Hardcore Quartet mallories Turn the Mosh Pit Into a Dance Circle

Once, at just 16, I heard mallories’ sludge-thick sound wall reverberate beneath a random freeway in Georgetown, Texas.

Standing underneath the highway, tuning out the cars driving over us, I watched my classmates – who were then still months away from graduating high school – mix their spit and sweat together, dance in circles through cigarette smoke, and, eventually, make a collective run from the cops. It was definitely past my curfew, and surely past each band member’s, too.

“You should feel like you’re swinging,” bassist Eddie Otto says over coffee, describing the band’s sound. “You feel it in your gut. The riffs aren’t complicated – none of it is really – but it’s supposed to make you feel something.”

Up until this year, most mallories shows were like this: a chest-penetrating fort of noise would build itself up from inside a Downtown tunnel, so that anyone who’d heard the band live had to literally be underground. But last month, when the hardcore four-piece released its debut EP stories fables and poemsunder local DIY label Doom Records, a listenership of mostly in-the-know teens and homegrown, dyed-in-the-wool metalheads grew outward.

“Their energy, stage presence, and dedication were undeniable,” Jason Whatley at Doom, who discovered the band last year at Kick Butt Coffee, says. “mallories brought something raw and heavy. Their sound taps into that thick, grimy sludge we love. It just made sense.”

“I have all my chips in this,” mallories frontperson Owen Vincent says. “When I moved here from small town South Texas, I just wanted to take advantage of the city’s scene. Now, I see people wearing our T-shirts.”

mallories’ origins date back to middle school band class, where Vincent first met drummer Antonio Cruz. But it wasn’t until much later – specifically after taking U.S. history with Mr. Paul Mallory in high school – that they paired up with Otto and guitarist Flynn Crawford.

It used to be that, when mallories weren’t given legal authority to shred above the cement at a coffee shop, college co-op, or anarchist bookstore, most setlists were measured in success by whether or not they’d get busted by the cops or ratted out by city curfew-abiding neighbors. But no member of the quartet was ever looking to get into any trouble, just to make music for people their age to dance to.

“I feel like most people go to hardcore shows as a release for their anger or anguish,” Otto adds. “It can be intimidating and come off [as] exclusive. But for us, I think it’s cool that you can get that feeling and still walk away from it afterward.”

No longer in high school, mallories and their psychedelic screams have more than broken into the Austin scene – playing at Chess Club, frequenting campus music hubs, and even sandwiching a bill at their dream venue, Mohawk. Still, no one in the band is old enough to order a drink.

Nestled in the band’s overheating practice space, it doesn’t take much to notice that the group’s sincerity feels at odds with the abrasive music they make. Singing through angst and dissatisfaction with the world around them, the EP has metal jangling and guitar fuzz laid so thickly over their arrangements that it feels as if, at least when they play, they’re stuck in a bad late-teenage dream. But in reality, it’s quite the opposite – this is the mallories dream, angst and all.

“My big goal was to play at Mohawk – but then we did,” Otto says. “The goals will change, but I’m just happy people appreciate what we’re doing. Especially the old guys.”

When heard live, the obvious talent of Cruz on percussion is what most palpably completes that elemental, cathartic piece of southern sludge. On “alligator weed wizard,” Cruz leads the band in with a heavy and unwavering hand, proving himself as the backbone of the sound.

“Can’t sleep/ Its eyes are dark/ My head is in her heart,” Vincent sings, in one of the few lyrically discernible moments on the collection. Recorded with the help of Bosh frontman James Chappell, the morose and tightly packed five-song assembly feels less like an EP and more like an ode to the gut punches of growing up, holding love and contempt at once, at all times.

Homing in on a sound that most resonates with the DIY ethos and the “Eighties and Nineties Austin culture,” as Crawford puts it, mallories hope to break through the stereotype of who is included in the hardcore scene. Perhaps that means even ditching the body-slamming for respectful, body-conscious dancing.

“There’s a certain stereotype to hardcore shows in Texas,” Vincent says. “The vibe is extra masculine. People are beating the shit out of each other in the mosh pit. The aesthetic that comes with it can be hard for queer people. At our core, we try to remain the opposite of that. I’d rather people hold hands and dance in circles.”

“We never try to sound clean – the dirtiness makes it feel more real to us,” Otto reflects. Although the making of the EP took over a year, and best represents mallories’ earliest material, it contains, in a way, the actual stories, fables, and poems of the group thus far: honest and harsh, averse to self-seriousness, full of uninhibited feeling. The nascent and earnest stages mallories are currently in elucidate how angry they are with the world, and through dissonant and cacophonous screams, how they plan to let it all out.

This article appears in July 4 • 2025.