How Holy Roar Became The Bastion of British Hardcore

At their core, every iconic record label boils down to one birthing moment. Eazy E’s Ruthless Records, for example, was conceived with $7,000 of the NWA member’s own money as a way to release their debut single “Boys N The Hood”. Young Turks, an off-shoot of the much-celebrated XL Recordings, started up after an out-of hand party attracted the attention of the police and XL founder Richard Russell was so impressed he decided to give the hosts of the party a job. For Holy Roar, though, it began with 40 people packed tighter than a packet of cigarettes into a living room in Birmingham.

Alex Fitzpatrick had chanced his arm on an unknown band he found on MySpace, and they responded with a performance that would change his life. Their keyboardist, James, dispensed the sort of atomic bomb sound effects you might produce from a keyring. Their singer, Eva, screamed bloody murder. The crowd - who were stuffed inside a cramped living room, staining the furniture with their spilled drinks - loved it. “It was like a school disco crossed with the apocalypse,” is how Fitzpatrick remembers the moment today, referencing the “tiny, feral, and skinny as fuck” humans who did their best to make sure he’d never be able to claim back the rental deposit on his house. That group were Rolo Tomassi, and their frantic, experimental take on hardcore changed Fitzpatrick’s life.

A year later, in 2006, Fitzpatrick moved to London and resolved to pull together bands who, like Rolo Tomassi, he felt were going under-represented in terms of label backing and distribution. Alongside Ellen Godwin, he co-founded Holy Roar, a label that endeavoured to establish a broad church across the hardcore, punk, and metal spectrums. The bands they sought to champion weren’t exactly the kind you’d typically see plastered across a double page spread in The Guide; they were uncompromising, abrasive, and challenging. Just as Dischord - the Washington, D.C. label founded by Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye - stands as a byword for angular, socially-conscious post-hardcore, in the ten years since those early house shows in Birmingham, Holy Roar has become shorthand for adventurous, progressive heavy music in the UK.

After putting out a CD compilation and a brace of EPs while still at university in the midlands, Fitzpatrick and Godwin’s label ideas coalesced with a £8,000 loan from Godwin’s family, which was initially earmarked to help put on shows in London and eventually provided the financial impetus for the first Holy Roar releases: an LP by the Indiana thrash-grind band Phoenix Bodies, a 12” split between Boston’s Kayo Dot and New York-based Bloody Panda - whose music met at the corner of avant-garde and doom, and Rolo Tomassi’s first EP, which the group and Fitzpatrick would assemble 950 copies of together, by hand. It went on to sell out three pressings.

In some shape or form, that’s basically been the story for the last decade, with each release created, packaged, and pushed out with a varying combination of blood, sweat, and/or tears. Thanks to a combination of shrewd observations (they put out a Gallows demo in 2005), a fierce, almost obsessive level of productivity (Holy Roar has racked up close to 160 releases since its inception), and a carefully curated roster that plucked only the wildest from the bunch, Holy Roar quickly became dependable as an outlet for intelligent music that could still strip the skin from your skull.

So much of Holy Roar’s success can be traced back to Rolo Tomassi’s head-turning debut, but no label has ever been built on one band. In the same way that a label like XL Recordings found its footing in the British rave scene, or a label like Sub Pop became the go-to for grunge, Holy Roar arguably found a base in “UK Swell” - a tongue-in-cheek umbrella term for a scene of hardcore bands rooted loosely in a combination of frenetic screamo and a furious melodic sensibility. While likes of Gallows and the complex hardcore of Trencher represented the label’s first wave, before bleeding into a second steered by the frenetic energy of Maths, Brontide, and Throats, it’s UK Swell that became the Holy Roar’s defining pillar, helping to cement it into British music history. Like Sarah Records and indie-pop, Big Scary Monsters and math rock, or Young Turks and experimental electronica, Holy Roar helped to stoke the flames of a burgeoning British hardcore scene.

The “UK Swell” moniker may remain a semi-tolerated joke - a good natured jab at a broadly similar collection of US bands, including La Dispute and Touché Amoré, who grouped themselves under the equally wry name “The Wave” - but, like their American counterparts, the music was nothing if not totally sincere. The bands played a lot of shows together and were bound by shared beliefs not a million miles removed from Holy Roar’s: treat people with respect, push back against bigotry, and make as much noise as possible. Like Holy Roar’s first and second waves, though, UK Swell also came to pass, meaning the label has had to adapt once again.

Fitzpatrick looks to 2012, when Kerouac played their final show to a buoyant, packed-to-the-rafters crowd at the Old Blue Last, as the beginning of the end for UK Swell. Yet he still sees strands of its energy in a number of the label’s contemporary names, among them Svalbard, the vicious Woking hardcore band Employed To Serve and post-rock miserabilists We Never Learned To Live, who have picked up the baton and run with it. “It was an interesting time,” Fitzpatrick says. “I almost feel that the bands that have followed on have taken everything that was good about it and cast its net further and got out there a bit more. It’s musically more diverse and possibly stronger and more long-term minded.”

There are no flagship bands at Holy Roar; no arena-conquering behemoths to subsidise an otherwise experimental release schedule. The scenes in which it continues to operate are resolutely DIY and prone to fracture and collapse, giving added weight to the label’s support and foresight. In very real terms, Holy Roar has helped to prop up bands and creative enclaves that would otherwise have disappeared with a silent howl. At shows, the label is referred to as a family, both by old stagers and new faces like the skate-punks Giants, who credit Fitzpatrick releasing their debut album Break The Cycle with helping them salvage a band they’d often thought about “sacking off”.

“If what they’re doing is musically good and we feel like they’re making a go of it then we’ll do everything we can to carry on supporting people,” Fitzpatrick says. “It’s 10 times easier for me to work with someone I know the ins and outs of as a person and how they function in a band. That’s not saying that we don’t support new artists and people, we’ve just started working with a band called Conjurer who we didn’t know before at all, but they’ve got something about them that’s a Holy Roar kind of ethos.”

What is the Holy Roar ethos, then? It’s a nebulous thing to define, but it does have tangible elements. Along with their values these bands have a keen sense of purpose, will play a lot of shows and are also invested in how their music is presented. In a streaming-saturated marketplace, Holy Roar remains meticulous in creating artwork to accurately represent the intentions of their artists. That is, in part, why a punk band like Apologies, I Have None can work in tandem with planet-smashing doom merchants like Slabdragger. “I find, weirdly, that sort of attitude and effort [in creating artwork] provides a certain sound,” Tom Pitts - who has manned enough stools to be described as the Holy Roar house drummer, currently playing in Rolo Tomassi - tells me. “You can hear the rawness and the thinking behind it. It has an audible effect.”

Last weekend marked Holy Roar’s 10th anniversary as a label. Their celebratory bash, Holy Roar X, unfolded in front of a packed venue in north London, with 18 bands playing across two stages in 10 frenzied hours. The Long Haul reunited for one night only, Vales played their stunning debut EP Clarity in full for the final time, and Bristolian hardcore outfit Svalbard pointed to the label’s future, playing a brutal set to a busy room a little after lunchtime. The punishing schedule highlighted the breadth of the label’s achievements, and showed that standing strong amid the shifting currents of alternative music for a decade means you need a big table if you’re going to sit down with your friends. Closing proceedings, Rolo Tomassi did what they always do. They were brutally precise, energetic to the point of collapse and utterly magnetic. Their career-spanning set, dubbed 'Chronolo Tomassi', paid tribute to their beginnings while underlining the formidable proposition they are today. As a whole, the bill did precisely the same thing for Holy Roar. A decade is a long time to sustain an independently run label, particularly when you deal in the kind of music where most bands have a lifespan of three years or less. Thanks, in part, to consistency, Young Turks will also celebrate their 10th anniversary this year, Big Scary Monsters are approaching fourteen, and Fortuna POP! have been going since 1985. As well as that, you need trust, dedication, and foresight. It says a lot about Holy Roar’s commitment to all three that it took 10 years for Fitzpatrick and company to stop and take a look back at the hundreds of records, thousands of shows, and sprawling group of people they helped bring together by a beautiful love for ugly music.

The label has earned the right to be viewed as a UK underground institution, but the bands in their orbit at this moment in time are so exciting that the word doesn’t quite fit. Holy Roar is not about to be filed away as an example of the way things were. “It’s not like you just take a wage, go home and crack open a beer,” Fitzpatrick says. “It’s a 24/7 existence, but the upsides outweigh that tenfold. When there comes a point where there are no new challenges, or I don’t feel like there’s anything to aim for, I’ll knock it on the head. I just don’t feel like that yet.”

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