The last decade of Pittsburgh hardcore can essentially be reduced to two paradigms: the Code Orange lane of bone-crushing mosh-core, and the Concealed Blade trail of old-school hardcore punk. Princess, one of the buzziest (and best) young bands in the Pittsburgh hardcore scene, occupy the middle path: They're like that meme of the little girl asking, “¿Porque no los dos?”
Princess’s second EP, Wishes for an Untimely Demise (independently released on April 12), seamlessly merges feral hardcore punk with bloody-knuckle, metallic hardcore. Face-ripping standout “Traer Un Arma” (Spanish for “bring a gun”) oscillates between fast sprints designed to spark two-stepping and chuggy breakdowns that offer the karate-mosh warriors a chance to show off. Guitarist Noah Sommers’ riffs are barbed and metallic, but unlike his previous band, the metalcore manglers Cutting Ties, his simple chord progressions in Princess’ songs are influenced by his lifelong love of Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys.
Still, he and his bandmates — vocalist Mel Kennelly, bassist Zach Bird, and drummer Jordan Braverman — aren’t shy about signaling their taste for heavier fare.
“We want to show that we’re not afraid to put ass-beater riffs in punk songs,” Sommers says, smiling.
Princess’ self-titled debut EP, released in Feb. 2023, was lighter on its feet. It nodded to the blown-out hardcore of their elder contemporaries in Scowl and GEL, bands that Sommers and Kennelly say they were excited to channel when they started Princess, which began, as their not-so-tough name lets on, as a sort of half-joke in summer 2022.
But things quickly got serious when they realized people were excitedly coming out to their first few shows to mosh and headbang — months before they even had any music out.
Since then, Princess has played all over Pittsburgh, opening for their hardcore heroes GEL, mathcore weirdos The Callous Daoboys, grindcore goofballs Escuela Grind, and virtually every other type of band under the hardcore umbrella. They’ve had a lot of fun making a name for themselves, but they also had good reason to go “heavier” and “angrier” on Wishes. Kennelly says she had some “really bad weeks and months” over the last year that spilled out into these new songs, several of which get highly personal.
Then there was their record label schism.
Many months after signing with the Connecticut-based Crimewave Records, the label head began telegraphing his militantly pro-Zionist politics in the days following the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. Princess’s leftist ideologies — which Kennelly calls “a huge part” of the band — were already apparent in the anti-police lyrics of their first EP, which were largely inspired by the injustices addressed by the Black Lives Matter protests. The band’s own pro-Palestinian beliefs were completely at odds with Crimewave’s, and fortunately, they were able to negotiate a swift split that Kennelly’s relieved to say “wasn’t messy.”
The incident encouraged Princess to remain independent until they find the perfect label home. In the meantime, every facet of the Princess operation is DIY. Sommers records and produces their music in practice spaces and basements, and the band books all its own shows in and out of town. They’ve already played gigs in Ohio, West Virginia, and Rhode Island. At the latter show, they made friends with Chris Cesarini of notable Boston hardcore band Street Power and oi-core miscreants Conservative Military Image, who lends his yells to Wishes’ feisty title-track.
That’s a pretty big get for a Pittsburgh hardcore band not even two years old. Sommers, Bird, and Braverman have all been playing in bands together since high school, but every achievement — and hiccup — is an exciting new experience for Kennelly. Princess is her first-ever band, and on Wishes, especially, it sounds like she’s unleashing a lifetime’s worth of pent-up rage when she screams about the personal and political trials of her everyday life experience.
Like many musicians who get vulnerable on the mic, Kennelly likens Princess to a form of therapy, and in between her righteously anti-cop, anti-abuser invectives, she also finds space to direct the rage inward. “Princess,” Wishes’ eponymous opener, hurls the diss, “you’re nothing but a fucking Princess,” into the mirror, cheekily flipping the band’s own anthem into a self-depracative dig.
“Everybody, even us, can be little princesses sometimes,” Kennelly admits.
On “Relentless,” she shouts, “my body, my life, my rules,” which she describes as a two-pronged rallying cry: “A mixture between pro-choice [messaging] and either mine or anyone else’s experience with sexual assault.” In “Traer Un Arma,” Kennelly growls, “Bring a knife to a gun fight and you’ll fucking see / How your life means nothing / And you beg and you plead.” That might read like the prototypical hardcore revenge fantasy, but in this case, Kennelly is actually one looking down the barrel of the gun.
“I felt like I was the one bringing the knife,” she says of the event that inspired that rage-stricken song. Her second-person perspective offers a fresh angle on a mode of interpersonal conflict that's been well-tread across 40 years of first-person hardcore lyricism. It’s subtleties like that — in conjunction with their not-so-subtly raucous sound — that make Princess feel like they could be the city’s next great hardcore export. They have plans to (hopefully) tour later this year, but for now, they'll keep racking up full-circle moments in Pittsburgh.
Kennelly says opening for GEL last summer at the Mr. Roboto Project was a “fever dream,” and, on May 13, they’ll return to that venue to open for Spy and Jivebomb — two of the hypest bands in American hardcore and ones that Princess happen to hold in high regard.
“Those are the bands we literally said we were listening to while we were [writing our first EP],” Sommers says, shaking his head in disbelief. “It’s kind of surreal.”
