In Defense of the Genre is a column on BrooklynVegan about punk, pop punk, emo, hardcore, post-hardcore, ska-punk, and more, including and often especially the bands and albums and subgenres that weren't always taken so seriously.The first month of 2026 is a wrap! Hopefully you're caught up on the 50 best punk albums of 2025 (and hopefully you caught the best punk songs of December list that went live around New Year's)
Poison The Well and Converge both helped define '90s and 2000s metalcore, they both have anticipated new albums coming out this year, and now they announced a tour together for this spring. Support at the East Coast/Midwest dates comes from West Coast hardcore punks Spy and Connecticut death-y metalcore crew Balmora, and the West Coast dates are with punk antagonists The Armed and the AWOLNATION-related Barbarians of California.
This week has been a whirlwind, musically at least. We got hit with approximately 867,954 album announcements and/or new songs (a good thing), including but not limited to Mitski, Kim Gordon, Poison The Well, ELUCID, WU LYF, Flea, Deathcrash, Shabaka, Sunn O))), Robber Robber, Fcukers, Holy Fuck, Tanya Tagaq, By Storm, and still more. Go check out all of those and more if you haven't already.
For Byrne's first album since his hugely acclaimed American Utopia tour and the subsequent Spike Lee-directed film he's working with an orchestra, as well as St Vincent and Paramore singer Hayley Williams, among others. The two tracks released so far, She Explains Things To Me and Everybody Laughs, have proved to be sweetly sunny and driven by acoustic guitar. The accompanying tour due to reach Europe next year will apparently blend visual art, storytelling and music into one compelling live performance.
