One side of Trashxstrike’s first 12-inch holds seven hardcore songs. The other belongs to Mama, vocalist Jake’s cat, drawn with X marks on her paws by a kid from a local band who also makes show flyers. The Philadelphia band did not arrive at this plan through label meetings or any great knowledge of pressing records. Guitarist Joe typed “record pressing Philadelphia” into Google and found Hellbender Vinyl.
The first run is 200 copies on random colour vinyl, with every song cut onto side A and the Mama drawing etched into side B. It cost a little over $2,000. Trashxstrike had first considered a 7-inch, then learnt that the running time would push the format too far and that a 12-inch made more sense financially. Hellbender had recently opened a plant in Philadelphia, which cut the shipping bill and gave Joe people nearby who could talk him through the options.
“The staff over there couldn’t have been kinder or more helpful,” he said. “They walked me through all my options and made some suggestions on what the best direction would be.”
The vinyl is expected in early autumn, and both Joe and Jake say they would work with Hellbender again. “Core Values” itself arrived on streaming platforms and Bandcamp on August 5 as Trashxstrike’s debut EP, following a free promo cassette they passed around late last year. That three-song tape was later uploaded as “Promo 2025” under the band’s own Core Values Records name.
The route from those first demos to a seven-song record was quick and fairly scrappy. After Joe’s previous band ended, he taught himself enough home recording to build a backlog of guitar demos, but his attempts to start something new kept going nowhere. Jake answered a Craigslist advert. The pair began sending files back and forth by email, pulling apart Joe’s recordings and rebuilding them into songs. Jake wrote the lyrics and recorded early vocals through a bad microphone in the basement at work.
Tom joined on drums through a mutual friend of Jake’s after moving to Philadelphia and looking for a band. Joe heard Tom’s previous band and immediately thought his playing would fit. Steve, an old friend of Jake’s, took bass. The four-piece began practising last autumn and played their first shows in February 2026. Joe had written all the music and Jake had shaped the words before Tom and Steve arrived, but neither man talks about the other two as hired hands brought in to copy a finished demo.
“Not only did they trust us coming in with the blueprint we had laid out and adapted themselves to it accordingly, they have been such an important part of what our live shows have become,” Jake said.
That live version of Trashxstrike is fast, physical and much less tidy than the story of two people emailing files might suggest. “The Truth Is Not Out There” opens with a section Jake proposed to make the record hit immediately, closer to early Integrity before it drops into older hardcore punk and a short groove. Jake brought the lyric in fully written and never changed a word, though recording it was difficult because the vocal had few clear cues to follow.
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From there, “Core Values” keeps shifting within the older hardcore language Joe grew up with. “The X” stretches out its entrance in the style of 90s Victory Records and Strife, then rises through the verses towards gang vocals. Jake changes his flow around the guitar and starts with a spoken part influenced by Rage Against The Machine, written as a conversation between his older and younger selves. The loose yell in the break was not planned. It simply appeared one day and stayed.
“Outrage / Waste of Life” began as two separate ideas. The first section took from Leeway and Floorpunch, with a Youth of Today-style break, before the band joined it to a faster song that moves through a Metallica-like thrash riff, a heavier groove and a return to the opening part. Jake used the intro to speak directly about Philadelphia, then turned the second half into a pointed verse and chorus song with call and response built for the room. It is one of his favourite parts of the set to sing.
The title track is even more direct, a traditional hardcore punk rush ending in a DYS-inspired breakdown. Its first ending leaned too hard into tough-guy beatdown, which Jake found funny but wrong for this band. He replaced it with a phrase he had already used in promo posts, “small stages and fair wages.” The final line took longer. It came to him one day before the EP was due for mixing, so he rushed to a studio and recorded it in time.
Trashxstrike are a straight edge band, but “The X” is not written as a lecture. Joe asked Jake for a mature straight edge song about carrying the choice into adult life. Jake had spent years away from making music, then found himself close to losing several friends and actually losing others. The need for an outlet brought him back, and the songs became more important as he and Joe kept writing. Working in the service industry also meant years of being mocked or treated with suspicion for not drinking or using drugs.
“There’s always been this stigma of, ‘Well you’re straight edge, so does that mean you’re gonna judge me for my choices?’ while judging me in the process,” he said. That alienation can follow people well into adulthood and, in Jake’s experience, can even push some away from straight edge. He treats sobriety and straight edge as choices about health and how somebody moves through the world.
“It’s just as much a song about sobriety as it is about straight edge and letting those around you know that they are loved despite differences in life choices, as well as a statement that it’s never about being better than someone else.”
Joe thinks there are more straight edge bands now than at any point in the past 10 or 20 years, and sees the wider scene in a much healthier place than it was even two years ago. Younger people are turning up X’d up, and bands are again playing the faster, more traditional version of hardcore that first pulled him in. Trashxstrike will play Edge Day at Preserving in Pittsburgh this October alongside 11 other straight edge bands. In Joe’s view, it would have been difficult to gather that many active edge bands for one bill a couple of years back.
The record’s politics come from the same place as that song about adult straight edge. Jake does not separate public anger from private choices.
“The way we attack the world is deep-rooted in how we handle the choices that only affect us,” he said.
“Outrage” starts at street level. “Infrastructure suffers to the highest bidder. Time to take our city back.” Jake wrote it after watching private equity firms buy Philadelphia property, turn homes that could have been owned into rentals and charge prices families cannot realistically meet. He also sees city money pushed towards keeping tourist areas clean and presentable while large parts of Philadelphia are left alone.
“Waste of Life” pulls back from the city and targets authoritarian and nationalist politics. Its central line asks, “If history is told by the winners, why are the losers writing the books?” Jake’s “losers” are people whose only real possession is power, cut off from the lives they control and interested in history only when it serves them. His point is that communities have always moved through the work of different people, while those with privilege have repeatedly decided which lives and contributions get recorded and which disappear.
On “Defense Forces“, older words became current again. Some of the first lyrics were close to ten years old, and Jake returned to them while writing about Gaza and the longer history of genocide, land seizure and religious power.
“Access to resources should never be controlled. Parents murdered, orphans left to die alone. Countless lives to unmarked graves. More than half of them, women and children.”
Joe gave that song the record’s most metallic first half, using 80s thrash before the band’s heaviest breakdown. All seven songs are played in standard tuning, but Steve switches to a five-string bass at the end so the final section drops with more weight.
Misinformation drives “The Truth Is Not Out There“, its title taken from “The X-Files” and turned against the current United States. Jake wrote it after the early versions of “Waste of Life” and “Defense Forces”, wanting an opener aggressive enough to cut through the constant flood of claims, propaganda and instant conclusions. He returns to an inward sense of right and wrong as the only answer he trusts.
“Even the truth can be changed to fit a narrative. The tools of the tyrants are to make you believe. Knowledge bubbles. Misinformation. How does anyone have the patience?”
The title “Core Values” is partly a joke at the expense of political slogans, but Jake uses the song to say exactly what he expects from himself and from hardcore: support women, defend trans people, treat immigrants as neighbours and stand up when someone else is being targeted.
“I don’t see myself as someone with clout, someone that has the power to change anything,” he said. “But I do think the best thing you can do for the world is to do good and be kind to others. Give respect rather than just expect it, and most importantly, stand up for others.”
The lyric spells it out: “I seek female empowerment as a core value of a healthy establishment. Trans rights and equal measures. Immigrants are just neighbors stuck in a cycle of propaganda.”
For Jake, hardcore is at its best as protest and as an aggressive voice against things that are plainly wrong. The record does not stay in political mode for all seven songs, because the band do not see grief, friendship, sobriety and politics as separate lanes.
“Past Tense” is the most personal song here. Joe’s central two-step riff came, strangely enough, from the breakdown in “The A-Team” theme, while the rest leans into the punk economy of Ten Yard Fight and Floorpunch. Jake disliked the song at first. He later understood that the problem was not the music but how uncomfortable the subject made him. He wrote about wanting people he loves to find peace after losing someone, making the lines longer and more frantic as the song heads towards its final section.
“Memories are the most painful thing until they’re the only thing that matters,” he sings. The songs “Holding On” and “Time to Heal” gave him a way into it. Remembering the bands that first helped him make sense of himself became part of finding some balance again.
Then comes Mama. The closing song started as a joke Jake made to his wife about writing an anthem for their cat, but it became the EP’s strangest arrangement and a favourite inside the band. A quick Carry On-inspired opening gives way to a mid-tempo verse. Joe plays a 70s blues-rock solo while Jake sings melodically over it, a section that became one of Joe’s favourites on the EP. The band then move into a Danzig-style “woah” chorus and finish with a slow, almost doom-like ending.
Jake had been listening heavily to Danzig and Misfits. Joe was unsure about the entire cat-song idea until he heard the first demo. Jake calls it the most fun he has ever had developing one song.
Making “Core Values” themselves has required a different split of work. Joe handled the pressing plant and physical production. Jake made the layout, designs the merchandise and will run mail order. More than ten years managing a bar have made him the obvious person to keep the books straight. Neither had run a label before, and both know that getting a record made is only half the problem.
“It’s both easier than ever to put out your own material and harder than ever to get people to care about it,” Jake said.
Joe comes from a time when promotion meant handing somebody a demo tape at a show. Now he is trying to understand social platforms and algorithms while accepting that the band’s best advert is still the set itself. They play as hard as they can, and the friendships built during their first year have done more for Trashxstrike than any attempt to imitate online music marketing.
The members fit shows around difficult working hours. Joe and Jake both work long days, Jake’s schedule includes nights and weekends, and Steve keeps overnight hours that Jake says “no completely sane person would.” Jake rarely reaches as many shows as he would like unless Trashxstrike are playing. Cousin Danny’s and Spellbound have been two rooms they particularly enjoyed.
Philadelphia contains several smaller scenes inside its wider hardcore community, with young crowds that have supported the band from the start. Joe thinks their range lets them fit bills across the hardcore umbrella. The same abundance can make attention difficult to earn, but Jake sees the upside too: when somebody in the city backs a band, they do it with the same stubborn commitment they give a Philadelphia sports team.
Trashxstrike are open to working with an established label on a reissue or a future record. The next release will probably involve Tom and Steve earlier in the writing. This one stayed close because Joe and Jake had already built most of it together and knew what they wanted it to be.
“We’re not clout chasers or cool guys or backed by anyone, so doing it ourselves felt like the right thing to do,” Jake said.
For now, the first 200 records are still at the Philadelphia plant. Side A holds the politics, straight edge, grief, thrash riffs, gang vocals and one theme-song-inspired two-step. Side B carries Mama.
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