas and 20-year-old DJ/electronics player Hunter Grogan) sound like a generation raised without rigid genre boundaries. Hardcore crashes into electronics. Melodic passages appear and disappear without warning. Nothing stays fixed. “We just play whatever we play,” Gatto shrugs. “We don’t really want to sound like one thing. That gets boring.”

That instinctive fluidity has already pushed XCOMM far beyond the scale most new bands reach in their first year. Before releasing a full-length record, they’ve opened for Foo Fighters at LA’s Kia Forum, appeared at Las Vegas’ Sick New World festival and landed a spot on the legendary Warped Tour. To top it off, they’ve recorded their debut album ‘Time To Burn’ with Ross Robinson, the legendary producer behind era-defining records by Korn , Slipknot and Glassjaw .

There’s one detail that inevitably follows the band everywhere: Ian’s father is Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian. But XCOMM feel entirely disconnected from legacy-metal nostalgia. Where older heavy scenes often revolved around lineage and preservation, the band reflect a time where everyone is consuming everything at once. “It’s like At the Drive-In meets End It and Bad Brains , meets first-album Deftones with a little electronic thing,” Gatto says.

Ian’s entry point into heavier music reflects this. During lockdown, he became obsessed with Slipknot and Korn before discovering Turnstile , which then led him deeper into hardcore through Hate5Six videos and bands like Madball, Terror and Bad Brains. “Slipknot was kind of like what Kiss was for my dad in the ’70s,” he explains. “I heard that, and I was like, ‘Now I gotta start writing these crazy heavy riffs.’”

Still, beneath all the sonic chaos, XCOMM remain deeply connected to hardcore’s emotional core. Ian repeatedly returns to “the positivity of it” – the release, connection and physical immediacy that exists beneath the violence of the pit. He points specifically to modern bands like Terror and Pain Of Truth, not just for their sound, but for the rhythm and conviction in their lyrics. “I like how direct and intimate hardcore shows are,” he says. “You can take that mic and make the whole room blow up.”

That intensity defines XCOMM live. Songs fracture and veer suddenly into electronics or melody without ever losing momentum. Album opener ‘Hot Pursuit’ arrives with the repeated warning “ XCOMM is coming ”, while songs like ‘Negativity’ and ‘Running Zeroes’ push beyond straightforward hardcore into darker and more atmospheric territory. “We want people to realise this band can do that too,” Ian says. “We can play hardcore, but then also play something that sounds like The Cars .”

> “We can play hardcore, but then also play something that sounds like The Cars” – Revel Ian

X COMM formed quickly in 2023. Ian had already been playing around LA hardcore spaces with smaller projects, including a jokingly named cover band called Minor Jerk Brains, pulling material from Minor Threat , Circle Jerks and Bad Brains. But he wanted something more serious. He and Escoto started writing straightforward hardcore, and when they decided Ian would be best placed as the drummer, they posted an Instagram story looking for a vocalist and guitarist. Gatto responded almost immediately. “It happened really naturally,” Ian says. “Michael responded before almost anybody even saw the story.”

The chemistry clicked instantly. The album’s title track was the first song they wrote together, followed quickly by ‘Hot Pursuit’, ‘Purity’, and ‘Negativity’, all in one jam session that turned into a flurry of serious songwriting. When Grogan joined shortly after, his background in DJing, jungle and electronics pushed the band even further away from traditional riff-led hardcore structures.

That evolution also reflects a wider absence of new, traditional hardcore bands that XCOMM are struggling to see around them. Despite LA’s substantial punk and hardcore history, both Ian and Gatto describe the current scene as surprisingly fragmented. “There needs to be more bands,” Gatto says. “When I think about hardcore scenes, I think of New York, Baltimore… LA doesn’t really have that right now.” Ian chips in: “A lot of the iconic stuff happened before us.”

Rather than inheriting a clearly defined local movement, XCOMM want to build one for themselves, through all-ages shows and younger fans discovering hardcore through them. Tracks like ‘Fake ID’ capture this directly. The song emerged after the band were thrown out of a venue despite helping another band load equipment inside.

They ended up sitting across the street, on the sidewalk, watching people trickle into a show they couldn’t attend. That frustration – wanting access to a scene while still being excluded from it – became the emotional core of the track. Over frantic riffs, Gatto recites the verse, “ Three chips on your shoulder / I ain’t getting any fucking older ”, before growling a simple yet effective chorus, “ Lemme in, lemme in ”.

That contradiction of being a fast-rising hardcore band while still being too young to legally enter some of the spaces the scene is built around gives XCOMM a perspective that feels distinctly theirs. The music isn’t nostalgic for ‘real’ hardcore because they’ve not been able to experience the scene fully.

It’s something Ross Robinson challenged the band on. Known for pushing artists toward emotional and physical extremes in the studio (he famously made Slipknot vocalist Corey Taylor vomit from relentless vocal takes), he approached XCOMM less like a producer than an instigator. “The whole time, every song, he was right next to me, screaming, ‘Go, go, go, faster,’” Ian says.

For Gatto, recording vocals became an endurance exercise. “I remember doing the ‘ why, why, why ’ part of ‘Borrowed Happiness’ like hundreds of times,” he says. “Every time it got pushed further.” The result is one of the album’s most emotionally exposed moments. Built around the repeated plea “ Why can’t you look at me? / Why can’t you talk to me? ”, the song spirals through alienation and insecurity without resolution.

> “If I’m writing and singing these songs without being true to them, then what am I even doing?” – Michael Gatto

But beneath Robinson’s intensity sat a consistent focus on authenticity. “I love Ross; he definitely knows what he wants from a band and how to get it out,” Gatto says. “A big thing he really preaches is authenticity, and that’s something I think everyone should pay attention to. If I’m writing and singing these songs without being true to them, then what am I even doing? That became the foundation of the whole record.”

That same rawness carries straight into XCOMM’s live identity. Their music reflects a generation experiencing the hardcore boom in real time, along with the tension between commercial and underground pressures. Playing the Kia Forum with Foo Fighters should have felt like a milestone. Instead, Ian left thinking about how much more exciting smaller rooms could be. “There were people just standing still,” he says. “I’d rather play a 200-cap room where everyone’s going insane.”

More than anything, XCOMM sit within a broader shift in heavy music, where genres naturally blur and everything exists in a state of flux. Asked why the band is resonating so strongly with their peers, Gatto shrugs off any grand theory. “Honestly, I don’t know,” he says. “I’m just stoked that people like the music. We’re gonna keep doing what we do, whether people like it or not.” That same instinct defines their place in the scene. XCOMM are following something immediate and intuitive, letting it take form as they go. They’re a sign of something larger – a new wave reshaping the hardcore into whatever the hell they want it to be.

XCOMM’s ‘Time To Burn’ is out on May 22 via Blowed Out Records.

The post XCOMM are rebuilding LA hardcore for a new generation: “We just play whatever feels real” appeared first on NME .

_Originally reported by [NME](https://www.nme.com/features/music-interviews/xcomm-time-to-burn-interview-radar-3945362?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=xcomm-time-to-burn-interview-radar)._