In 2020, a Manila security guard named Alchie Paray took hostages. He had been mistreated by his security agency, his grievances ignored, and the legal and labor laws meant to protect him were not moving. That case sits underneath “Retributor“, the second track on Figure Out’s new EP “Through The Tides“, out April 20 on Still Ill Records.
It is one of several real-life pressure points the Manila straight edge band point to when explaining how the songs on this record came together.
“Retributor talks about a man who is fed up by the slow legal system. Justice delayed is justice denied,” the band explain. “He took matters into his own hands because his agency didn’t listen to his grievances, and the legal / labor laws did not help him. There are many cases similar to Alchie Paray when a person is pushed to their limits by the lack of support and options available for them from the legal institutions that are supposedly helping them.”
The lyric carrying that thought is one of the EP’s sharpest: “When system keeps failing the man, the gavel, silenced by the axeman.”
“Class War” picks up the same thread from a wider angle. The band frame it as the inevitable next step in a society where wage caps, election lobbying and missing flood-control funds are the daily texture.
“Time and time, it’s capital’s interest against labor’s welfare,” they say. “Minimum wage capped at a very unlivable level just to protect the profits and CEO and shareholder bonuses. Lobbyists putting money on election campaigns so they can profit from laws that benefit no one but themselves. Flood control project kickbacks. It’s all a collective experience Filipinos are experiencing.”
“Praxis“, the EP’s shortest track at 1:27, answers that frustration with a directive borrowed from socialist and anarchist theory: stop talking, go out and do something about it. “It’s all words until you go out and make your voice heard by the working class knee deep in oppression.”
The centrepiece guest feature on “Through The Tides” is “Test Of Time” with Pat Flynn of Have Heart and Fiddlehead. The band met him in person when Fiddlehead played Manila in August 2023, though Have Heart’s 2009 Manila show was already part of the scene’s mythology (Figure Out missed it).
“We were able to hang out with him, and solidified that connection by being constantly keeping in touch,” they say.
The song itself critiques comfortable history. “We wrote ‘Test Of Time’ as a critic of people choosing reading comfortable history rather than tacking painful points from the past. The Marcos dictatorship, the liberal politics that followed, or to relate to the west, the slave trade and the evils of colonialism.
All these things happened and by not talking about it, just because it feels uncomfortable, opens the gate for the oppressive party to repeat it.” Pat Flynn’s day job as a history professor in the US is what put him at the top of the band’s wish list. “He certainly would agree to the song’s broad message of ‘learn history or relive it.'”
That theme of revisionism is one Figure Out push back against in the day-to-day. They name the Marcos and Duterte regimes as the source.
“Saying nonsense stuff like the Martial Law era being the golden era of the Philippines, or that the Drug War has been effective in eradicating the crime problem. Blatant lies force fed to the hard working wage earners who have limited time to do research.” Their answer is repetition. “We push back against it by always talking about it, at shows, on social media, and on every day talk. Now we have the new generation of kids not buying the government’s narrative, actively pushing for the truth.”
The other two guest spots map onto Figure Out’s network in different directions. Riz of Eskrima, the all-Filipino hardcore band based in Canada, lands on “Retributor“.
The connection traces back to Ace (Red Death, 9million, Pure Disgust), who visited Manila around 2017 or 2018 and ended up at his first hardcore show in the motherland after the band brought him out.
“I think it’s the Filipino connection and the shared love for Lockin’ Out releases bonded us,” they say. When Eskrima formed, their first show included a Mental cover.
“My partner loves Mental,” the band note, on the small detail that sealed the friendship. Kyo of Monument X, the Southeast Asian straight edge band whose name is impossible to leave out of any conversation about edge in the region, ended up on “Slice Through” after Figure Out caught their set when Clean Slate played the first Concrete Jungle Fest. “Blown away by the energy and the clear straight edge message and we just thought to ourselves we have to get him on our upcoming song about straight edge.”
“Slice Through” itself works as a thesis on what straight edge does and doesn’t have to be: “Not a badge, not a crown. Like a sword, I slice throughโฆ Not to fit a mold, not to join a trend, not to tail a crowd, but because it’s right for me.” That message lands differently in a country where, as Figure Out put it, “the Philippines has a very strong drinking culture, and straight edge has always been against the norm.”
The early Pinoy edge bands, FEUD, Half the Battle, and STAID, were active across the 2000s and 2010s, often in a scene where edge kids got made fun of just for claiming it. The current count of active straight edge bands carrying the message in Manila is two: Figure Out and Shockpoint, who share members.
The wider scene around them has changed shape since the pandemic. “Back then we got shows once a month, then touring bands once or twice a year, but now we get two touring bands per month, and multiple weekend local shows.”
The band trace the ecosystem out in detail. In Manila, Still Ill Records and Brigad3 handle records and shows, and Sleeping Boy Collective covers the hardcore-adjacent and emo end.
Outside the capital, every region has its own movers: Pag-Asa Crew, DIY or Die and New Misery in Cavite, Hardcore Hope in Batangas, Hostile Youth in Cebu, Sweet Nothings and BCHC in Bacolod, Not Very Noise and More To Life in Baguio, Notorious Scene in Pampanga, 2200 Crew in Olongapo, 049 Hardcore and Fist By Fist in Laguna.
“We’re an archipelago, and we have several pocket scenes outside the capital Manila who are doing their own thing, but we’re connected, for when let’s say a band from Cebu plays Manila, or Manila bands tour Visayas and Mindanao, and of course, on social media which has been a big help in getting these pocket scenes connected.”
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Still Ill Records, the label putting “Through The Tides” on a 7″, traces back to the tail ends of the now-defunct but influential Take4Collective. It was founded by OGs of the scene from FEUD and Bystorm, with a stated commitment to pressing Pilipinas Hardcore on physical media.
The label has put out three Pilipinas Hardcore Compilations, framed by the band as their answer to America’s Hardcore Comp, alongside vinyl releases for Clean Slate, Value Lasts, Veils, Bystorm, Prayer of Endurance, Badmouth, Gibraltar, Repetition, Barred, and others. “Through The Tides” lands inside that ongoing project.
The record runs short, seven tracks across roughly fifteen minutes, with cover art by Fr3lan and mixing and mastering by Anthony Burke at Burke’s Dungeon. “Inside Out”, track six, is the only piece on the EP that turns the lens away from systems and onto the self. “Only you can save yourself, from yourself.”
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