Best Hardcore of 2022

It's been a huge year for hardcore, with more eyes on the genre than ever, so much creativity happening without the genre, and a slew of amazing new records. To go along with our list of 20 great hardcore releases from 2022, I teamed with two of my current favorite music critics that have been covering the hell out of hardcore all year, Eli Enis (Revolver, Endless Scroll) and Hugo Reyes (who writes the hardcore column Step 2 Rhythm over at The Alternative and whose writing can also be found on his Medium), to discuss and debate the best hardcore releases of 2022 on the latest episode of the BrooklynVegan podcast. Each of us ran down our lists of our personal top five hardcore releases of the year, and we discussed a few other faves after that. We also dove into some "hardcore-adjacent" faves and debated a bit about what truly counts as hardcore. There were a few releases that all three of us had on our lists, but a good amount of differences between the lists too. Between the three of us, we touched on everything from the more melodic alt-rock-leaning stuff to different varieties of straightedge to thrashy NYHC to heavy rapcore and plenty of other stuff in between. Music featured: Speed - "Not That Nice" End It - "New Wage Slavery"