Undertone’s first EP “Revolt Vol. 1” goes straight for the throat. The band came together in Hengelo, Netherlands as a close group of friends who’d already been playing together in different bands for years, bouncing between styles from pop-punk to powerviolence. With Undertone, they wanted to get back to hardcore, and this EP is what came out of that.
As vocalist Rogier says, “We are a group of friends who have been playing together in various lineups in different bands for many years. With our separate projects, we have explored various musical directions, from pop-punk to power violence. When we started Undertone, we wanted to get back to our roots and make hardcore music again. Our EP, Revolt Vol. 1, is the result of this.”
The record came from pressure building up until there was no way around it. “With Undertone, we didn’t start writing Revolt Vol. 1 because we wanted to release music. There was no strategy. It started from frustration that just kept stacking until it had to go somewhere. Going back to our hardcore roots was a natural outcome of this.”
That frustration runs through the whole thing. Undertone describe their sound as somewhere between Locked Shut, Sunami, and Speed, and the lyrics are every bit as upfront as that comparison suggests. “Our sound is reminiscent of Locked Shut, Sunami, and Speed. The lyrics are strongly anti-fascist and anti-capitalist. We make music that gets us moving, both physically and mentally. I would say our band is for fans of Locked Shut, Speed, Sunami, and punching nazis.”
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A lot of what fuels “Revolt Vol. 1” comes from watching what’s happening in the Netherlands and getting sick of how normal it all starts to feel. Rogier lays it out clearly: “A lot of what’s on this EP comes from very specific frustrations. Things you see and hear every day in the Netherlands right now. The normalization of far-right rhetoric. Politicians talking about ‘security’ and ‘order’ while entire groups of people are being dehumanized. The quiet acceptance of it. That’s the part that sticks. Not only the people in power, but how easily it becomes background noise.”
That comes through hard on “Short Anser“, which is probably the EP at its most direct. Rogier points to the way people love talking about resistance when it’s safely in the past, then suddenly get hesitant when similar stuff starts showing up in the present. “World War II gets brought up like a moral reference point. People like to imagine what they would have done back then. But when similar dynamics start creeping in now, the reaction is hesitation, nuance, excuses. That contradiction pissed us off enough to write something that doesn’t leave any room for interpretation.”
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“Shut The Door” goes after another familiar comfort zone, the idea that elections alone are somehow enough to keep fascism out. The key line, “Your right to vote opens the door,” is about the fact that fascist regimes didn’t just appear out of thin air. They were elected. That matters. As the band put it, when people say never again, they also have to look at how it happened in the first place. There are more democratic instruments than elections, but the whole thing keeps getting narrowed down to just that. “It happened before, so it can happen again.”
Undertone aren’t trying to make some cheap anti-democracy statement here. They’re questioning the lazy faith that the system will sort itself out if people just keep participating in the approved ways.
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The economic side of the EP hits just as hard. “We The Bakers” and “Brutal Honesty” come from being fed up with how exploitation gets sold as normal life. Rogier puts it bluntly: “You’re expected to accept that your time, your body, your energy all belong to someone else as long as there’s a paycheck at the end of it. Meanwhile, the people at the top aren’t just benefiting, they’re hoarding, while everything else gets worse. Housing, healthcare, the climate. It’s always the same trade-off: profit over people, over everything.”
One of the sharpest lines on the record comes from that same part of the EP: not the crumbs, not the bread, but the whole bakery. It comes from an old Dutch working-class slogan, translated and dropped into the record as a call for radical change instead of another round of reform. Not a slightly better deal. Not a bigger share. Scrap the whole setup.
On “Chokehold“, the band get into the way violence gets renamed depending on who’s doing it. The Netherlands likes to think of itself as progressive, tolerant, peaceful. Undertone aren’t buying the polished version. That image starts falling apart fast when you look at colonial history or the way protests and political voices get handled now. “Permits denied, demonstrations shut down, police presence justified as ‘keeping the peace.’ It’s a controlled kind of silence.”
Then there’s “Burning Fuse“, which turns toward the way people are meant to process all this stuff now: through feeds, noise, outrage cycles, and platforms built to keep everyone passive. Rogier ties it to the constant stream of information and disinformation, and to the way everything gets flattened into content. “The way outrage becomes something you scroll past, the way the ones in charge ‘flood the zone with shit’ and how the narrative is being controlled by Big Tech. It’s hard not to feel like the systems we use to stay informed are also the ones keeping us passive, submissive and addicted.”
That directness isn’t just in the lyrics. It shaped the whole recording process too. The band wanted the songs to stay as close as possible to how they sound live, without sanding anything down. Most of it came together fast once the ideas were there. “It wasn’t about perfecting them, it was about capturing that initial reaction, that moment where something actually makes you angry enough to do something with it.”
Their past recording experience and DIY mindset pushed them to do most of it themselves. They recorded just about everything on their own, using the studio of their friend Tom Meier and their rehearsal space inside their local venue Innocent in Hengelo, which they proudly call “Home of Hardcore since 1985!” The mixing and mastering were done by Jaap van de Kleijn at Klein Soundworks. The artwork was hand-drawn and put together by the band themselves. Credits keep it simple: recorded by Undertone, mixed and mastered by Jaap van de Kleijn at Klein Soundworks, artwork by Undertone.
The band describe the EP as “a sonic punch in the face and an expression of our anger regarding global political developments and existing power structures.” Before the full release, they put out two singles in early March, and by their own account those were well received. “We’re stoked about how it all turned out!”
The title matters too. “Revolt Vol. 1” is called that for a reason. Undertone don’t see this as a complete statement, more like the first hit. “This doesn’t feel like a complete statement. If anything, it feels like a starting point. Things aren’t stabilizing, they’re accelerating. So it wouldn’t make sense to treat this like a one-off release. The idea is to keep documenting, reacting, pushing. Not just musically, but as a band in general.” They’ve already started writing for “Revolt Vol. 2”, and expect to have that out later this year, with another EP they’d like to release in the fall.
Being from the Netherlands shapes the whole thing in a very specific way. Rogier talks about the tension between the country’s self-image and what’s actually going on underneath it. “There’s this strong narrative of being a tolerant, well-organized society. And in some ways that’s true. But between the image of a well-functioning, tolerant society and the reality of what’s shifting underneath it there’s a tension. The anger on this EP comes from that tension, from seeing the gap between how things are presented and how they actually play out.”
That’s also why the lyrics are so blunt. “No overthinking is also the reason why the lyrics are as direct as they are. There’s no real interest in hiding behind too much metaphors or making things vague. If something is about fascism, we’ll call it fascism. If something is about exploitation, we’ll call it exploitation. It might not be subtle, but we’re not trying to be.”
Undertone already have their eyes on what’s next, but right now the focus is getting out and playing as much as possible behind “Revolt Vol. 1”. “We’re going full steam ahead! We’re looking to get out there to play shows as much as possible in support of Revolt Vol. 1, so you’ll definitely see us at shows in the coming period. Additionally, we already started working on new stuff for a new EP, which we’d like to release in the fall.”
Asked what else people should be checking from their area, they point to Grondvorst, Boos Oog, and Massive Assault, all either fully or partly from Hengelo. Outside that immediate circle, they also shout out newer Lowlands hardcore bands Swell, Cold Mind, Parkour, State Power, and Premonition.
Undertone are from Hengelo, Netherlands. “Revolt Vol. 1” is out now.
