There’s something unusually patient about releasing music that was written nearly three decades ago.
Reagnition’s self-titled 12″ on Refuse Records is the completion of unfinished business from 1996, when these compositions were meant to become the second album for Warsaw hardcore band Agni Hotra. They never made it to tape back then. Almost 25 years later, the material resurfaced, got reworked, and finally saw a studio.
The lineup pulls from three cities—Warsaw, Kraków, Stockholm—and reads like a hardcore family tree. Jarosław Składanek (Agni Hotra, Cymeon X, Kto Ukradł Ciastka) on bass, Piotr Grabiński (Sunrise, Iron To Gold, Last Item) and Daniel Kryj (Sunrise) on guitars, Arek Lerch (Sunrise, Czerń) on drums.
The missing piece was vocals, filled by Art Jagódka (After Laughter), who tracked his parts at Waiting Room Studio in May 2024. Everything else went down at Mustache Ministry Studio.
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“As Reagnition, we realized material composed in 1996, which was supposed to be the second album of Agni Hotra, but it was never recorded at that time,” Składanek explains. “The songs were refreshed and rearranged. New guitar parts were added, and vocals filled the missing element in this story.”
They played their first show in March 2025 at the Refuse Records Showcase in Warsaw, now pared down to a four-piece. Geography doesn’t seem to slow them down—scattered between three cities hasn’t stopped them from booking more dates.
Składanek has another project running parallel to the band. He’s spent the last ten months working on a book about Straight Edge in Poland, envisioned as a large-format art book documenting 40 years of the scene.
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“The first flyer on this topic was created in 1985,” he says. “To this day, over fifty hardcore punk bands in Poland identified with this idea.” The book will cover bands, distros, labels, and cultural artifacts like X watches, starting with the first Polish Straight Edge band, Ustawa o Młodzieży. Składanek has been Straight Edge since the early ’90s and runs Kultura Gniewu, a comics publishing house he’s operated for 25 years. He’s also a graphic designer who creates album covers and concert posters. The artwork for Reagnition’s release, “Matrice,” was done by Michał Powałka.
The riffs hit clean and separated, each one pulling you somewhere without trying too hard. There’s metal in the tone, vocals that go from straight-ahead to stacked, tension that builds up then backs off into sections that could almost be grunge if they weren’t so committed to staying hardcore. It’s physical music with feeling behind it, locked in tight. You can throw it on during a walk, in the car, at a show—it holds up wherever you take it.
For anyone raised on ’90s hardcore or missing that sound in the current Polish scene, this record delivers exactly what it promises. Made by people who helped shape that era and continue contributing now, the band’s history speaks for itself.
After decades of projects that have become part of Polish hardcore history, quality is expected. The record meets that standard without pretense.
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