Upcoming Releases

Equal Vision Records and Endpoint have announced the Friday, February 27 release of After Taste (Deluxe Edition), a fully remixed and remastered, 18-track expanded version of the influential Louisville, KY hardcore band’s 1993 album. When it was first released, After Taste was widely considered a “departure” for Endpoint. It’s slower, they said. It’s more melodic and less political. Back then, descriptions like these were deployed to signal to others when a band was supposedly moving away from hardcore — a genre that, up until the turn of the decade, was best known for being fast and discordant and socially outraged. In retrospect, nothing about this judgment holds up.

“Writing ‘After Taste’ was a time of transition for Endpoint — we were evolving as musicians and our music tastes were changing. The record is a testament to that change,” guitarist Duncan Barlow recalls. “The songs are a combination of heavy hardcore riffs and occasional pop sensibilities. We were trying to grow without losing our core values and our hardcore style, and as we grew together, we also found ourselves in a new dark period where we were watching our friends abuse drugs and alcohol, helping one another through heartbreaks, and struggling with the larger questions of identity and well-being.”

Endpoint had always operated ahead of hardcore’s exploration curve. Which is to say that After Taste was, in fact, a confirmation of their ongoing commitment to evolution and all of the messy complexities that arise from it. It’s an album with range and dimensionality and even fearlessness. Much like their live shows at that time, sensuality and chaos dance with each other in unpredictable ways. And much like vocalist Rob Pennington’s live monologues from the era, its songs are neither afraid to be too vulnerable nor too vehement.

In the early 1980s, hardcore punk swept across the globe like a wildfire of youthful energy and angst. In the States, the pyres burned brightest in the highest population enclaves, particularly the major coastal cities. Miraculously, through tattered pages of fanzines, tales shared by friends, and crackling records and mixtapes, hardcore expanded beyond its metropolitan birthing grounds and into the corners of unassuming towns like Louisville, KY.

Louisville was disconnected from the pulse of culture when, in 1987, a handful of high school skaters and miscreants formed a band called Deathwatch. Deathwatch quickly morphed into Endpoint and, over the next six years, became the flagship Louisville hardcore band of the era. They are quite possibly the essential Louisville Hardcore band. While there were handfuls of hardcore bands in Louisville before Endpoint and many in the decades that followed, during their short existence, they defined a sound, perspective, and tangible sense of community that spread across the Midwest, throughout the continent, and across the oceans.

Because being from Louisville meant that Endpoint were blissfully free from the kinds of self-imposed restrictions that bound other artists — bands who lived in cities with more entrenched styles of hardcore, like New York or Cleveland or even Washington D.C. — and they repeatedly and consistently used that license to grow with liberal helpings of curiosity and courage and adaptation. Let’s not forget that this is the same band who, only one album prior, explicitly instructed us in this regard: “Don’t be scared of growing old,” Endpoint vocalist Rob Pennington advised us. “Just grow towards the sky.”

Listen harder. After Taste was never a departure. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

After Taste track listing:

1. Force Fed
2. Circumvent
3. Decision Maker
4. Keating
5. Beggar Song
6. Lowland
7. Passive
8. Witness
9. Dirge
10. Myth
11. After Taste
12. Survival Song
13. 26 Seconds
14. Chalk
15. Pencil Break
16. Strings
17. Mather's Point
18. Brown County