This week we head back to East Anglia to chat with Norwich Straight Edge OG’s Hour Of Reprisal who’s breakdowns, heavy riffs and nasty vocals have been amping up the scene over the last five years.
Hour of Reprisal haven’t always had it easy. They have been repping the Norwich scene for years and their early days had fewer venues and less shows in general in their area, so home shows weren’t much of a thing for them. This forced them to travel out to other towns and cities to play gigs but now,he Norwich scene hgas grown tremendously in the past few years with newer artists bringing the scene back to it’s shining glory.
I’ve been speaking to vocalist Joe about their experiences during this time and finding out more about the band and what we also have to look forward to!
FIRST OF ALL WHERE ARE YOU GUYS BASED & HOW DID YOU ALL MEET?
We’re mostly from Norwich (Paul’s from a village near Kings Lynn) and our first show was four years ago today! (at time of writing) Me (Joe, vocals) and Mike (guitar) had always talked for years about doing a politically themed mosh band, and after Covid we got it together pretty quickly – he knew James so we had a drummer very quickly. We found Paul (bass) on Facebook, and after a few shows we added Sam on guitar, who we found because James cuts his beard.
We’ve all done bands before but nothing that really broke out of the local area – I had a hardcore band called Crooked Minds (a couple of those guys are now in Dynamite and Uzumaki) and a grind band called Welldweller, Mike did a couple good metalcore and deathcore bands in Minerva and Claremont, James was in almost every north Norfolk based metalcore band, Paul had one called Hollow Reign, and Sam makes industrial in his living room and is currently trying to do a bedroom mathcore band.
WHAT WAS THE SCENE LIKE WHERE YOU WERE GROWING UP & HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED IN IT?
I’m not sure what my first taste of hardcore was (though I think it would’ve been the Casey Chaos free cd on the front of Kerrang magazine). I got into heavy music during the turn of the millennium nu metal era so it was EVERYWHERE. I’m also very lucky – Norwich’s hardcore scene was amazing in the early 00s, so I got to see a lot of incredible bands in very small venues – we had Terror, Merauder, Bane, Comeback Kid, Blacklisted, Hope Con, Black Dahlia Murder, Himsa, Paint It Black, Bleeding Through etc all within a couple years around me being 15 or 16. Because it was so vibrant it was on every tour and it wasn’t just the international bands – from one of the first BMTH shows opening from The Red Chord, demo-era Enter Shikari, Gallows, and Your Demise shows, the Sea Breeze venue in Lowestoft was huge for UK deathcore, and we always connected well with Essex and Suffolk scenes too. It was really easy to throw myself in as soon as I found it, because there was so much to go to! Everyone wanted to put shows on and start bands.
THIS MIGHT SOUND LIKE A DUMBASS QUESTION BUT HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE NAME HOUR OF REPRISAL?
It’s from ‘Raining Blood’! We’d thrown a couple ideas around but it was always the best one.
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR SOUND TO SOMEBODY WHO HASN’T HEARD YOU BEFORE?
We play metalcore that’s very 2007 influenced, but in a deeply unfashionable way. Musically we take a lot of cues from Recon, Acacia Strain, Disembodied, and vocally I’m probably more Most Precious Blood or The Warriors. It’s very breakdown-heavy. Lyrically obviously I’m a bit further away from those kinda bands – I’m hugely inspired by Catharsis, Heaven Shall Burn, His Hero Is Gone, Nasum, Earth Crisis, and Napalm Death.
WHAT HAS BEEN SOME OF THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES YOU’VE BEEN FACED WITH?
A lot of our local bands seem to have a hard time getting out of Norfolk but that wasn’t a huge struggle for us (we played Bristol twice in our first five shows). We’re at least a couple hours from anywhere important in England so I think a lot of promoters are unwilling to take a chance on bands from the middle of nowhere when they could just use a reliable local – which is completely fair. I don’t think our politics have ever really counted against us (if anything, it’s helped us get shows)
WHO ARE SOME OF YOUR ALL TIME FAVOURITE ARTISTS?
Shai Hulud is my favourite band ever. Mike absolutely LOVES Misery Signals. Of stuff we’d all agree on, it’d be things like Martyr AD, Throwdown, All Out War, Contention, Disembodied, Terror, Foundation, Hatebreed etc. Sam would want me to say Health and Devin Townsend.
WHAT ARE SOME OF THE SHOWS YOU’VE REALLY ENJOYED BEING A PART OF & DO YOU HAVE A FAVOURITE VENUE?
Oh man we love playing shows so we’ve probably enjoyed like 95% of them. Getting to play Edge Day in Sweden with Contention was huge for us. We recently did a couple shows in Bulgaria and Romania with TruexFeeling, PoisonxIvy, and Frust, and they were all amazing. We’ve been incredibly lucky to get to play with bands like Terror, Madball, The Callous Daoboys, Portrayal Of Guilt, Freya, Wristmeetrazor, Kaonashi, and Fuming Mouth. We’ve played a couple skateparks now, so the next one to tick off is playing a wrestling ring.
WHAT WOULD BE YOUR DREAM TOUR TO GET HOUR OF REPRISAL ON?
Well, we toured with Racetraitor in July so I got the dream tour recently! I do really wanna play something with a huge stage though – I like to run around a lot and while I don’t normally like big venues I do wanna try it just once.
WHAT HAS BEEN SOME OF THE BEST EXPERIENCES YOU’VE HAD TOGETHER?
Going to Europe! I basically just get to go have a small holiday with my friends and go to a few shows. Bucharest stands out as a particularly highlight for all of us – all the shows were great but Bucharest took it up a level, and the city was amazing.
HOW HAVE YOU FOUND THE SCENE CHANGE IN RECENT YEARS?
In Norwich we struggled a lot through the 2010s – a lot of venues started closing or getting council-mandated volume limiters and we started to get a lot fewer shows, couple with touring costs getting much worse and less tours came through at the same time. Since Covid though, it’s been great. Lots of bands are popping up, we’ve got a few solid venues, and the crowds are back in a big way, with loads of new faces at every show. We’ve got some great promoters here, especially Phase Shifter and Sabaka Promo.
HOW IMPORTANT IS REPRESENTATION IN THE HARDCORE COMMUNITY?
I wrote a little essay about this when the Racetraitor tour was announced, so I’ll try not to rehash my own words too much but:
I grew up in an overwhelmingly white area. There were no non-white kids at my school. Lucky for me, when I got into heavy music I very quickly got into bands like Rage Against The Machine and Sepultura, who showed me entirely new ways of looking at the world, that I never would’ve learned in my little suburban bubble. From there obviously I found my local punk and hardcore scene, which luckily was extremely left leaning and I discovered bands like Gather, Undying, Verse, Kingdom, and Racetraitor who showed me even more. All those bands showed me new perspectives and all those bands made me a better person. So yeah, even as a straight cis white guy, representation matters, because it’s the best way to learn! We’ve got a load of incredible bands in the UK that I hope do the same for the generation coming through now – Shooting Daggers, Ikhras, Sarsour, Mashaal, Grail Guard, Misgendered, Leibniz, Traidora etc etc
WE MEET A LOT OF PEOPLE IN THIS SCENE. DO YOU HAVE A GREAT CONNECTION WITH ANYONE IN PARTICULAR AND WOULD RECOMMEND WORKING WITH?
Yeah of course! This is gonna turn into an insane thank you list though so I’m gonna leave the Norwich bands off and do a separate hype answer for that. Betrayed By Life Records and everyone connected in Southampton. Bristol has been insanely good to us – Josh from Ark At This did our fourth and fifth shows, Blowout Nights, Uncertainty, Tension, and Perp Walk. In London, Theo Real Life, Cut & Run Collective, everyone LBU we’ve ever met has been lovely. Nottingham are great – Cast Iron Promotions, Wrecking Crew Collective etc. In Essex, Less Than Zero Promotions and Splitknuckle. Fenland Hardcore in Lincoln. Levy Punks in Manchester. The entire Birmingham queercore scene have been amazing to us. The first couple of labels that took a chance on us were German! Huge thanks to Final War Records and Bound By Modern Age Records.
CAN YOU TELL US A BIT ABOUT THE SCENE IN EAST ANGLIA?
While it was amazing in the 00s, we started to lose a lot of venues (noise complaints, developers, venues just not liking spinkicks etc) around 2015, a lot of the older heads started to drop out, and covid really kicked it in the arse. In the last two or three years it’s come back in a big way. We’ve got a couple great venues that are happy to have hardcore shows – Space Studios, Dead Wax, and Voodoo Daddys – and we’ve started to get loads of younger kids coming through. We don’t actually play at home much (for the first year or so of our band there wasn’t much for us to play!) but the newer bands like Heel Turn, Bind, and 2nd Location have been putting in serious hours to build the scene back in Norwich. Sabaka Promo, Phase Shifter, Asinine Corp and Yellow Tape Promotions have done great work.
WE CAN’T ALL BE MUSICIANS 24/7 SO WHAT JOBS/CAREERS DO YOU GUYS HAVE?
To be fair I don’t think any of our bodies could handle doing this full time. I’m a shop manager, Mike and Sam are both office guys, Paul’s an electrical engineer, and James is a barber (he was out there cutting hair at Outbreak, so if anyone was running around with their head shaved, or got a dramatic mullet it was most likely him!)
YOU RELEASED YOUR MOST RECENT EP ‘ENDLESS WAR, ENDLESS PEACE’ LAST FEBRUARY. WHAT WERE YOUR INFLUENCES FOR THESE TRACKS AND HOW HAPPY WERE YOU WITH HOW IT CAME TOGETHER?
We do all our recording ourselves – Mike writes most of the music so he likes to have a lot of control over the recording process, and Sam has a degree in music production. It was mixed and mastered by Stu McKay at Studio 6 in Swindon (Stu is in Eternal Lord and has done production for Malevolence, Guilt Trip etc). It came out on Bound By Modern Age Records in Europe, and Betrayed By Life Records in the UK, and the (incredible) artwork was done by a high school friend of mine, Wes from Deviated Instinct. My favourite track is the closer. ‘The Fruit From Poisoned Trees’ which has possibly our stupidest riff in a breakdown right in the middle of it, which was written by me making silly noises with my mouth (I can’t play guitar).
WHAT CAN WE EXPECT TO SEE FROM YOU GUYS FOR THE REST OF 2026?
We’re about to finish recording our debut album! 10 new songs, it’s getting mixed by Stu at Studio 6 again, and hopefully it should be out in the next few months. Artwork is being done by Ozan from Maran, and it’s got some features you might not expect. In July we we’re obviously off on tour with Racetraitor which was an actual dream – one of the greatest of all time and I got to watch them every day for a week. Mad.
FINALLY, HAVE YOU GOT ANY OTHER ARTISTS/FRIENDS YOU THINK THE PEOPLE SHOULD CHECK OUT?
Hell yeah, I’ve got so many. Norwich is small and it’s insanely underrated. It’s a small city but I’d easily claim it’s a top ten scene in the UK. Listen to us, Heel Turn, Other Half, Cassus, Deviated Instinct, Haavat, Dismara, Afraid To Die, Acid Throne, Mountain Peaks, Berenice, Annotations Of An Autopsy, Birdwitch, Second Location, Grim Harvest, Slowly, Narcolepsy, Peat Boggs, Blank Talk, Nerve Peel, Sleemo, Kulk, Lease On Life, Algae Bloom, Lifejacket, Hello Kitty Fun Land, Shelf Life, Aphra, Hello Pedro, Elenwen, Sebbuku, Dog Boy Trio…
Hour of Reprisal head out again in a few weeks supporting Baltimore hardcore heavyweights Sinister Feeling & Erode both locally in Norwich and Lincoln so if you’re around head down and support!
Keep supporting local bands and promoters and of course DIY UKHC.
You can listen to Hour of Reprisal on all major streaming services now!
So go and give it a listen.
For further show information keep an eye out on their socials @xhourofreprisalx
Until next time, I’ll catch you in the pit!
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