Mass Confusion have squeezed six fast, old-school hardcore songs into just over six minutes on “Demo 2026“. The Dutch four-piece go straight for the late-90s and early-2000s style they grew up with, taking cues from the likes of Right Brigade and Carry On, with short, aggressive songs and lyrics directed at injustice and inequality. All four have spent decades around hardcore, and they still care enough about it to have some pretty strong opinions about the bands playing now, the people who have disappeared from gigs and the punk attitude they sometimes miss.
Guitarist Niels has probably the funniest way of explaining that last part. He’s impressed by how many young musicians are getting involved, how well they play and how packed hardcore shows have become. He also remembers a time when bands occasionally screwed up a song, played too fast or were simply too drunk to care much about perfection.
He’s been checking out newer Dutch acts and recently caught Groningen crust punks Stresssysteem. They made quite an impression.
“there are lots of cool bands now, I saw Stressysteem the other day and they reminded me of Flipper meets Bad Brains with Jello Biafra on vocals. I know you won’t believe me but they were great and mustve been around 20.”
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That sort of encounter keeps him interested. But as somebody who spent years travelling around the Netherlands to see hardcore bands, Niels also notices how much the music has shifted towards heavier, more metal-influenced territory. He misses the faster, sometimes clumsier punk stuff and bills where bands could sound completely different from one another.
“I mean all of these bands are great musicians and showmen/women, I have played many bad shows because we fucked songs up and whatnot. Bands take their shit seriously, I miss the punky elements where its not about making everything perfect but just wanting to play really fast or short or loud or drunk.”
His take on contemporary hardcore gets fairly specific. There are more nu-metal influences, more bands competing to write the heaviest mosh parts and, in his view, too many line-ups where everybody is playing a variation of the same thing.
He’d love a little more diversity than “six bands trying to play the same BULLDOZE riff with their mates trying to punch their way around the metalcore horseshoe.”
And then he immediately starts arguing with himself.
“Then again it’s cool to see shows are well-attended and kids are going off so fuck whatever my romanticized version of what hardcore is supposed to be like.”
It’s a good indication of where Mass Confusion are coming from. These guys have their preferences, and they’ve spent enough time in hardcore to know what they’re talking about. They also recognise that the younger generation is having its own experience of the music. Niels can miss the old gigs and still be happy that kids are filling venues and finding new bands.
His advice is pretty straightforward.
“Go off to your friend’s band, buy a t-shirt, do some research on NYHC-bands no one gives a fuck about anymore and start a band trying to sound like them! Hardcore rules”
Mass Confusion have effectively followed that advice themselves. The band came together when drummer Mirko moved to Leeuwarden around three years ago and reconnected with Niels, who had been living there for ages. They knew each other from the Dutch hardcore circuit and had kept bumping into one another at shows long after their earlier bands had stopped playing together.
A Breakdown cover set with some younger musicians got them back into playing. They were both big Right Brigade fans, and the sort of early-2000s hardcore they loved seemed to be getting harder to find among the newer bands.
“New energy man,” Mirko says about starting Mass Confusion. “We just thought it was a good time to reflect back on earlier days and have some fun recreating the sound and vibes of back then.”
The two also spent time talking hardcore at SC Cambuur football matches in Leeuwarden. Those conversations eventually turned into actual songs. They recorded rough guitar and drum sketches on a phone, and before long they had enough ideas to bring some more old friends into the picture.
Niels ran into bassist Arjan at a hip-hop gig. Arjan had played with Mirko in A Step Apart back around 2004, so the prospect of making something together again was a nice excuse to get back in touch.
A Step Apart had been active during the first half of the 2000s, releasing their demo and EP during that period before playing their final show at Light The Fuse Fest in May 2006. Their history is one of several connections running through Mass Confusion.
Mirko also played in Abusive Action and Glory Bound. Arjan’s previous bands include Nothing Done, State of Mind, Back Up and Glory Bound, while Niels has been involved with Cornered, Bloodsucker, Diamond Dogs, Straight A’s, Remain and Bad Attitude. Cornered, formed in the north of the Netherlands in the late 2000s, went on to play across Europe and the United States.
Alwin comes from O’Hara, where he sang a more melodic kind of hardcore. Joining Mass Confusion finally gave him a chance to do something he’d been wanting to try since those earlier days.
“I used to sing in a more melodic hardcore band, and I’d always had the desire to be in a band that was fast, aggressive, and straight to the point. I think that idea is already 20 years old. Now it has finally turned into something concrete.”
He also happens to think hardcore is bigger than it’s ever been, which makes returning to the music he loved twenty years ago even more enjoyable.
The four live in different parts of the Netherlands now, but getting them together to record the demo wasn’t especially complicated. Arjan travelled up from Utrecht to Friesland on a cold winter morning to record bass. The music was recorded by Douwe Boom at his studio in Franeker, and Alwin later recorded his vocals with Pieter Vonk in Amsterdam.
Getting those vocals recorded took a little persuasion. Mirko and Niels had wanted Alwin involved from the beginning, and after a few months of chasing him, the songs were finally finished.
Demian Snel, guitarist with Dutch black metal band Terzij de Horde and an old friend of Mirko’s, mixed the recordings. He apparently accepted a couple of bottles of Clynelish Scotch whisky for his work. Mirko took care of the artwork.
The finished demo has six tracks: “Fuck Off”, “Vandal State”, “Inside My Head”, “We See You”, “Nightkrawler” and “Rotting Streets”. They range from thirty-two seconds to a minute and a half, with the whole recording over almost as soon as it starts. The directness is exactly what the members were looking for.
The reference points are pretty clear, and the band aren’t trying to disguise them. There’s a strong early-2000s hardcore pull, with the shorter, faster approach associated with bands like Right Brigade, Panic, Hands Tied and The First Step. Alwin’s lyrics bring the same anger at social injustice and inequality that has stayed with him since his earliest years in hardcore.
The line attached to the demo, “No gimmicks. No hype. No bullshit”, can easily sound like a complaint about modern promotion, social media or the pressure on small bands to constantly market themselves. Mirko had something simpler in mind.
“To each their own, but this is actually more about the style of hardcore on our demo. Mass Confusion is not about reinventing any wheels, it’s just a couple of hardcore songs with inspiration taken liberally from the early 2000s and sometimes that’s gotta be enough.”
He remembers the little competitions that came with being young and heavily involved in hardcore, too. Who had the coolest band, who owned the rarest records, who had the best vintage shirt. There’s a lot less interest in any of that now.
“There’s no pressure anymore to be the coolest band or have the most vintage Chain of Strength shirt or something, let’s just make something we think is cool and kind of missing from hc nowadays.”
Back when these guys first got involved, the Netherlands was small enough that travelling to shows in other cities meant constantly running into familiar people. Every local scene had its own regulars, but those groups were connected by the same gigs, labels and friendships.
“The Netherlands is not that big, we all used to travel all over the country for shows so everybody kind of knew everybody in the scene. It’s cool that people from back then are still connected and just do bands when they feel like it.”
That was a big part of the attraction for Niels as well. Getting in the car to see a band often meant spending the evening catching up with people he hadn’t seen for a while and having a few beers. The bands mattered, but so did everything happening around the gig.
Alwin has known Niels for more than twenty-five years. He’s known Arjan for a similarly long time, and met Mirko while he was still living in Utrecht. They don’t get together very often these days, although they’ve stayed in touch through hardcore.
Alwin now lives in Amsterdam and still goes to shows regularly. Quite often, he goes alone. Many of his old friends have stopped attending gigs, and there aren’t as many familiar faces around as there used to be.
Strangely enough, he’s listening to more hardcore himself than he was ten years ago.
Social media have helped today’s scene grow, giving bands access to people who might never have found them twenty years ago. Alwin can see the benefits, although he also misses the surprise of discovering something without already knowing everything about it. There was a certain excitement in turning up at a gig with very little idea of what you were about to hear.
Mirko has noticed a similar change in his own experience. Some of the excitement of those first years has inevitably worn off, but the friendships and the habit of getting involved have stuck around.
“Although some of the wonder and newness of those first years has worn off, hardcore is still a place I feel very much at home at.”
He still makes zines, puts on shows and starts bands when he wants to. Seeing how different the atmosphere can be at a black metal gig has also reminded him how much he enjoys the energy of a good hardcore show and the way people get involved in making things happen.
“That whole DIY attitude is fantastic and we should not take this for granted.”
The effect of hardcore on the members goes well beyond the gigs they attended. Mirko credits the music with getting him interested in critical thinking about politics and social issues, and with making him more conscious of his everyday choices. He still remembers Ray Cappo’s old line about paying attention to “what I put in my mouth, my eyes and my ears”.
For Alwin, the records and lyrics he grew up with had an even longer-lasting effect. They taught him to question what was happening around him and pay attention to inequality and oppression. A lot of those problems have since become subjects of much wider public debate, although he remembers thinking about them when he was young.
“What strikes me these days is how people are only now starting to get worked up about things that have seemed completely obvious to me for years. Sometimes I find it difficult to understand why certain issues are suddenly becoming a concern when, to me, they’ve always been clear.”
He’s spent much of his life looking at politics and society through ideas he first encountered in hardcore lyrics. The problems he worried about back then haven’t disappeared, and he’s sometimes surprised by how many people seem to have only recently noticed them.
“I’ve always seen the world as a deeply messed-up place, marked by inequality and oppression. To me, none of that is new. The world has been like this for a very long time.”
He also sees something familiar in the way many of his old friends think about the world. They might have stopped going to hardcore shows, but those early experiences still affect their views.
“I think a lot of that comes from the lyrics I used to read and the music I listened to when I was younger. Those things shaped the way I look at the world, and they’ve stayed with me over the years.”
That’s quite a lot to carry away from years spent listening to punk records, driving across the country and hanging around at gigs. Alwin has a simpler way of putting it.
“In that sense, hardcore has never really left me. It’s become part of the way I think and the way I see the world.”
Mass Confusion also seem comfortable with the fact that making music doesn’t have to occupy every spare minute of their lives anymore. The members live some distance apart, with families, work and other responsibilities to manage. They’ve made the demo, they’re happy with it and they’ll play gigs when they can.
A show in Dordrecht is planned for February 2027, although there’s no big touring schedule attached to the project.
They originally intended to release the demo themselves. Mirko was already dealing with the cassette duplication paperwork when Light The Fuse Records and Trilob Records offered to put it out as a small physical run. The labels took care of the packaging, including individually spray-painted tapes.
Mirko was happy to have somebody handle the release. As for choosing cassette, he reckons there’s only one correct answer.
“Why cassettes? Because cassettes are the only way to go for a physical demo release, no matter whether you own a tapedeck or not. If you disagree then you better get out of hardcore, hejo!”
They made fifty copies. Alwin is perfectly happy with that number, and with the thought of playing a few gigs without trying to build a massive operation around the band.
“We did this deliberately. I don’t think we ever planned on playing a lot of shows, and we actually like the fact that there isn’t going to be too much fuss or attention around it. Especially at a time when you can look up and listen to pretty much everything.”
“Demo 2026” came out on 31 August 2026 through Light The Fuse Records and Trilob Records. All six songs are available digitally through Bandcamp, with the physical release limited to fifty cassettes.
