The Habak show at the Roxy on November 29th, presented by Viva! was more than your typical winter punk rock invading West Hollywood.
I first heard of Habak after seeing Lagrimas open for Soul Glo at Zebulon in 2022 and then following the band until their Teragram takeover with Habak- I knew Los Angeles was witnessing the formation of a new scene, subgenre, and phenomenon in punk music. Both Habak and Lagrimas represent a style known as melodic crust.
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Sonically akin to a lovechild between Deafheaven and Doom, Habak represents the emotional interior of anarchism. With so much political activity both in underground and mainstream circles, we often get exposed to the surface of rebellion but never the glacier of emotionality underlying the action. We see the rallies, the chanting, the rioting, the rhetoric, but when anarchists go home, we rarely see the pain to empathize with. Habak gives the world a sonic synthesis of that pain so we don’t have to venture into every anarchist’s home to see it for ourselves. How does that pain feel? Like suffered screaming over the most beautiful, dissociative harmony.
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Those sonic characteristics should give listeners a sense of their trauma. That these are people wanting peace and love at their core, who appreciate nature, who vibe with giving and nurturing, who keep youth sacrosanct, who protect defenseless animals, who feel the suffering of the oppressed with such sensitivity it literally rips them to shreds inside so terribly they need to scream.
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Whereas the majority of humanity has a high tolerance for the horrors of war, anarchists have a low tolerance and high sensitivity. Who will scream for all the starved and exploded innocents of the world? Habak will. They will scream for their deaths but also make beautiful music to lament and memorialize the cultures of the destroyed.
There is so much complexity and symbolic power to this punk music, even though to many it probably just sounds like noise and feedback. Here though, at Janky Smooth, we see the real artists behind the noise.
It is rare that bands from the Los Punks backyard scene make their way to the Roxy or the West Side in general for that matter. It was not only refreshing to see the sounds of a different region invading West Hollywood, but it was also symbolic of this underdog sound climbing the ladder in the music world.
I deeply want Habak to succeed far beyond Tijuana or East Los Angeles. I want them to be the face of sensitive extreme music. And slowly but surely, it is happening. With an upcoming appearance at Roadburn, the band is carving their niche.
Opening the show at the Roxy were Futura and Quiet Fear, two Latin punk bands that you can see on a screamo bill or a Nacho Corrupted bill. Heroes of the LA underground, it is a treat to have them join in the Roxy’s long tradition of bands alongside Neil Young, Bob Marley, and Guns and Roses.
Right before Habak came on, Barrio Slam made the Roxy quake with powerful hardcore with a mountain of purpose behind their punch. When they are not ripping up pits, the band is putting on shows to put members of their community through college. One important moment of their set was when they said no one is coming to save them from ICE or MAGA, that the community can only rely on themselves. And if there is one thing I have noted from watching the Los Angeles Latino community over the years, it is that no feat is too large for them to overcome and thrive in. They are scrappier and have more grit than the American government.
Having not seen Habak until this point, I felt a bit left out of the LA punk scene, like I had been missing a quintessential band in the current LA punk landscape. Without Habak, you are missing a major piece of the current LA punk tapestry, even though the band is from Tijuana.
In many ways, Southern California has embraced the band as one of our own and in doing so makes a punk have to reflect on the nature of these borders in the first place. Are we really from two separate communities at all? We only share a handful of miles between us. What makes us so categorically separate?
With all these large political forces at the forefront of my mind, I was ready to confront them through the beautiful rapture of Habak’s heavenly crust. An exercise in antonyms, crust is not supposed to ever be described as heavenly, yet here we are. This reinvention of the sound has essentially kicked off a movement that transcends the modern punk scene.
When I see fans of Habak and Lagrimas, I put them in a separate world from typical punks. They are screamo fans, inspired by a particular sonic and visual aesthetic, a skull overflowing with flowers for instance, beauty juxtaposed with brutality, verdant nature with rotting death.
That is what the music sounds like as well, with some tracks ripping through the audience with animalistic rhythms and drums that sound like landmines popping off while a wolverine blasts lyrics on the microphone. Other songs tame that wolverine and make her keep the screams but shift to a more lulling cadence, as if getting to the confessional part of their story after telling the reader about all the hate and anger in their heart over the brutality they survived.
Their set did not just innovate within punk though, but also within the frameworks of shoegaze. Representing the pumping blood in My Bloody Valentine’s invention, Habak’s gaze carries an aura that extreme music fans can escape into and forget the elitism they have been taught over the decades.
What punk should be. What gaze should be. What metal should be. What music should be. All dissolve into the question of what music can do, and in the tradition of innovators like Crass, creating a wholly new sound out of the punk everyone thought they knew at the time, Habak has created a new vision of punk during a time of creative drought. Without Habak, anarcho punk would have much less to offer the music world today. With Habak, this scene has everything to offer the world now.
From the rubble of Gaza to the murder stalls of factory farms to the hierarchical everyday oppressions of a Western world dependent on the suffering of the global south, Habak creates a sound that is needed in many more places than just West Hollywood. We at Janky Smooth consider their Roxy show a good start. May their melodic crust inspire and disturb those that need it around the world.
Words: Rob Shepyer
Photos: Albert Licano
