Southern California hardcore crew ’92 have brought an MMA fighter and a chess game into the video for “Survivor“, their latest collaboration with Lancaster rapper Joesnapped. There are bruises, exhaustion and two musicians sitting across a board, trying to think several moves ahead. For a band that have spent the past two years writing about betrayal, isolation, grief and getting through some pretty difficult shit, it makes sense.
Rooted in the hardcore scenes of Lancaster and Long Beach, ’92 have always had one foot in 90s West Coast hip-hop. Their music carries that crossover through its grooves, bass-driven funk and approach to storytelling, with the aggression and physical energy of hardcore still firmly in place. They have been pushing that combination since their self-titled debut in 2024, and “Survivor” brings an old friend from the Antelope Valley hip-hop scene into the picture.
“Survivor” is the fifth and final song in “Shattered Garden”, a run of releases that ’92 recorded back in 2024 but whose meaning kept changing as life caught up with the band. The single arrived on 30 October 2026. Today, we’re premiering its accompanying video, directed by Mitchell Lujan, also known as Vudaje, alongside a much longer look at what happened during those two years.
Watch the exclusive video premiere below.
The band filmed at Matador Training in North Hollywood, a gym run by Marcos “El Matador” Bonilla, a retired professional MMA fighter who also has connections to hardcore through Cinfuegos and Pain Spiral. Fighter Joseph Muñoz appears in the video, putting in the sort of work where the exhaustion is as much a part of the experience as the physical competition.
There’s a fairly simple idea behind those scenes. When somebody comes out of a fight bruised and beaten, you can usually tell they’ve been through something difficult. What you can’t necessarily tell is whether they won. ’92 wanted to look at survival from that angle, including what somebody takes away from losing.
The band wanted the video to show that getting through a fight can mean something even when you’ve lost it.
“We wanted people to see the effort behind perseverance, not just the celebration that comes afterward,” the band explain.
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Then there’s the chess game between vocalist Jabril “Brillo” Ward and Joesnapped. It gives the video another way to talk about endurance, through patience, thinking ahead, recognising patterns and knowing when to make a sacrifice. Joe’s children play chess, so the game already had a personal connection for him. The band also liked the visual symmetry of placing the two musicians opposite each other.
And, as they readily admit, they thought it would make for a cool shot.
Director Mitchell Lujan brought those ideas together for what ’92 describe as their second documented music video. Erol “Rollie” Ulug engineered, mixed and mastered the song, while the single’s artwork was created by @malo.vida.
The whole thing started a couple of years before anyone saw the video. ’92 recorded five songs with Rollie in 2024, intending to release them separately. Each had its own musical character, and there wasn’t initially a plan to group them into one larger story.
“We recorded all five songs with Rollie back in 2024, and originally, the plan was to release them individually as singles. Each song had its own sound, its own identity, and we wanted to give each one the opportunity to stand on its own.”
After “Cannibal” and “Shattered Garden” came out, the band began seeing connections between the songs. The writing had been shaped by things happening around them, from personal relationships to the political problems they had been talking about since the band’s beginnings. As the releases continued, their lives kept changing. Some of the lyrics became much closer to home than anyone had expected.
“Cannibal” was the first example.
It’s a song about betrayal by somebody you trust, with the title referring to people who turn on their own friends or community when there’s something to gain. The band initially wrote about that behaviour in fairly general terms. Later, a situation within ’92 itself made the lyrics uncomfortable in a much more immediate way.
Someone close to the band had to leave after things came to light that went against their values. The musicians have chosen to keep the details private, and there’s no reason to turn that into gossip. They do acknowledge how much the experience changed the way they heard “Cannibal”.
Words about somebody exploiting the people closest to them had suddenly become personal.
“Shattered Garden” went through a different change. The song was originally written as a love letter to friends and family going through heartbreak, the end of relationships and the feeling of losing somebody important. As the band watched immigration enforcement affect Latino communities in the United States, those same words began to bring up families facing separation, displacement and the possibility of losing their homes.
For ’92, the song now reaches into questions about who gets to feel secure in a place they’ve spent their entire lives calling home. They also see an uncomfortable contradiction in American arguments about land and belonging when set against the country’s own history.
“The lyrics didn’t change. Our understanding of them did.”
It’s a pretty good example of how ’92 have been living with these songs. The recordings stayed where they were, but the people who made them were going through experiences that kept changing what they heard.
By “Pariah”, the band were writing about what happens when society decides somebody doesn’t belong. The song deals with the anger that comes from being rejected, stripped of a sense of identity and pushed into isolation. Its central character starts accepting the labels being thrown at them, even the ugliest ones.
“If the world wants to label us outcasts, monsters, or people who don’t belong, then maybe we’ll embrace that identity. Maybe we’ll become exactly what they think we are. Maybe we’ll make that darkness our home.”
There is something deeply uncomfortable about that position, and ’92 know it. The band recognise the temptation to make an identity out of being rejected, to get used to difficult circumstances because fighting them has become exhausting.
“Sometimes survival doesn’t look like overcoming something. Sometimes it looks like adapting to the circumstances you’ve been thrown into, even when those circumstances are ugly.”
That was where the story stood when the band were making their way towards the final song. “Survivor” follows somebody who has been through that experience and is beginning to find a way forward. The scars remain, and the people involved have changed. The band wanted to recognise those marks as part of a person’s history, including the strength that gets passed through families and generations.
They were also thinking about people fighting through cancer, depression, anxiety, addiction and other struggles that might be completely invisible to everyone around them. “Survivor” is dedicated to those people as well.
There is plenty of anger in this band’s music. There’s also a willingness to talk about difficult emotions without trying to toughen them up for hardcore’s sake. Frankly, the scene could do with more of that.
And nowhere in the “Shattered Garden” story does that come across more personally than on the fourth song, “’92 Till Infinity“.
We covered the single in April, when Brillo spoke at length about his childhood friend Gillan, who died towards the end of 2024. Gillan was born in 1992, the same year that gives the band its name, and his death changed what the song meant to the people playing it.
Brillo and Gillan grew up together in Lancaster. They went to high school together, went to prom together as friends, and spent their younger years in the same circle. Gillan helped Brillo choose his first car. A lot of their time revolved around his house, where friends would work on cars, watch films, go to parties or just hang out. Sometimes they’d turn up there even when Gillan wasn’t home.
Gillan was close to guitarist Cole as well. He supported the local hardcore scene by simply being around, showing up to gigs, standing up front and getting involved, even when he didn’t know the words.
“He valued friendship a lot and was always someone trying to keep people connected,” Brillo told us earlier this year.
When Gillan died, the loss took time to settle in. The group of friends had grown older and gone in different directions, but they were still connected by those years in Lancaster. Brillo remembered how much of their friendship had been built around humour, quoting films and joking about things, even during difficult periods.
The song had originally been a declaration that ’92 would keep going, regardless of changes in the lineup or the band’s circumstances. After Gillan’s death, it became a dedication to him and his family.
What had started as a promise about the band’s future now carried the memory of somebody who had helped shape Brillo’s life long before ’92 existed.
“Looking back on it, more than anything it just makes me think about being there for your friends while you can. Life moves fast, people go different directions, and you don’t always realize what you had until it’s different or gone.”
The song had also been changing musically. ’92 had always been influenced by funk and hip-hop, but bassist Quinn pushed those elements further on “’92 Till Infinity“. The band gave the bass more room and let the groove become a bigger part of the song.
Brillo had previously told us that Quinn’s playing convinced everyone to open things up. The group had spent years pulling from hardcore and 90s hip-hop, and this was one of the first songs where they felt comfortable letting the funk side come through without second-guessing it.
They had been playing “’92 Till Infinity” live since around December 2025, learning which parts worked with the crowd and finding new meaning in the song as they performed it. There was a personal dedication behind the title, but they still wanted the music to have the physical, communal feel of a hardcore show.
That connection between hardcore and hip-hop also explains how Joesnapped ended up on “Survivor”.
Joe comes from Lancaster, where Brillo and Cole grew up, and he’s been connected to the Antelope Valley music community for years.
Back in June 2022, we included him in our Antelope Valley hardcore and punk scene report, which featured contributions from Kantu Culture.
At the time, Joe had released “Lyrical Dope Man” through Kantu Culture and was already finding his way into local punk and hardcore shows. His music sat comfortably alongside the wider range of artists emerging from the desert communities north of Los Angeles, where the connection between people mattered as much as the differences between the genres they played.
Brillo and Joe had known each other for several years. The band watched Joe grow as a writer, producer and performer, and they had been talking about making something together since the early days of ’92.
“One of the things we’ve always loved about hardcore is how much it shares with hip-hop.”
Both came out of communities that used music to speak about things people were angry about, struggling with or being ignored over. West Coast hip-hop has always been a big part of ’92’s identity, including the way they present themselves and approach their lyrics. They had already played around with funk and groove within their hardcore songs, so bringing Joe into “Survivor” came out of a friendship and a shared musical background.
“To us, it feels like two artists from the same community, who have different musical backgrounds but share a lot of the same influences and experiences, finally coming together to make something.”
There have been plenty of changes outside the songs, too. ’92 have gone through lineup shifts and difficult decisions, and Brillo admits that the band have become more thoughtful about how they operate together. They’re still determined to prove themselves, although they’ve stopped measuring everything by whether somebody else understands what they’re doing.
That includes the music, artwork, videos, live shows and the people they choose to work with. They want the different parts of ’92 to belong together, with a clear connection to the communities they came from.
The band’s geography helps explain some of that. Lancaster and the Antelope Valley have their own hardcore history, including periods when local venues disappeared and musicians had few places to play. Brillo has been encouraged by the younger bands bringing things back and by how openly they’ve accepted ’92’s less traditional approach.
Long Beach has a different history, with a more established hardcore community and its own deep connections to hip-hop. Being involved in both places has given ’92 room to develop without feeling they have to follow one particular version of hardcore.
Politically, the band remain outspoken. Their view of American politics is deeply sceptical of both major parties, and their concerns about immigration enforcement and the treatment of vulnerable communities have become increasingly personal.
“We don’t believe that simply changing the color of somebody’s tie changes the fundamental problems within the systems we’re living under.”
They want to keep asking uncomfortable questions about the people in power and what happens to communities left dealing with the consequences of political decisions. For them, that has always belonged in hardcore.
It’s also one of the things they intend to carry into whatever comes next. The band aren’t revealing specific release plans yet, although they’re making it clear that their interests reach beyond a single approach to heavy music.
Hip-hop remains central, with funk, jazz and blues all part of what they listen to and draw from. ’92 have no interest in limiting hardcore to one guitar sound, one vocal style or one particular period of the genre’s history. The next recordings may take some of those interests further.
“There’s a tendency sometimes to define hardcore by a particular style of guitar playing, a particular type of vocal delivery, or a particular period in its history.”
They have spent the “Shattered Garden” years making songs about some difficult experiences, then watching those songs change alongside their friendships and lives. The final video gives them room to talk about something hopeful without pretending those experiences can simply be left behind.
The MMA footage and the chess match both come back to the same belief. Losing can teach you something. Getting hurt changes how you approach the next fight. Some things take patience, others take everything you’ve got just to get through the day.
“You don’t have to win every battle to be a survivor.”
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