Every Wednesday, Frayed Ends BC would spend three or four hours pulling apart whatever had landed in the band WhatsApp that week. Guitarist Steve Martin was sending rough demos from home, vocalist Eddie Cross might arrive with a breakdown section, the drummer had riffs of his own, and nobody was precious about where an idea had started. They would keep rearranging it until everybody was happy and the song was tight enough to stay.
That routine sits underneath “Nothing At All“, the Belfast hardcore band’s debut album, released on July 10 through Gokuhi.
Frayed Ends BC started in 2022, but by the time their first EP “Strive” arrived on March 30, 2024, the next record was already beginning to take shape.
“Fuck Around and Find Out” and “Problems They Bring” were in the live set early, as the band started picking up momentum around Ireland and playing Dublin shows for Blackwater Music, including the first As One Fest. “Problems They Bring” then appeared on the self-released “Winter Promo ’24” that November, giving an early indication of where they were going.
At this point the band are Eddie Cross on vocals, Robbie Beckett on rhythm guitar, Steve Martin on lead guitar, Zac Mcbride on bass and Chricky O’Kane on drums. Chricky joined in December 2025 and does not play on “Nothing At All”, which means the album already documents a version of Frayed Ends BC that has since changed.
The jump from those earlier recordings is pretty obvious once “Nothing At All” kicks in. “Nothing At All” keeps most of its business short, with guitars pushed down into beatdown weight, quick old-school bursts and breakdowns that owe something to both 1990s New York hardcore and the heavier Los Angeles end of the form.
Belfast punk is in there too, along with the LBU strain the band have taken to heart. There is very little decorative space around any of it. Bass and guitar tend to arrive together, the drums keep the songs pointed at the next impact, and Eddie’s vocals sit right at the front.
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No Echo heard the same step up in weight, describing “Nothing At All” as pushing Frayed Ends BC “into heavier territory, drawing from beatdown and Los Angeles Hardcore and featuring several notable guest vocalists.”
Cavedweller Music went further: “Right from the opening track, this album sonically punches the listener straight in the mouth, and it doesn’t really let up from there. This is aggressive, ignorant, heavy music that delivers very palpable rage in a raw display of power. The tracks are short and punchy, running between 90 seconds and 3 minutes. This allows each one to hit hard and then make way for the next banger to step up to the plate.”
The band’s earlier recordings had taken criticism for their recording and vocal quality. Eddie doesn’t dodge that. To him, “Nothing At All” is where Frayed Ends BC finally got the size they had wanted from these songs.
“We were basically a demo band before this album,” he said. “Recording this at Black Mountain got us the massive sound that our songs needed, the tracks were heavier in all aspects, the message is clearer, thanks to Brian at Gokuhi we were able to achieve this vision and show people what FEBC is all about.”
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The first two songs written for the record were “Fuck Around and Find Out” and “Problems They Bring”. Steve’s home demos became the backbone of much of what followed, though every member pulled at the arrangements in rehearsal. Because everyone plays other instruments, ideas moved around easily. Eddie could hand Steve a breakdown written at home and watch him build outward from it. A riff did not necessarily belong to the person holding that instrument on stage.
By August 2024, they had seven songs they liked enough to start thinking beyond another EP. They had already set themselves a January 2025 recording target when Brian Brinkerhoff got in touch after seeing footage of Frayed Ends BC playing in Dublin on YouTube. He asked what they were planning, the band sent him rehearsal footage of the new stuff, and his reaction helped push the idea towards a full album.
For Eddie, the relationship never carried the air of a formal industry arrangement. Brian believed in the band, and Eddie remembers it as “more a passion project between friends than anything corporate with dodgy contracts.”
Brian flew in from California and took the band to Black Mountain Studio in Dundalk, where they spent four days working with Scott Halliday. Sessions ran roughly from 9am until 7pm. They would record the instruments for a song, move onto vocals, and use that sequence to give everybody some breathing space before starting again. Brian co-produced the record with Frayed Ends BC, while Anthony Burke at Burkes Dungeon handled mastering. The band had wanted Anthony involved after hearing his work with Bitter Pill.
Scott came from a very different background. Hardcore and metal were not his usual world, and his previous experience included working as Prince’s guitar tech. Eddie remembers him getting fully involved anyway.
“He knew exactly what sound we were going for and was full hands on getting excited over the recordings,” Eddie said. “We worked really well with him, he’s a genius and really had fun going outside his usual zone to work with a hardcore band.”
The studio was not just a matter of reproducing the WhatsApp demos. Vocal patterns shifted. Backing vocals were added across the record. Brian heard riffs and sections he thought deserved more time and suggested repeats or extensions. “They Deserve Better”, already the most technically awkward song for the band to finish, changed its main verse during recording after going through several lyrical versions beforehand. Eddie was still adjusting the vocal pattern on the day it was tracked.
“Fuck Around and Find Out” had another problem. Eddie had never been completely satisfied with his vocals on it. The answer came through a coincidence involving Paddy Scanlon of If It Bleeds.
Eddie had gone to record a guest spot for If It Bleeds, only to discover that both bands had independently written songs called F.A.F.O., or “Fuck Around and Find Out”. Paddy had already been following Frayed Ends BC before his own band formed, then got to know them properly once the two bands started sharing shows. They also played Metal To The Masses together.
“It turned out we had both wrote songs with the same name and no prior knowledge of each others tracks lol,” Paddy recalled. Eddie ended up recording with Paddy at Robbie from If It Bleeds’ house, while Paddy was brought into the Frayed Ends BC track and improvised a completely new verse.
Once that verse was there, Eddie’s view of the song changed immediately. “It was night and day difference, that was what the track was missing for sure.”
Guests ended up becoming one of the defining parts of the album, though arranging them was also one reason the release took longer than the band first hoped. Coordinating people across different places is quite different from recording a DIY demo and putting it out the following week.
Brian’s contacts opened the door to Bayway. Eddie had been a big fan since hearing their “Word Is Bond” EP, and Jayway took on the opening track, “Powerviolence”. It is an old-school, fast, short piece, and Eddie initially suggested a section for him to work over. Jayway changed the pattern, wrote his own lyrics and added backing vocals. What had started as a fun opener became the album’s most popular track.
Knuckledust were much more personal for Eddie. They are his favourite hardcore band, so he asked Brian whether there was any chance of reaching Pierre. Eddie had met him previously when Pierre’s other band Borstal played Belfast and remembered him as a lovely person. “Jaded By Choice” was already Eddie’s favourite song on the album, and its closing section had been written with Knuckledust very much in mind. Pierre wrote his own lyrics and vocal patterns for the part.
Kalem Clarke came through the Dublin connection. Frayed Ends BC had crossed paths with him at metal and hardcore shows before Lost To Life and Frayed Ends BC began playing together regularly. Eddie was listening to Lost To Life heavily while writing “Problems They Bring” and had their vocal style in his head. Kalem had already appeared on the “Winter Promo ’24” version before returning for the album.
“The lads were always big supporters of us so it was an honour to be asked to throw down some guest vocals on their record,” Kalem said. “AIHC forever.”
Brian J. Harrington’s history with the band goes further back. His Dublin deathcore/death metal band Jenova had been welcomed onto Belfast and surrounding-area shows before Frayed Ends BC even existed, and he met Eddie, Steve and Robbie at different points through that period. Eddie and Brian became close through a shared love of pro wrestling, metal and hardcore. They kept playing together over the years, including shows involving Brian’s later band Congenital Abnormalities.
When Frayed Ends BC wanted death metal vocals over the breakdowns in “Gatekeeper“, Brian was an obvious call. He came into the studio for the day having heard only a rough demo and deliberately avoided overthinking his part.
“Whatever you want me to do on the day il do and just go with it not over think it,” he remembers telling Eddie.
The subject hit close to home too. “Gatekeeper” can read from the outside as a diss track, but Eddie wrote it around paranoia and the sense that people are out to get you. Brian connected it to another side of gatekeeping he had seen across hardcore and metal, particularly towards people whose taste crosses genre boundaries. He and the Frayed Ends BC members share wide tastes and a similar set of values, and his experience of the band has always been the opposite.
“Always welcoming to everyone,” he said. “So happy to see how far they have come and excited to see how far they go Album is sick so proud to be a little part of it.”
They have played “Gatekeeper” together live several times since, and Eddie still counts it among the most fun songs to bring onto a stage.
For all the guest voices, most of the record stays very close to Eddie’s own life and the things happening around him.
“Jaded By Choice” set much of the lyrical direction. Eddie wrote it about growing up with ADHD and autism, with the title taking aim at the assumption that neurodivergent people are simply lazy, careless about school or work, or incapable of applying themselves. Being scatter-brained is read as a moral failure. The same subject follows into “Always Following Me”, where the problem is no longer only misunderstanding from outside hardcore.
Eddie thinks the scene has become more inclusive around ADHD and autism, but his own experience has left him wary of how far that goes.
“I’ve seen good people in the scene who put a lot of work in get excluded just because they are different,” he said. A former bandmate would repeatedly preach politics and morality to him, then complain about people with ADHD being annoying and point out moments when Eddie was displaying ADHD symptoms. “People need to educate themselves on ableism.”
“Straight Up Answer” approaches neurodivergence from the other direction, with a positive mental attitude and pride in being different. “Disowned” is Eddie’s own family story. His father’s entire side of the family disowned him, wanting him to make something of his life by joining the navy or army. Eddie was anti-war and already knew he wanted music instead. That choice has since taken him around the world and into places he never expected to visit.
Politics gets closer to Eddie’s working life on “Mental Prisoner”. He works for a homeless charity, and the song tries to get at what living on the streets might actually do to a person’s mind. The housing crisis also ended up giving the whole record its name.
“Nothing At All” was not settled when the band entered the studio. Eddie had suggested “Free From This Mental Prison”, but everyone thought it might be too long. Then somebody put on The Simpsons.
The joke was the “stupid sexy Flanders” episode and the phrase “nothing at all”. It stuck around long enough to stop being a joke. For Eddie it began to sum up the level of government support people with mental illness in Northern Ireland have learned to expect, while private rents swallow most of a pay packet and leave tenants with very little afterwards.
Once the cover arrived, they stopped looking for another title.
Frayed Ends BC have known Ciaran from Spearhead Media for well over a decade. They had played together around Ireland in different bands, Eddie had commissioned him for several projects, and Ciaran had already designed the band’s current logo. For the album, there was no elaborate brief. They sent him the record and the lyrics and essentially told him, “do your thing bro.”
The interpretation came afterwards. Eddie sees the hooded figure on the finished cover almost as a landlord draining Belfast dry while the working class decays around it. The image had not been commissioned with that meaning dictated in advance. It appeared once the band saw what Ciaran had made.
“They Deserve Better” widens the political scope again. Written in solidarity with people in Gaza, it became one of the most difficult songs on the album structurally as well as lyrically. “Under The Rubble” followed events in the United Kingdom in August 2024, with Eddie specifically pointing to the August 6 aftermath of the riots. The song was written in solidarity with Muslim communities after far-right racist violence and attacks on Muslim-owned businesses.
His point is fairly plain: violence does not select victims according to whatever racial logic the people carrying it out imagine.
Frayed Ends BC are part of Belfast hardcore not only as a band, but through the work they put into organising shows and keeping things moving locally.
Eddie thinks Belfast hardcore is currently on the rise, but much of that activity came from people putting things back together after the pandemic.
The band remain involved with Near Death Collective, which is not exclusively a hardcore operation but worked to keep heavy and underground shows moving through that period. Embrace Execution had already been carrying Belfast hardcore for years. Frayed Ends BC came through, then If It Bleeds, who went on to win Bloodstock’s Metal To The Masses competition in 2025.
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More bands, promoters and collectives followed: One Truth Collective, Adrenochrome, FU Dog, Ghiodorah, Drag Wounds Promotions and Backfist Promotions among them. Blackwater Music from Dublin DHC have worked with the Belfast crew on several shows too. Eddie has recently started helping Backfist put on hardcore gigs, and there is also a Backfist zine in progress that will cover hardcore alongside other heavy bands in the local scene.
Frayed Ends BC do not hear Belfast as a place producing copies of one sound. Eddie sees the current bands as having distinct influences and identities. His own band pull from 1990s NYHC, LBU hardcore and Belfast punk, but the more important point for him is that no two bands around them sound the same.
That approach carries into how they use the stage. Frayed Ends BC regularly invite friends up for guest vocals, including people who have never done it before, and Eddie specifically wants more women and femmes getting that opportunity.
“The scene shouldn’t be male dominated,” he said. “We love to share the stage, a hardcore show for everyone no macho ego BS here.”
That makes the amount of outside voices on “Nothing At All” look less like an album trick and more like an extension of how Frayed Ends BC already operate.
The record took longer to get out than the band initially hoped, largely because a full album involving outside production, guests, mixing, mastering and release logistics could not move at demo speed. By the time the album was finally out, Frayed Ends BC had also landed their first major festival appearance.
Frayed Ends BC were invited to Slovenia for Tolminator Festival 2026, their first major festival appearance, while touring and playing in support of “Nothing At All” across Ireland and the UK.
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The band photographs accompanying this period were shot by Garethjpg, while the album artwork was handled by Ciaran at Spearhead Media. The album itself was recorded by Scott Halliday at Black Mountain Studio, produced by Brian Brinkerhoff and Frayed Ends BC, and mastered by Anthony Burke at Burkes Dungeon.
Chricky O’Kane joining on drums in December means they are already writing past it. Four songs written with him are currently in the live set, and Eddie says the band are extremely happy with how quickly the new lineup writes together. A short teaser EP later in 2026 is already being considered.
“I am really excited about what’s next though,” he said. After spending so long trying to get their first full album right, Frayed Ends BC already have four new songs telling them where to go.
Frayed Ends BC will open both Irish dates of Speed and Spy’s September run, playing Opium in Dublin on September 2 with Poser, then Oh Yeah Centre in Belfast on September 3 with If It Bleeds. Both shows are barrierless. Yay!
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