By the time Justice Tripp logs onto Zoom at 1pm, he’s already been awake longer than usual. “I woke up and hung out with the dogs, made breakfast,” he says. “Usually I’m a pretty late-to-rise type person, so I woke up about two hours ago.” The dogs in question – English bull terriers – have become something of an unofficial mascot for his band, Baltimore hardcore group Angel Du$t, popping up on the band’s merch whether he’s asked for them or not. “I don’t think I’ve ever once asked for the bull terrier,” he laughs. “People are just like, ‘Oh yeah, you have a bull terrier, I’m gonna put that on this design.’”
It is a level of domestic calm you might not expect from a frontperson who has always thrived on urgency. For the past 15 years, Tripp has helped shape modern American hardcore. As the frontperson of Trapped Under Ice, he drove the genre’s 2010s resurgence, fusing ’90s metal heft with confrontational beatdown songwriting. With Angel Du$t, he pulls the other way, stretching hardcore’s limits through melody and loosened form.
That restlessness runs through everything he does. Songs feel less written than expelled, sprinting tempos snapping into sudden melody, driven by the nervous energy he has been trying to release since his teens. Angel Du$t now occupies the space between softness and intensity, a friction that defines ‘Cold 2 The Touch’, their most ambitious and fully realised record to date.
Its arrival last week coincides with a moment when hardcore itself feels closer to the cultural centre than ever before. “This album feels like a big moment in the fact that our team is just locked in,” Tripp says. “We set aside a lot of time to plan for this record, and just trying to do everything right, make the coolest album possible and put it in front of as many people as possible.” He pauses, then qualifies it. “You do that every time you put out a record, but you’re always learning and growing. This just feels… different.”
That difference isn’t just internal. Hardcore has spent the last few years edging into places it hasn’t occupied in decades, bigger rooms, wider audiences, and, most visibly, commercial recognition. When Turnstile picked up two Grammys earlier this year, a line had firmly been crossed. Hardcore is now ‘mainstream’.
For Tripp, who shares deep creative and personal ties with the band (Turnstile drummer Daniel Fang and guitarist Pat McCrory were both early members of Angel Du$t), the moment was emotional rather than vindicating. “It’s the visual, physical manifestation of a lot of mine and probably our shared childhood dreams,” he says. “Not necessarily a Grammy, but just to see the world hear what we’ve been trying to say.”
Angel Du$t were early to the melodic crossover conversation that now dominates hardcore’s most visible edge, but Tripp is wary of claiming ownership. “There’s melody in the first hardcore band,” he points out. “A lot of people would point to Bad Brains. That’s what it was.”
For him, Angel Du$t’s trajectory isn’t about softening the genre, but reconnecting with its foundations. “As much as I love how hardcore’s evolved into something almost metal in a lot of cases, sometimes more metal than metal […] for us, it was like a return to form. Like, what did the [bands like] Bad Brains bring to this? What did a lot of early hardcore carry that you don’t see as much anymore? Melodic value.”
“[Hardcore’s mainstream success is] the visual, physical manifestation of a lot of mine and probably our shared childhood dreams”
Still, increased visibility brings friction within the purist parts of the scene. Hardcore has always been fiercely protective of itself, and Tripp understands why. “That instinct exists in me,” he admits. “It probably exists in everybody who grew up on hardcore. We all want to protect this thing that’s been so important to us.” For him, the stakes are personal. “Hardcore music specifically kept me on a really productive path. There’s a lot of dark directions I could’ve gone in life, but this kept me grounded.”
The problem, he says, isn’t new listeners or bigger stages, it’s the potential exploitation of a scared space, and “greed and inauthenticity”. “When dollar signs start popping up, that’s when it gets dangerous,” he reasons. That’s when, in his words, hardcore needs its “top-tier gatekeepers”. “Not to keep people out,” he clarifies, “but to protect this little microcosm of rock’n’roll from being exploited.”
Rock’n’roll is a phrase Tripp returns to often, and deliberately. It’s how he defines what Angel Du$t and many modern hardcore bands actually are. “I’ve always looked for that thing in music. We called it rock and roll, then punk and metal, and later hardcore. For a while, it disappeared, unless you were in a DIY venue. That was the only place you could find it.” What he means is a sense of authenticity within the performance. “Guitars, drums, somebody yelling on a microphone, sometimes melodic, sometimes not. That spirit just keeps changing names.”
Much of ‘Cold 2 The Touch’, Angel Du$t’s sixth album, is shaped by urgency – be it emotional, mental or physical. Tripp speaks openly about anxiety, ADHD, and how in 2022, he was hospitalised due to symptoms of a stroke, which the doctors later determined was a mental breakdown. These conditions all informed his songwriting. “What hardcore music is, really, is just making the sound of your mental health struggles,” he says bluntly. “That mindset demands urgency. You look at a Cro-Mags track, and you get everything you need in a minute and 30 seconds. That’s always made sense to me.”
Opening up emotionally has never been the hard part. “I’m a talker,” he explains. “I’m not good at keeping my personal life secret. I started writing lyrics I was going to sing in front of people when I was 18 or 19, so it’s never been hard for me to open up.” In his earlier career, though, he would set boundaries on just how much he would share. “There were times where I was like, ‘I’ll only open up this much.’ Now it’s just a stream of consciousness. I spill it out.”
That openness extends beyond the lyrics. ‘Cold 2 The Touch’ is the most collaborative record yet from Angel Du$t. The band has a relatively new lineup, with Tripp joined by longtime guitarist Steve Marino and bassist Zechariah Ghostribe, plus new drummer Nick Lewis and veteran hardcore guitarist Jim Carroll (The Suicide File, The Hope Conspiracy, American Nightmare).
It’s a shift Tripp finds energising. “It’s less about what I think Angel Du$t is,” he says. “We’ve reached a point where we all speak a common language.” Earlier records leaned heavily on his vision, but this one thrives on collective identity. “There’s more character, more feeling, more personality on this record than anything we’ve done. That’s exciting, because it means the band can keep evolving.”
That evolution was shaped with the live room firmly in mind. “More so than anything we’ve done before, we were thinking about how this would feel live,” Tripp explains. “We’ve toured a lot. If you’re going to be on the road 100 days a year, it has to feel good.” Songs were written with setlists in mind, not as compromises, but as challenges. “We wanted to make a record where we could play every song live and have a good time. I think we nailed that.”
“There’s a lot of dark directions I could’ve gone in life, but [hardcore music] kept me grounded”
The album’s guest features deepen its emotional and philosophical stakes rather than diluting them. On ‘Pain Is A Must’, Scott Vogel, of legendary hardcore band Terror, appears not as a cameo but as a living thesis.
“Scott is the physical embodiment of hardcore music,” Tripp says. “He doesn’t know how to be anything else. He sacrificed all his comforts for what he loves.” The track deals in endurance, conviction and the cost of staying true to yourself, themes Vogel has quite literally lived. As the longtime frontman of Terror, Vogel pushed his body to its limits for decades, playing with a level of intensity that’s left him battling serious back injuries and chronic pain. In a genre historically disconnected from financial reward, that sacrifice matters. “Hardcore has never been a financial venture, especially in the era Scott came from. That’s why it had to be him.”
Frank Carter’s appearance on ‘Man On Fire’ serves a different function, a bridge rather than a backbone. “That song was the more traditional rock moment on the record,” Tripp explains. “And Frank has the most rock’n’roll voice possible. That song needed that voice to be real.”
Sequencing, too, is deliberate. The album’s closing duo of ‘The Knife’ and ‘The Beat’ hits with blunt-force intensity, a final reminder after moments of melody and reflection. “Bad Brains used reggae as a moment to breathe,” Tripp says. “They’d talk you down off the edge, then throw you back over it.”
He wanted listeners to question what they were hearing, then have it clarified unmistakably. “I wanted people to get to the end and go, ‘Was that a hardcore record?’ And then the last songs say: yes. No question.” That intent carries through beyond the record itself. When asked what he hopes someone gets from ‘Cold 2 The Touch’ if it’s their first time hearing Angel Du$t, live or on record, Tripp doesn’t hesitate. “The desire to jump off the stage.” Yeah, that’s rock’n’roll.
Angel Du$t’s ‘Cold 2 The Touch’ is out now via Run For Cover Records. The band’s tour begins in Baltimore on February 26 – visit here for details.
The post Angel Du$t’s Justice Tripp: “Hardcore has never been a financial venture” appeared first on NME.
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