Kids of Rage don’t feel like they ever disappeared. From the outside, with one LP in 2019 and a handful of singles since, the seven years since “Hurry Up” might look like a long stretch off. The Barcelona band kept rehearsing weekly that whole time, kept touring across Spain, France and the UK, kept putting out the occasional song. They’re not interested in calling “Rearranged” a comeback. It’s their first extended release since 2019, out on Useless Pride Records since April 24, six tracks recorded by Pere Rediu at Slapshot Room in Terrassa.
Three of the songs were already out as singles with videos: “Keep Pushing,” “Forever Incomplete” and “Tear Down the Walls.” The focus track is “Hold On Tight.” The other two are “Just by Myself” and “I Was Wrong.” There’s no closed concept, but there’s a thread about resisting, questioning, and moving forward despite exhaustion. The 2000s hardcore loyalty is where they started, and where they’ve stayed.
They’ve been at this 16 years. Started in 2010. Their account of Barcelona hardcore around that time goes deep enough to read like a small scene history.
Around 2010 the scene wasn’t actually that different in size from now. What’s different is more stylistic variety, more types of people involved. Older heads sometimes say there was way more happening back then. The band reckon that’s nostalgia doing its thing. They were playing Estraperlo Club in Badalona constantly, still around but much more punk and hardcore back then. The Kasal de Joves de Roquetes, a youth center, was the DIY anchor. Down to Nothing and Have Heart both played there. Shows came in waves depending on who was running the place. When the right people were there, weekly. Now, every now and then. Sala Tube II in Verneda was a rehearsal space and a venue in what they describe as a dirty, funny-smelling industrial area on the outskirts of Barcelona.
Mostly the hardcore shows lived on the peripheries. There were exceptions. Monasterio in the city center, now gone. Moog Club, a techno spot, briefly did hardcore shows. They played there a few times and caught Title Fight there. Moog is still open as a club. Monasterio moved areas and eventually closed.
The Marina area, “the epicenter of alternative (sub)cultures at Barcelona,” held bars like Dixi and BB+ and the biggest venue in the city, Razzmatazz, which is still going. Around it, smaller rooms: Ceferino and the legendary Rocksound. Ovella Negra, where they played a few times, was “the meeting point of every alt kid in the city before or after they went to the shows,” and is now “the absolute antithesis of what it was back then, sold to the interests of tourism” as Marina turns into a new financial district.
And the squats. “Un desalojo, otra okupación,” as they put it. L’Astilla at L’Hospitalet, Toxics at Cornellà, both gone. Blokes Fantasma, La Squatxeria, El Gato and La Cinètika are still operating.
The people doing the booking work back then: HFMN Crew, who worked with European and American agencies and brought the bigger tours through. They’re still active. When tour packages had room for local slots, Kids of Rage ended up on bills with Ignite and No Turning Back and toured Spain off the back of those shows.
Over the years they’ve shared stages with Sick of It All, Madball, Terror and Propagandhi, and played festivals across Spain and France like Resurrection Fest, Xtreme Fest and Otero Brutal Fest.
Gabi, now part of Can’t Keep Us Down Festival, was putting on shows at Roquetes and running Fire & Ice fest pre-CKUD. Gispert and Farting did shows under Death Wish Team and Punkorlatex.
Oscar, the band’s current bassist (since 2022), ran Voice of the Voiceless to bring smaller national and international bands through. Marius Tiberian kept Tiberian Music going. 93 OTDR booked beatdown shows. The band themselves were part of Criminal Hardcore Crew, a network across Spain that swapped gigs and put on a yearly festival in Madrid.
Their peers at the time: Crack del 29, B12 (ex Bastardos), Read My Lips, Until Better Days Come, Anal Hard, Hyde Abbey. Most of those bands are gone, and several Kids of Rage members come from them. David (drums) and César (guitar) were both in Read My Lips. Oscar (bass) sang in Until Better Days Come. Pol, an ex bassist of theirs, played guitar with Crack del 29. Presta, also ex bassist, sang in Hyde Abbey. The band’s word for this churn is “endogamy.” Small scenes do that.
What they miss is partly economic. Smaller venues you could book without surrendering 300 euros up front. Cheap tickets where all the door went to the band. Now you start a show at minus 500 euros, in a city where a cheap hotel is a unicorn. They also miss a level of crowd commitment beyond people showing up just for their own friends’ bands. They tried mixing the sub-scenes back then. It didn’t work. “We have a small scene which gets divided into even smaller groups.”
The other shift is how people consume music. More immediate, more singles, less time spent living with records. They miss the touring habit of bringing other bands’ records to the merch table, distros where people could dig through cheap albums. Most bands travel with only their own merch now. Kids of Rage themselves have largely stopped doing physical releases. The math doesn’t work. They were ending up with a record warehouse in the rehearsal room.
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And then there’s the constant turnover of people coming through the scene and disappearing. Natural enough, everyone has their own life, but after this many years you really notice it.
The new generation, in their telling: La Plaga, a collective putting on DIY shows with younger bands including Enyor, Pöls, Baixa Permanent, Glitter, Joia and Puny.
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Discos Pinya, closely tied to that scene, releasing records and putting on shows year-round, including an annual Christmas compilation from bands in their circle.
Around the CKUD environment, Bloque (see IDIOTEQ feature here) and L’Irreal Omega, mixing newer faces with longer-running scene people.
Soroll i Glitter, working specifically on spaces for women and dissident sexualities within a still male-dominated scene. My Heart Your Mouth and La Reyerté working closer to screamo. They say they’re probably forgetting people.
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Of the original Kids of Rage lineup, only the singer is still in the band. Everyone else has been around a long time, but the bass slot kept turning over until Oscar joined in 2022.
“Yeah, we had a lot of people playing bass with us, don’t ask us why because we don’t know,” as they put it. What’s hard about being in a band 16 years isn’t the obvious stuff. It’s the everyday things. Jobs. Some of them have kids. Different levels of drive on a given Tuesday night. Five different personalities trying to stay in agreement about anything. “It is like a couple but formed by 5 people. It’s not always easy to find balance between 5 very different personalities. But, again, like in every romantic or affective relationship, it all relies on communication. After many years together, we are confident enough with each other to be our real selves, and that is usually a good thing, but sometimes confrontations appear. So that’s when you need to sit down and talk your heart out.”
Their relationship to the genre has opened up over the years. The 2000s hardcore core hasn’t changed. They all agree on it, despite five different individual record collections. What’s loosened is the fear of doing something that might read as not “correct” within the style. They’ll try things now they would have rejected on principle a decade ago.
Then COVID. They had Resurrection Fest 2020 booked. The pandemic killed it. They ended up playing the 2022 edition instead. Almost two years without playing live. Some bands grew through that period. They didn’t. What they did was keep meeting, write through lockdowns, record three singles and stagger their release over a longer stretch. There was a bass change in there too. Being forced to stop is what made them want to continue. “It wasn’t a planned decision, more like realizing we didn’t want the band to just fade away.”
We asked them to pick five records as checkpoints rather than favorites. One for the early years, one tied to a tour, one tied to making “Rearranged,” and then one each for the burnout period and the gap between releases. They couldn’t agree on the personal phases as a band, so they each picked their own.
Early years was “Life on the James” by Down to Nothing, which played constantly while they were writing their first LP “Whatever May Come,” and shaped a lot of that record’s energy.
Tied to a tour: “Vae Victis” by Alea Jacta Est. Their first French tour in 2016, with Alea Jacta Est headlining and bills shared with Real Deal and The Great Divide. The album was always on in the van.
For “Rearranged“: “Glow On” by Turnstile. They’d been listening to Turnstile for years, saw them at Groezrock and Resurrection Fest, but that record landed differently for them. “It definitely pushed us mentally towards being less afraid of trying new things or stepping outside ideas that, years ago, we probably would’ve rejected immediately.”
For the long gap and pandemic, individual picks: César went with “Mayhem” by Lady Gaga. Jorge picked “Post Human: Survival Horror” by Bring Me the Horizon. Óscar chose “Bellavista” by Viva Belgrado. David picked “The Dusk in Us” by Converge. Quim went with “As You Please” by Citizen.
For the burnout periods: César picked “Future Nostalgia” by Dua Lipa. Jorge chose “The Green Trip” by T3R Elemento. Óscar went with “Birth of Violence” by Chelsea Wolfe. David picked “Sublime” by Sublime. Quim picked “Hara-Kiri” by Honestav.
Where they are now is closer to actively wanting to keep going than just maintaining the band. Creative period, lots of new songs in the pipeline. The actual kids in the lineup (their kids, not the band) have grown up. Jobs are stable enough to allow the financial outlay of touring again. “We’re hungry again. The release of ‘Rearranged’ is helping a lot with that feeling, because we’re having very good feedback and we can’t wait to play these songs on stages everywhere.”
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