Three years is a long time to say nothing when your country is falling apart around you. Malang metallic hardcore quartet Noose Bound didn’t plan it that way – the hiatus just happened. “All of us felt kind of worn out with Noose Bound’s routine with all the shows and tours, so we agreed to take a break for a while,” they say. Everyone had jobs. Some explored other projects. Nobody’s a full-time musician. “Long story short, time flies, and the plan ‘break for a while’ ends up being ‘3 years of absence.'”
What they came back with is “In Silence / I Would Die,” a maxi single built as two separate tracks merged into one continuous piece — released through Brightside Records, a Malang-based hardcore punk label run by younger heads in the local scene: Dani from Masquerade, Dakara from Otwofive, and Gama from Keep It Real. The label has been putting out stuff from rising Malang and East Java bands like Otwofive, Seek & Destroy, and Rulls out of Mojokerto. The choice to work with Brightside wasn’t just practical — the band says the label’s name felt like it matched the direction the new lyrics were heading.
The lineup is the same as their 2022 debut LP “To The Same End“: Rio on drums, Devrizal and Icang on guitars, and Bagas on vocals. But the sound has shifted. Noose Bound were always a metallic hardcore band and still are, but this time they’ve let black metal bleed into certain sections, worked in clean vocals, dynamic parts, and pattern changes they’d never tried before. They point to 90s metallic hardcore as the foundation — All Out War’s “Condemned To Suffer,” Kickback’s “No Surrender,” Integrity’s “Howling” and “The Nightmare Shall Consume” — while the clean vocal approach pulls from Deftones and Vision Of Disorder territory.
Longer-running influences like Vein.fm, Code Orange, Varials, and Loathe fed into the shift too. “Our consideration for including new elements like clean vocals, dynamic parts, and pattern rotations we’ve never tried before is because each of us felt the desire to explore further as musicians,” the band says.
They have it as a natural consequence of those three years away. “We still feel like we’re a deeply rooted hardcore band, but as musicians, we always want to be better than before and beyond any label.” They cite Refused breaking the boundaries of hardcore with “The Shape Of Punk To Come” in the 90s, and bands like Integrity and Kickback injecting black metal into their later records. “We want to be a band that listens to many, inspired by many without any barrier, and then makes its own sound and style out of it.”
The single works as two halves of the same argument. “In Silence” is the first part — chaotic, heavy, and dark. It’s Noose Bound venting about what it feels like to be a civilian and middle-class worker in Indonesia right now. They don’t keep it vague. The targets are specific: a tone-deaf government, corrupt and scandalous politicians, deadly disasters caused by political incompetence, and the repressive response of police and military against civilians. They reference the Jakarta demonstration protests where Affan Kurniawan, one of the protesters, was killed by police, along with other cases where people lost their lives at the hands of authorities. They also call out president Prabowo Subianto’s decision to join Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” — “which doesn’t make sense to us at all.” Corruption, arrogance, and a total lack of empathy are what they describe as the fuel behind “In Silence.” There’s a local angle too — they reference a stabbing incident involving a member of the Malang hardcore scene.
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“The idea is basically we want to release a song that makes our listener get the experience of what we felt about our country, Indonesia,” they say. “The hectics, the frustrations, the madness, and the rage with everything that happened around us, especially in a political aspect. As we grew older and wrote the song, our views shifted into the realization that everything around us revolved around politics, and we agreed to voice what’s wrong with it and protest through this song.”
“I Would Die” is the second half — heavier breakdowns but with a more anthemic feel. Where “In Silence” is the anger, “I Would Die” is the reason behind it. The line “for those I love, I would die to sacrifice” is the core of it: devotion to the people and things worth defending even when everything described in the first part is pushing back against you. “We want to tell the listener the reason behind why we did it and challenge everyone who stands in the way,” the band says. “For us, it’s for a better future for everything we truly love: our families and friends, our love for the place we were born, and our passion for music.”
That shift in purpose — from inward-facing despair to something more directed and responsible — didn’t come from nowhere.
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Noose Bound formed in late 2017. Early on, Bagas wrote about the darkest corners of human experience: anger, pain, despair, regret, fear, loss, addiction, suicidal themes. It was how they set themselves apart from peers in the Malang scene at the time.
Their 2018 single “Paint Me Red” was a visualization of hopelessness and the kind of morally unacceptable decisions it can lead to — the lyric video, made with Batu-based production house Restless Project and director of photography Brama Bagaskara, followed Bagas through a dark hallway searching for light. The debut LP “To The Same End” carried those same themes forward.
Then in early 2022, after the album was done, a friend of the band in another group took his own life by hanging himself. “After the incident, our vocalist felt some kind of guilt over what he had written and promised to write better,” the band says. The model they looked to was Hatebreed — a band with a name that sounds threatening but whose lyrics are built around perseverance and getting through it. They also drew from the positive messaging of Indecision and the Krishna Consciousness-influenced Cro-Mags. The idea was to keep writing about anger and pain but give it a sense of purpose — not nihilism for its own sake.
The other reason is more personal. Bagas is a father now. His daughter is seven and she’s started asking about everything.
“I realized those older lyrics could be read by anyone and could indirectly impact their lives,” he says. “As a father to a growing daughter, I want to ‘redeem’ that by writing lyrics that remain honest as a characteristic of the band, but point toward a brighter direction. I hope that when my daughter reads them one day, she understands her father was constantly trying to grow into a better person. That’s the thought process behind ‘I Would Die.'”
They distinguish themselves from the nihilism of early hardcore and metal touchstones — Black Flag’s “Nervous Breakdown,” Black Sabbath’s “Behind The Wall Of Sleep,” and the thematic territory explored by the late Ivan Scumbag of Indonesian legends Burgerkill. The anger is still there, but the delivery has become more responsible.
Meanwhile, the Malang scene kept moving while Noose Bound were away. “We’re glad to see that a lot of young bands from our hometown came into the spotlight by doing their things,” they say. The regeneration has been strong — young bands releasing records through DAZE, some doing international tours and connecting with the global hardcore community. Members help each other across bands. “We think all of us are moving into the same goal: to put Malang’s name on the map, making our hometown proud and our voices heard.”
But there’s a darker side too, and they don’t dodge it. “Sadly with all those accomplishments, there were also some unfortunate events where some of the hardcore kids in our city turned into a bunch of criminals by pickpocketing in the gig and acting tough, beating up others in the pit, and then some ended up in jail for assaulting another kid with a blade outside the venue, which later made it into national news.” They acknowledge it plainly: “There’s an ugly part in it, but as a whole ecosystem, we could say we’re moving into the right direction at the moment.”
The scene has also become more accessible to mainstream audiences, which they see as a double-edged thing. “It’s still pretty much alive and well, but we still have some homework to do, like educating our new audiences. They need to learn to not just follow trends; we hope that if they’re truly into it, then they will dig deeper about it.”
As for what’s next — Noose Bound are preparing a comeback show in Malang and working on a bigger release after this single. “We’re going to push ourselves to the limit, and we’re not afraid to break more boundaries. We might be faced with a lot of obstacles or criticism along the way, but we’re ready for it and open to any discussions needed. We’re moving towards a new phase now, hopefully a better one, but still Noose Bound.”
