It came out last October and sort of snuck up on people—short, noisy, and weirdly clear-headed about the things that actually matter.
Class rage, identity, fake struggle, gentrified punk posturing—it’s all in there, under layers of frantic drums, synth freakouts, and riffs that feel like they’re barely holding themselves together. Thirteen minutes long, and somehow they manage to say more than most albums twice the length.
It’s like if Turnstile took a wrong turn down a dirt road, never cleaned up, and decided to stay loud, bitter, and weirdly catchy—somehow still hardcore, just with more grime under the nails.
Since the release, Dinerboy haven’t slowed down. Their Monday night residency at The Wayfarer in April became the venue’s most successful in over a year. “Somehow people kept showing up for weekly anger management on a school night,” they said, which feels about right.
The EP lives in that same space—too much noise for a Monday, too honest for irony, and completely unbothered by genre rules.
The record is shaped by resentment toward people who co-opt the look and language of struggle while living comfortably above it. “It’s a play on the class war—how our generation has been crushed into low-paying jobs and high rents in the neighborhoods we grew up in.” They’re not yelling for the sake of it. The frustration is earned. And it runs through the whole thing, from the opening blast to the final piano crash.
View this post on Instagram
Below is Dinerboy’s full track-by-track commentary. But before diving into each one, here’s the heart of it: the EP is about pressure—financial, social, internal. It’s about watching your world shift into something unrecognizable, and deciding to scream about it rather than quietly adapt.
View this post on Instagram
Now go read the commentary. It explains everything without explaining too much.
“DINER BOY”
This song is an amalgamation—if that’s the right word—of a lot of different things. It’s got this weird James Bond swagger, a 5/4 time signature, and a heavy, self-aware energy. It’s like teetering on the line between a Michael Bay Transformers fight scene and a crusty 80s hardcore punk show. It feels like what would happen if our kid selves gorged on every genre they could find and then just vomited it all up—chaotic, messy, and strangely cohesive.
Lyrically, it’s a play on the class war—how our generation has been crushed into low-paying jobs and high rents in the neighborhoods we grew up in. It’s also about the resentment we feel toward those who posture as struggling, but are actually part of the one percent, comfortably co-opting our spaces and struggles.
“PLANET OF THE VAPES”
A dream of mine has always been to have a band with like 20 people in it for live shows, just this massive, chaotic collective. And between every single song, I wanted hip-hop beats playing so there was never a dull moment—just constant energy. Culturally, I think hip-hop and hardcore exist in a similar space: raw, emotional, born out of frustration, and community-driven.
I love the juxtaposition of a laid-back electronic beat dropping right into chaotic hardcore punk guitars. This track is inspired equally by Jai Paul and the Donkey Kong theme song—ridiculous, fun, and intense. Including it on the EP was a blast, but honestly, playing it live—improvising, soloing over it—that’s probably one of the coolest parts of our set.
“X-15”
Named after the titular hypersonic, rocket-powered aircraft—the fastest pilot-flown aircraft ever. It’s a blast of sound that pulls from all the subgenres of hardcore punk we love. It’s inspired by raw 80s hardcore energy like Gorilla Biscuits and shifts into more technical territory that feels a bit like Between the Buried and Me (we wish lol). Each of us brings different influences into the mix, some of which you don’t typically hear in hardcore punk.
Lyrically the song explores the idea of overinflating your sense of self into something so unrealistic it feels like you’re faking something as iconic and technical as an X-15.
“BLEED”
This one feels like walking into a club right as the band’s finishing up soundcheck and the house music’s still playing—just that weird liminal energy. Going back to our obsession with having an absurd number of people on stage for live shows, we started writing this over-the-top, jungle-style drum circle section that would need at least 10 people playing some kind of percussion.
Our guitarist used to play in a youth crew straight edge hardcore band, and the main riff here really taps back into those roots—raw, fast, super tight.
Ultimately, the track becomes a smorgasbord of sound. It’s what happens when you let us loose in our studio (AKA home office) for too long—layers, weird ideas, and a lot of joy in experimentation.
Lyrically, it’s simple: time moves fast. Blink and it’s gone.
“COUNTDOWN”
We don’t get why this is our least streamed song lol. Without really intending to, we ended up creating this cool blend of pop punk, youth crew, and melodic hardcore in a way that we hadn’t heard before. This song is definitely inspired by bands like Final Fight, Have Heart, Comeback Kid, but we have also been told that it sounds like the black parade so…
“TRIPLE CROWN: A DENTAL TRILOGY [HUFFING NITROUS (DON’T DO IT)]
One of the secret sauces of DINERBOY is our Euro-rack modular synth specialist Michael. He just kinda went nuts and it ended up triggering our guitarist who has been in and out of the Dentist with 3 (three) crown replacements for the same tooth. This one is fun because you just sit back, relax, and imagine the dentist having their way with your mouth, blasting you off into our last song—
“BREAK YOUR SHIT”
This one was heavily inspired by blasting Power Trip at max volume while flying down the 395 at 120 miles per hour at one in the morning. It’s high-octane, full-throttle energy from start to finish.
Our drummer listened to Petal by Every Time I Die and demanded we write a track in 3/4, and this one came together pretty quickly once we locked into that feel. It wasn’t until Break Your Shit that we tracked our bassist Taylor’s backing vocals and realized—holy hell—she can scream. That moment changed everything. From then on, we knew her voice had to be all over the rest of the EP.
Recording drums for this track was a blast. Our friend Bobby visited the studio—he’s also a killer drummer—which created this weird but fun sense of competitiveness. That pushed our drummer, Jimmy, to absolutely go off and lay down the most insane drum track he could.
Our producer, Chance Espinoza, had this idea to pair that chaos with the upright piano sitting in the studio. So by the end of the song, it just explodes—Jimmy going nuts on the kit while these wild piano hits crash through. The moment we heard it back, we knew it had to be the ending of the record.
