Mosh Bit

Charlottesville’s first music and gaming event in more than a decade, Mosh Bit features casual gaming tournaments and punk performances by NIJI SAGA, Steel Samurai, and 14£bs. Each band combines nostalgic video game melodies with energetic sets packed with a punch. Superbit, a new outpost of the popular gaming store from northern Virginia, and local […]

PICK: Crock of Gold

Punk drunk love: In the documentary Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan, The Pogues frontman claims he was preordained for punk success. Born on Christmas Day, “God looked down on this little cottage in Ireland and said, ‘That little boy there, he’s the little boy I’m going to use to save Irish […]

Arts Pick: Punk the Capital

Punk from here: When her family relocated from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., in the early ’80s, Cynthia Connolly brought her camera and her passion for punk rock to the nation’s fledgling scene. Her documentation resulted in Banned in DC: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground (79-85), one of the first books on punk […]

The Hard Core: Charlottesville punk’s ongoing legacy

Before Charlottesville’s first hardcore punk band played Charlottesville’s first hardcore punk show, Lackey Die bass player Danny Collins had a prediction. “I think we’re gonna be the hottest thing that ever came out of this stinkin’ little town,” Collins said to one of his bandmates. It was 1983, and the band was about to take […]

Over hard: Punk band Fried Egg goes beyond its hardcore roots

One week before the winter solstice, the weather is nasty in Charlottesville and it’s cold as fuck inside Magnolia House. The four members of hardcore punk band Fried Egg—guitarist Tyler Abernethy, bassist Sam Richardson, drummer Sam Roberts, and vocalist Erik Tsow—sit on mismatched couches and chairs in the dim living room of the DIY venue […]

Fast forward: Punk band The Landlords’ first album gets a slick reissue

In his early teens John Beers was “certain that punk rock sucked.” He’d seen the Ramones on television and thought all their songs sounded the same; and he thought Patti Smith singing, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” was “kind of scary.” Heavy metal was Beers’ thing. But a few years later, he […]

The Attachments play sane punk as art reaction

After band practice on a recent Monday evening, the three members of The Attachments lean back on couches in drummer Jack Richardson’s Belmont living room. As the day falls into dusk outside the window, they drink beers and bottled teas while a record spins punk music at a low volume in the background. “I came […]

Punk rock just comes natural to Little Graves

Luis Soler bought his first guitar for $30. It was a pawn shop find, “the worst possible guitar,” he says while nursing a pint of beer at Champion Brewing Company on Halloween eve. “Metallica,” “Slayer” and other metal band names were scratched into the guitar’s paint, says Soler, prompting throaty laughter from his Little Graves […]

Poetic edge: Punk quartet Wild Rose is beholden to beauty

Climbing into your mom’s minivan when you’d lied only slightly about your whereabouts for the evening, reeking of cigarettes and blaming it on your friends when it really was you who was smoking. Claiming you’d only been drinking Pepsi and then trying to figure out how to throw away the beer bottle caps you’d stuffed […]

Haircut’s perspective strikes a hot chord

On a recent Friday night, a bunch of punk rockers in patch- and pin- covered jean jackets, cutoff shorts and moth-eaten band T-shirts packed into the front room at Magnolia House. Some donned well-worn baseball caps, two wore dreadlocks, one wore a dangly yin-yang earring. Charlottesville punk band Haircut had second billing on the hardcore […]