It has been a long time now since our last music release—but desperate times call for desperate measures. Taking up arms against a wave of authoritarianism and despair, North Carolina’s premier hardcore band, Catharsis, has recorded a new full-length album, “Hope Against Hope.” You can now download it from us here or pre-order the LP on vinyl from us here. It’s also available on the usual streaming platforms.
This record picks up where the band’s last material left off, continuing to push the envelope in terms of what hardcore can do. They don’t retread the ground they broke on their previous albums, but press forward into ever more abrasive and dynamic territory. Politically, they remain uncompromisingly radical in their lives as well as lyrics. Hardcore draws its dramatic power from the connection between word and deed; this is not a band that has slowed down, toned down, or mellowed out.
You can read a review of this record here courtesy of The Counterforce, an underground hardcore publication. You can read an interview Kim Kelly conducted with the band here.
True to their roots in the do-it-yourself underground, Catharsis are releasing the album through CrimethInc. in the United States, Refuse Records in Europe, and No Gods No Masters in South America. The band recorded the drums with Benny Grotto at Mad Oak Studios and tracked the rest themselves. For the backing vocals, Catharsis tapped the vocalists of some of their favorite hardcore bands: Gosia (of Poland’s Mind Pollution, Next Victim, and Sorrow), Brazil’s Point of No Return, and North Carolina’s own Scarecrow and Vittna. Mixed by Kurt Ballou at God City Studio and mastered by Scott Crouse, “Hope Against Hope” is as explosive as our times.
Twenty-four years have passed since Catharsis released their last record, the split LP featuring “Arsonist’s Prayer,” though they did complete another song from that session for their discography in 2012. But they have been playing regularly together since 2013, adding Jimmy Chang (of Undying and Sect), who left the band in 1995, to the lineup that recorded the “Passion” LP. It was high time to record another album, making the most of material that has come together across two decades. In fact, Catharsis has never sounded better.
“Hope Against Hope” is an assault on a self-destructing society and a beacon of inspiration for all who are determined to survive.
In the words of the musicians themselves:
We have recorded a new album, Hope Against Hope.
This is our first full-length release in 26 years. We’ve been working on these songs for a long time—if you saw us on tour in fall 2000, you witnessed an early version of the oldest one.
We’re still the same band, the four of us who recorded the Passion LP and Jimmy, who left the band almost thirty years ago and had to wait until we got back together in 2012 to resume playing with us. We’re still the same people, just a few years older, a few years angrier, more heartbroken, more haunted by the brutality of our society, more convinced of the urgency of our mission. We are still doing what we have always done, metabolizing our grief into fury, our despair into determination, reaching out to you across the gulfs that divide us, seeking to give hope to fellow rebel hearts.
It is still true that, if the world we deserve to live in does not exist, then our clumsy efforts to bring it into being are the closest thing to it that we will ever experience, and the best way to mourn our distance from it, the best way to honor it and what is noblest within us. Hope Against Hope is our humble contribution.
For us, hardcore is not a style of dance music or a marketing strategy. Hardcore is still a secret society at war with the world, a way of living in struggle against everything around us that is petty and servile, a way of fighting to defend the beauty of the world.
For all, against all.
You can download the lyric sheet at catharsis.band.
More information about the band is available here, including updates about their upcoming shows.
Reviews
A record that feels less like a comeback and more like a statement carved out of three decades in the trenches.
The songs circle around collapse, memory, and resistance — from the bleak opening of “Nocturne” to the anthemic weight of “We Live” and “Last Words.”
Hope Against Hope is exactly that: a reminder that even in despair, there’s still ground to stand on, and still reasons to push forward.
“Hope Against Hope” is not an attempt to update or chase after imitators—if anything, it calls them to order. […]
“Gone to Croatan” and “Power” hover between unease and ritual, evoking not so much post-hardcore/metal as we understand it today, but rather an idea of hardcore that has come to terms with the end of illusions. “Eremocene,” in terms of structure, inspiration, and intensity, is perhaps the pinnacle of the album: a song that transforms geological anxiety and the awareness of collapse into something lyrical and relentless, as if Catharsis had found a way to sing about extinction without resigning themselves to it. […]
In an era in which the political urgency of hardcore is often digested and spat out as aesthetics or formal code, Catharsis rejects rhetoric and reappropriates a stance that has always rejected shortcuts: that of commitment as a long-term choice, of art as a form of responsibility.
One of the original innovators of metallic hardcore return with one of the most ferocious and relentless albums of the decade. Catharsis is everything hardcore aspires to be—crushing, sharp, and matched by an outspoken political acknowledgement of the world we inhabit, not empty bravado. Hope Against Hope grapples with a paralytic melancholy that is ultimately overcome through fury.
Let’s start with a question. Do we deserve a new Catharsis album?
Catharsis needs no introduction.
Hope against Hope is a triumph of art coinciding with life.
We could say that it’s difficult to come back hoping to make as much of an impression as with the Passion LP, but after listening to this, we understand that it happens naturally.
The band continues on the path established with their latest releases, but deepens their aggressiveness and expands their sound.
Catharsis tap into the primordial essence of the hardcore scene.
Catharsis did not return to remind us of the music that they once created; rather, they came to show us what they can do today—and that everything is possible.
They are an inspiration to us and a great example of what we stand for and what we’d like antifascist metal to become: anticapitalist, in opposition to the commercial structures of the music business, free, horizontally organized, unbound, unleashed.
I didn’t get to think too much about what Catharsis 2025 could be or create any expectations other than that sudden rush of excitement, but it’s safe to say that they handled any kind of weight that a two and a half decade-long absence of an iconic band could have created with their typical effortless class. They did it by just being themselves, just like they’ve always been.
I gotta say, it’s really good.
Catharsis will be performing in the United States and Europe over the next three months.
US Shows, August-October, 2025
- August 8 - Durham, North Carolina: The Pinhook
- August 9 - Asheville, North Carolina: Sly Grog Lounge
- August 10 - Atlanta, Georgia: Eyedrum
- September 12 - New York City, New York: Property Is Theft, Brooklyn
- September 13 - Providence, Rhode Island
- October 10 - Raleigh, North Carolina: Kings
- October 11 - Richmond, Virginia
- October 12 - Washington, DC: St. Stephen’s
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October 13 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Bonks
European Tour, October 15-25, 2025
- October 16 Warsaw, Poland: Voodoo Club with Point Of No Return, Ghostchant, Moira
- October 17 Krakow, Poland: Alchemia with Point Of No Return, Ghostchant, Moira, Reagnition
- October 18 Budapest, Hungary: Turbina with Point Of No Return, Ghostchant, Vlky
- October 19 Zagreb, Croatia: AKC Attack with Vlky
- October 20 Bologna, Italy: Freakout
- October 21 Munich, Germany: Kafe Kult
- October 22 Vienna, Austria: Tüwi with Vlky
- October 23 Brno, Czech Republic: Kabinet MUZ
- October 24 Schweinfurt, Germany: Stattbahnhof
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October 25 Berlin, Germany: Neue Zukunft with Corrective Measure, Moira
