Hardcore punks Soul Glo: ‘The real character of America is sheer apathy’
In a house a mile or so north of Philadelphia City Hall, sitting around a table strewn with bags of weed and a hiphop video paused on the TV, Soul Glo are contemplating disaster. The hardcore band are about to release their first full-length album, having signed at last to a big label, Epitaph, and that album – Diaspora Problems – is as exciting, dynamic and furious an album as you could hope for, but the wheels are already coming off.
A couple of weeks earlier, they were a quartet: singer Pierce Jordan, bassist GG Guerra, drummer TJ Stevenson (the only white member of the band) and guitarist Ruben Polo. Then Polo released a statement saying he had been accused by his ex-boyfriend of rape by deception: securing consent by not admitting that he was in another relationship. The statement also said the ex had been telling others that Polo had admitted raping him. Polo admitted the deception, denied the rape, and insisted he was “working through his actions”. Either way, he is no longer part of Soul Glo.
The remaining three are horrified at the accusations and empathic towards the accuser, but despair at having been hobbled. “It is kind of hard to see a vast future without a very predominant member of our group,” Guerra says, softly. “And though that hurts me inside, in a lot of different ways, I just don’t know if, personally, I can go on this trajectory – being signed to Epitaph, doing all this shit – for a future that I don’t know anything about. Hopefully in time, our future is figured out more among ourselves. Right now, I just don’t know.”
If they end up doing nothing else, they have made an extraordinary record – hardcore punk, but not limited to its brutal template – that doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects. “I would say the main themes in my writing are self-analysis, mental illness, racism, interpersonal violence, state violence, abuse, capitalism – living under it,” Jordan says, between puffs on a carefully rolled blunt. “The easiest and quickest thing to say would be black life, but I would have to continue saying things. The other themes are love and how difficult it is to exist as a person who wants to continue being a loving person after having been traumatised.”
Jordan grew up in small-town Maryland, where being a black kid into heavy music made him an anomaly to his white peers. “There was a point in middle school and high school – this is not an exaggeration – where every single day someone would say something to the effect of, ‘You’re the whitest black person I’ve ever met,’ or, ‘You’re an Oreo’: black on the outside, white on the inside. Or: ‘You want to be white because you like rock music.’ They’d say: ‘I don’t mean it as a negative thing – I actually like it about you.’ Literally every day, from classmates, from teachers, every fucking day. When I think about all the things in my life that have happened to me that have made me a little bit crazy, I feel like I’ve gotten away from how specific that experience was. That experience was formative to me, probably more formative than any music I could have ever heard.”
“I had a similar experience,” Guerra says. “I had a lot of black and brown people coming up to me saying: ‘You’re a faggot because you like [post-hardcore band] the Blood Brothers.’ It was straight up malicious.”
Though none of the trio are Philadelphia
natives, they live in a city where the politics of race remains live. The house is in the shadow of Temple University, and the area, cheaper than New York, is beginning to gentrify. “This neighbourhood was based around older black residents who’ve been here for a while. Now out-of-state developers are covertly buying property, moving people in as quickly as they can, and having their meetings in secret so no one has the chance to vote against them.”
The group have disdain for those who think the existing political structures will change. “The real political character of America is just sheer apathy and a focus on oneself, for the sake of survival,” Stevenson notes.
Joe Biden has made no difference to Jordan’s view of politics. In fact, the notion he may be better than Trump in substantive ways provokes his contempt. “One of my favourite things that happens in punk is every four years watching all of these people who I thought that I respected, whose politics I thought I agreed with, be like: ‘We need to vote. And I’m going to talk down to you hard as fuck right now and expect you to treat me as a political authority, even though I’m just somebody that you see wasted as fuck at the bar and at DIY shows sometimes. Hey, you should vote for Joe fucking Biden.’” The idea that Biden – who helped in the demonisation of a black woman, Anita Hill, in 1991, when she accused the supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment – is a friend to black people is anathema to him.
He says his father told him Biden could be held accountable in a way Trump could not. “I was like ‘How? Do you have his number? Do you know his momma? The fuck you mean you’re going to hold him accountable?’ That shit is crazy. So many so-called punks, so many people in bands I like and still have to respect are saying that shit to me, talking down to me. Nothing is more amazing to me than watching a so-called punk band play a benefit show for someone’s presidential campaign. That shit is fucking embarrassing.”
Soul Glo’s music matches the fury of their speech: there will be few more exciting guitar records released this year than Diaspora Problems. Now the question is: will they ever be able to make another album. They sigh. “It’s very murky,” Jordan says, and sucks again on that blunt.
• Diaspora Problems is out now on Epitaph.