While Houston has always maintained a steady roster of hardcore and punk bands to be proud of, there has undoubtedly been a resurgence in the past couple years. The scene now boasts a growing scene of young, interconnected hardcore acts, which have been working to foster a tight community of diverse yet like-minded individuals. On the forefront of that has been Dress Code, an energetic and abrasive young band of five who started playing together in early 2013 and released their swift but brutal demo on cassette this past fall on Schizoid Unit Records.
The self-titled demo contains five songs of heavy, powerful hardcore that hits like a brick to the face. Energetic, forceful and meaningful, the release is one of the stronger to come out of Houston in the past year. Birthed out of the Houston hardcore scene, the songs are about issues going on within it. On standout "I Disagree," the song ends with vocalist Brandon Mahler shouting, "We don't have to get along."
"I feel like with hardcore there a lot of things that separate it," Mahler says. "I feel like we should have unity but it's not going to be there all the time. There are people in hardcore you're not going to agree with. We don't have to get along. You can just be here and it can be cool. Everyone has different issues and things they're trying to get away from."
Other songs on the EP, like the frenzied "12," find the band taking a hard stance on those who want to police the scene. The members of Dress Code believe in having an inclusive environment, and wrote the song as a diatribe for those who throw around the term "PC" as an insult.
"PC is just a pejorative term people throw out when they get upset that you get upset that they say something offensive," says drummer Carson Wilcox.
"That's one of my biggest issues right now," Mahler offers. "If you get mad at someone for using a derogatory slur, they just call you 'PC.' If I'm not comfortable with it, I'm sure there's someone else who isn't either. People do that trying to be edgy, and it's not cool."
"None of us fuck with shit like that," says bassist Daniel Ortuno. "No one fucks with racism or homophobia."
"If you come to a show and do that, you get shut down," adds guitarist Jacob Duarte.
The five members of the young band have all known each other since high school. Three of them -- Duarte, Wilcox, and Esteban Rubio -- played in an emo-influenced band named Chemistry, but always felt drawn to the hardcore scene. During practice they worked on recordings of what would become Dress Code and sent them over the phone to Mahler, who would become their vocalist. Inspired by their friends in Back to Back, the four of them, with the later addition of Ortuno, started Dress Code to fill a gap in the Houston scene.
"When Dress Code started, the hardcore scene was in this weird, transitional place where there weren't really a lot of hardcore bands," says Rubio. "There were indie and punk shows that the hardcore kids would go out to, but no hardcore shows,"
Seminal Houston bands like Iron Age and On My Side were breaking up, playing less, or aging out of the scene. A new crop of hardcore kids was anxious for more shows, only to find the scene stagnant or dwindling. Out of that came Back to Back, a younger, intense band that pioneered the way for the new wave of hardcore and punk bands popping up in the city.
"We have Back to Back to thank for being a band," agrees Duarte.
Dress Code's first demo was recorded by Back to Back drummer JJ Foster as a school project for the Art Institute, and Mahler credits that group's bassist Hank Doyle for naming them. Alongside Back to Back, Dress Code has been working the past few years to build up the hardcore scene to where hardcore shows only appeared every couple months, they're now popping up bi-weekly.
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