After eight months of silence, and exactly fifty years to the day after The Saints went into the studio on the 13th of June 1976 to kick the door of the whole punk movement open with their single ‘(I’m) Stranded’, Deadtrigger Records have made fucking history.
Careening on the concrete cacophony that is Thornlands skatepark, we witnessed the birth of a feeling that was new, yet familiar; one you could feel but couldn’t quite put your finger on. As you drop in, you find a Subscene of suburban students singing their souls out, a sound so loud and so proud, a sound that doesn’t need bars, politicians, or lies. The rain had blown out all but one of the guitar amps, the lights had to be turned off and there wasn’t a stage, but somehow that was the point, and we all felt like this wasn’t a repeat of the SkatePUNK festivals or the YMCA gigs; this was the start of a new scene, a movement, hell, you could call it a revolution.
When I gazed out of the bus window, I saw a mountain of people, might’ve been around a hundred, could’ve easily been two times that. The place was shaped like a stadium, except you could stand face to face with the bands and shoulder to shoulder with people who make you feel like you’ve known them for years when you’ve only just met. You couldn’t get an accurate gauge of it because it was just teeming with the old and the new. All us on the 262 knew was that we were lost for words, except for the few who had holy shit force its way out of their mouths. After swaggering over to the bowl where our scene’s Maine Road was unfolding, I caught some of the older heads talking about how the turnout was just impressive, how they too were blown away. I’d come expecting a decent comeback gig, a medium-sized crowd, something that would land as ‘respectable’. This blew it out of the water. SkatePUNK had the numbers before, sure, the 2024 one back when Antidismal, Casualty and Project Punk still ran the show and Deadtrigger was barely a name, the 2025 one stuck indoors with the energy cramped in rather than let out; but those were proof of concept, and this was the thing itself, where you just know it isn’t a gig you turned up to but something you’re part of. They called it Punk in the Park, which, dare I say, makes it even more biblical.
No Clue
Madam President opened · this is the record from No Clue on
Madam President opened the day while I was still finding my way in, so this is the record of the sets I caught end to end. In the middle of the sun going down and setting the proper atmosphere, a band fittingly named No Clue were soundchecking. Some people might not have had a clue who they were, or how they got the whole scene standing for them, but in a few moments everyone right there, right then, would know what they meant. I had a clue long before. I’d seen them play at Paddington Skatepark back in September 2025 for Findaway’s Left For Us single launch, and I’d heard them multiple times a week through the wall of the school rehearsal room next door; one of my bandmates wrote them off as ‘Green Day shit’, and he was wrong.
No Clue got people off their ass, and that started with them rehearsing their asses off first. They were a stronger live act than back in September, gone from a garage band still hunting for its identity to one that had found it. Just straight, no trying to flex pop punk or alternative rock. As soon as they started the crowd walked over to the ring and warmed up; their faster songs got everyone truly going. Their songs right now are straight up songs, they get the job done for a good set, though it felt like at times they could become anthems; they just need more experience, and to get there, more recognition, which they’re earning by playing support slots and being better than 90% of school bands by actually rehearsing, and rehearsing properly. Someone got out glowsticks and handed them around, which was just in time.
Strange Days Indeed
A new name · numetal · cut short by the rain
Strange Days Indeed are a new name. They had their own brand of numetal, nice and bouncy the way rap rhythm over metal instrumentation is, and being a new act playing to a punk crowd used to sped-up breakdowns and fast tempos, they did well, though the crowd response wasn’t as charged as it was for the others. They had decent swagger and didn’t flinch when it got real. You could tell they’d worked their stage act and practised it, though it felt at times like they were performing to the audience instead of getting into that trance where the band and the crowd feed off each other. You could hear the System of a Down in them; their sound was a comb going through your hair and hitting your scalp, just out there, trying to work its way in, though it didn’t land as loud as it should’ve.
Could’ve been the tempo, the genre, the crowd, them being new, a mid-gig dip, or the real reason, which is that their set got cut short and marred by nerves as the rain started to trickle through it and then properly pour. A respectable, high-quality set, tight and dissonant; the rain just came at the wrong time. If they’d finished as intended maybe they’d have left a lasting mark; maybe they’d planned for the last few songs to do exactly that.
One Cable
PAs bagged in plastic · the lights off · ‘should the show go on?’
Brax announced the gig would have to pause for the rain, and the PAs and speakers got covered with plastic bags and whatever cloth anyone had; apparently two blokes donated their shirts for the cause. Everyone wondered whether that was going to be it, three bands of what should’ve been a canon event, not because anyone expected it to fall over but because you just knew this was the moment. The ‘stage’ lights went off and everyone waited in trepidation. Right before anyone could even think about going home, Brax got up and stood alone in the circle while the whole crowd was up on the elevated concrete rings, and announced that we’d found a way, which got everyone screaming to the point you could feel your eardrums contract, but that the live mix would all have to run through a single PA speaker, and he asked if the show should go on. The crowd went ballistic again, and some of us shouted DO IT. The whole thing was now going to run on one power cable.
Delphic Afterparty
One of the strongest live acts in the scene · the rain suited them
This was right in time for Delphic Afterparty, who absolutely nailed it. The sound was meaty and the opposite of gormless. They’ve got a reputation as one of the strongest live acts in the scene, and at this gig, the rain glistening and somehow suiting them, you could hear why. They pulled out a cover of Bieber’s ‘Baby’ that had no business working and absolutely did, metalled and emo’d into something that genuinely rocked instead of the usual ironic-cover gag that dies on the floor.
Their own songs turned into anthems off that soaked concrete, amps pushed to breaking and the rings throwing the sound back at us, every track moshable bar one slower, more personal ballad, after which the pit truly let it out. A proper punk push pit, soaked floor and all, the kind a wet surface is supposed to make you careful on, except nobody was, that was the point. Their lead guitarist played leads that soared over the top of it. They’ve been called emo and they absolutely are, and you can see why they’re so popular; they hit exactly what every emo kid and mall goth wants, metalcore, pop punk, emo, all of it. They were fucking awesome and on another level. They closed on Backup! Backup!, the crowd singing the ‘woah oh oh oh’ back as a call and response; those who were there got to live it, those who weren’t wish they were.
Bleed the Freak
Brax’s new band · their first ever gig · one amp, one light
The last set was Brax’s new band, Bleed the Freak, playing their first ever gig, and they had the closing slot to do it in. Brax is a drummer by his roots, so it threw a few people that he wasn’t the one out front; the vocals were someone else’s, and Heath McTegg, who used to front The Amphetamines and turns up in the Complete History at the School’s Out gig, was over on bass now. Brax had gone quiet the back half of last year and into this one, the kind of quiet I knew the shape of because I’d been in it too, and somewhere in there he’d been missing the days when he started all of this back in 2023 as an emo kid, the same way I’d spent a while missing 2024, when I was still an emo kid myself and didn’t start calling myself purely punk until the end of it. Two blokes who’d dropped off the map; and there he was, putting his own band on for the first time, on the night the whole thing came back.
Before a note was played, the singer said the whole masterplan out loud, the thing everyone there already understood. That you don’t need shitty bars to have a good gig. You don’t need the lies of the politicians and the establishment. You can just go down to your local park and play. That’s the entire Subscene in three sentences, the thing The Saints worked out fifty years ago and the thing I’d been reaching for with the Big Break this magazine ran, said straight into one working speaker without a rehearsed script, by a band nobody had heard yet, in the rain, with the lights out. Everyone there knew what it meant.
It started lukewarm. After Delphic Afterparty’s industrial-scale moshing the crowd was back to swaying, finding the new band’s feet with them, and a song or two in they hit one the band’s mates all knew, something about a pie shop in Cleveland, and the floor started to come back. They never got to play it out. The vocalist’s amp died in the rain right before, so the set collapsed down to one guitar through the one amp still working, the stage black but for a single light somebody had aimed down from the merch stand bolted up on top of the skate ramp. The singer said his voice was shot, that he was sick, that he was sorry, and asked if he should even do it. The crowd answered that for him. DO IT.
Brax leaned into the mic and said this one’s by a famous rock and roll band we all know and love. The bloke next to me went, is it Oasis. I said it back in the worst Mancunian accent I own, Oasis. Someone asked if it was Wonderwall. It was Slide Away.
I knew it was coming a half-second before he said it, and I already knew every word, because I was meant to sing this song once before. I played it at the Big Break and it was meant to go out to someone who didn’t come; the night fell in from the top, and the song never landed the way it was supposed to. So when a sick kid with a broken amp started it under one light in the rain, give it all you got, dreaming about the people who really mattered and aren’t here anymore, finding a way, it stopped being a cover. Zen from Delphic Afterparty turned and asked if I knew it. Of course I knew it. I sang it straight ahead, face to face, and that pulled the bloke next to me in, then the guy in the Oasis shirt, then it was the singer plus one off the floor, then two, then three crowded onto the mic, and someone shoved me the rest of the distance in the punk way, and we sang the outro together off the one speaker. It was as cathartic as anything I’ve felt at a gig. It really did take me there. Whoever the singer dedicated it to up the front, for the length of that song it belonged to all of us.
Then they put the boot back in. The last few were rock and roll but high-energy, punk and metal at once, the way a real rock and roll band is supposed to be and almost none of them are, none of that mid-tempo plod from the bands who swear they don’t want money or fame or status so they can feel righteous about going nowhere. They closed on Rage Against the Machine’s Bulls on Parade, which the whole scene apparently knows by heart, and it detonated, then rolled into the first song they ever wrote, Propaganda, dedicated to all of us hitting the za, which was funny for a drug-and-alcohol-free event, except what the song’s actually about is a big fuck you to every politician and authority figure who calls their lies education. It was what everyone wanted to say, now with a hundred people shouting it with you. I think we all knew what it meant. We all lived it.
And then it was over, except nobody let it be. It started quiet, one corner of the park, then spread until it was the only sound out there: Bleed the Freak, Bleed the Freak, the whole crowd, the way a crowd chants O-a-sis, drawn out and stamped down hard, for a band most of these people hadn’t heard of an hour earlier. Brax came back to the mic and said that was Punk in the Park, thanked everyone for coming, thanked his crew one by one like a promoter who’d been running these twenty years instead of a bloke who’d just put on his first. For a second a few of us thought that was the end of the whole thing, and maybe it was the end of the gig, but the chant kept going after he’d said his piece, and that was the other thing starting. The same bloke who’d gone quiet for the better part of a year stood there running it like he was born to it, and the scene he started as an emo kid in 2023 was chanting his band’s name into the dark.
We’re Back
Maine Road · the form had moved · expect more
The crowd was mostly the alternative lot, scene kids and emo kids and mall goths with punks scattered through, and a couple of years ago I’d have made a point of telling you which one of those I reckoned I was. I don’t bother now. Punk, emo, rock and roll, they’re three heads of the same holy and unholy trinity. Standing there I felt like that emo kid again, just feeling the moment before all the bullshit became the only thing my head could hold. Everyone had been holding something in. There were dark clouds over the park and there were the ones we’d all been carrying, and the pit was where both got let out. The scene had been asleep, and everyone there had been waiting for someone to give them permission to call it alive again. It was supposedly just punk in the park, the way Oasis were supposedly just a rock and roll band, and it fit the people standing in it so exactly that it was never going to come out as anything less than what it was.
Nearly every band on the bill was new or barely known, getting its big break on that concrete, which is how the scene keeps going when the old names fade out, sell out, or break up for good. Deadtrigger didn’t only pull itself out of the dead, it pulled the trigger on a new stage of the Subscene, and the night read as a signal flare more than a homecoming, a flat statement of what’s coming. More of these, soon, all ages, easy to get to. There’s already another one right on the first day of holidays, and if this was our Maine Road, Knebworth comes next. I want them weekly, and I reckon a lot of us walked to the bus stop wanting the exact same thing. It’s going to be.
Belief. Believe. Beyond. The (hi)story.