near-arctic state of alert: tracking norway’s recent punk explosion

In November 2014, I was at the end of my teenage years, which I’d spent putting up DIY shows and festivals in my tiny home town of Flekkefjord together with both punk and not-so-punk friends. I wanted more of it, so like a ton of people from rural Norway who’ve felt the same way since time immemorial, I had packed my bags and moved to Oslo. 

One of my earliest toe-dippings into the city’s scene was a local mini-fest at Blitz, a famed autonomous house and venue that’s hosted punk shows and remained a center for activism since the building was originally squatted back in 1982. The show was put up by a booking collective called Svart Samtid, which I had figured were somehow related to Urbanoia, a hardcore band I had bought the first 7” and a t-shirt off of while living in Flekkefjord. Three of the five acts that played Blitz that November night were bands I knew: the noisy punk trio Dark Times, the just-plain-noisy west coasters in Staer, and the tongue-in-cheek hardcore band Haraball. They were joined by another local hardcore act, Blood Suckers, as well as New York-based headliners Hank Wood and the Hammerheads.

The Hammerheads became a new personal favorite, but there weren’t many people to share the discovery with me that night. Being a naïve and hopeful 19-year-old and traveling to Oslo, I expected packed venues and ruckus. Instead, I found a few dozen other people. I remember feeling disappointed, and also left early, still a bit unsure of the way home. (I realize the last bit’s on me.)

Fast forward eight years: I brought along my camera to a punk show for the first time in ages. I’d had the idea to do a new fanzine for a few years, but hadn’t gotten around to it. In all fairness, I hadn’t been too inspired to do it either, creatively languid as I was in the midst of the cultural vacuum which was COVID-era lockdown Oslo. But at that point, in February 2023, there’d been something abrew in town for a few months.

I’m not the only one feeling it. The show at the Barrikaden basement, a self-managed social housing project that’s been around since 1999, was packed. It was the second night of a two-day festival called Hundre Tusen Volt I Skallen, the night before having taken place at Blitz with shows by local acts Teppebombe and Assistert Sjølmord, as well as Copenhagen-based Indre Krig. 

At Barrikaden, there were four bands playing. The debut show of local band Asinin attacks the basement with a lone rave strobe to go with the intense, dual-guitar-wielding barrage. Gloomy local act Draumar engulfed the room in a mid-tempo slew of hardcore with a hint of Norwegian black metal. After Gothenburg’s X2000, Indre Krig came out for a surprise set. I’d already exchanged some questions with them for a potential interview in the lockdown era, and it was a major energy boost to see them tear the room apart with their frenetic riffage. Empty cans flew everywhere as the room went wild.

The crowd at that show was indicative of just how packed most shows around here have been ever since. Sure, there are familiar faces who've been around for years, including local indie rocker Erik Lindo, a fellow punk expat from southern Norway behind the spooky hardcore offshoot Que Lindo. But at these shows, there’s also a horde of kids I’d never seen around before. 

Draumar’s vocalist Sig and Asinin’s guitarist Mats are the co-founders of the Den Bisarre Lyd collective, which were responsible for putting up the Hundre Tusen Volt i Skallen festival along with other recent punk shows. In March 2023, a month after the Barrikaden show, I decided to go ahead with my new zine. I met the two of them to ask them what’s going on.

“I think for many people, the pandemic times were tough,” said Sig. “It’s crazy to see people at the shows who I have no idea where are coming from.” Mats joins in: “A disclaimer: We haven’t put up too many shows yet. But it’s fun to see the turnout being so good. Young people have been on the lookout for alternative sources of culture and music. It shows the need for a scene like this, where this music can unfold and develop. There’s definitely a heightened interest for it now than before the pandemic.”

“I can’t wait for these kids to start making their own bands,” said Sig. “I’ve been very insistent towards some of the youngsters I’ve encountered at the shows. ‘Make bands and we’ll set you up!’ That has to be the next step.”

Later in 2023, Den Bisarre Lyd organized a band workshop at Blitz aimed at enticing some of the younger people in the scene to start their own projects. Initially, not much came of it. But for some of the attendees, a spark was ignited. Among them were the members of Molbo. Today, they’re one of the most active and prolific of the new punk wave washing across Norway. At that point, however, the band had yet to form.

“I joined Den Bisarre Lyd to help out with the band workshop, get things moving. There, I met Herman, who was participating in the workshop,” said Roksana, Molbo’s bassist. Guitarist Johannes, who plays with Roksana in the punk band Hudkreft, adds: “Not much came of it then, but when we met Herman again a month later at the Copenhagen punk festival K-Town, he and I bonded over our love for acts like Powerplant, Coneheads, CCTV. We talked about how cool it would be if someone in Oslo started an egg punk band.”

“A bit later, on my way to the toilet, I told Johannes ‘let’s see who starts one first,’” Herman said laughing.

“And I thought to myself, ‘it sure as hell is not going to be you.’ But after K-Town, when me and Roksana sat down to piece things together, we realized it would be better to start a project with Herman rather than separate bands. So we asked him to join, and he accepted,” said Johannes.

Having their first practice by the tail end of August 2023, Molbo’s first show took place a few weeks later, in October 2023 at Barrikaden. Molbo shared the bill with Swiss band S.G.A.T.V. and the local five-piece Teppebombe. Active since 2022, Teppebombe were one of the first new bands to form in the post-pandemic Oslo hardcore scene—a particularly vicious d-beat “tactical bomb unit” armed with a saxophone and the guttural growls of a vocalist with a tendency to wrap his head in plastic and paper shopping bags.

That bag-clad vocalist Mikael—who has recently started organising shows of his own under the Fritt Fall moniker—saw first-hand how the crowds suddenly grew dramatically.

“I think a lot of people here were just eager for something to happen that wasn’t too commercial or ‘proper,’ in a way. A lot of people, especially younger people, were beginning to find their way to shows, which before the pandemic had been attended mostly by scene veterans in their thirties or forties.”

For a brief time, Mikael was worried shows might get too crowded by people jumping trends, or that it could be co-opted by profit-makers, dulling some of the edge off it. “Luckily, this didn’t turn out to be the case, and so there hasn't been a need to gate-keep like you see in some scenes in other countries. Meanwhile, a lot of the young people attending have turned out to be stayers and keep going to shows, which is cool to see. The energy at shows has also been kept up at a high level throughout the last couple of years, making it worthwhile for touring bands to stop by.”

Aside from Blitz and Barrikaden, shows have taken place at the riverside Boksen venue just around the block from Barrikaden, as well as the recently-closed Endless Tinnitus recording studio, run by local sound tech and rocker Mr. Møkk. He’s been a scene fixture for decades, but has recently taken the stage with new bands Invisible Hand and Stabber. The punk lineups are an ever-revolving door of both older bands like Problems, Draumar, and Teppebombe, as well as new acts like Accelerator, AG-3, and Null Tone. 

It was after a punk show at Blitz in January 2024 that local audience regulars Bjørn-Nicklas and Jelle toyed with the idea of making music of their own. Bjørn-Nicklas had already churned out stark black-and-white photos of the punk scene he saw unfolding before his eyes for a while, but hadn’t really played in a band yet. Inspired by the surge in activity, the duo formed Anemisk, texting each other already the following day and sending riffs back and forth.

“I spent an hour making my first song, ‘Pryl.’ I recorded the guitars and vocals, programmed the drums in GarageBand, then Jelle came to my house and added bass to the recordings,” remembers Bjørn-Nicklas. “All of a sudden, we had a demo, which we released in the middle of March 2024. I think that’s the moment we realised wow, we’ve actually made something, and this could become a proper band. We asked my roommate Tor Håkon, who also drums for Molbo, to join, and brought on board Hudkreft’s guitarist Leah.”

Two months after releasing the demo, Anemisk played their first show at Blitz on May 30, 2024, at a Den Bisarre Lyd-presented bill—a release fest for the first edition of the Armering zine. It’s the same zine I had picked up work on a year prior. Like Anemisk, it was inspired by the local punk explosion. 

At some point during the evening, a lanky local teen passed me a note with a Bandcamp download code of his new band’s demo, due out the next day. The band is Shament, and their debut release turns out to be one of the best demos I’ve heard in years—angsty and moody, yet crushing and ferocious at the same time. They’ve become a mainstay at punk lineups all over town.

The last band to appear on the Blitz bill on May 30, 2024, pulled up in their van, unloaded their gear, and got on stage just before the show was about to start. The 17-year-old members of Deponi hit the stage at Blitz in front of a maxed-out capacity and delivered a frantic set of crusty hardcore, the tunes fresh off of their recent demo tape. It was their second show of the night. The reason for their just-in-time arrival? They’d just played a music industry showcase at a sauna-and-shows event complex by the Oslofjord. 

The day after, the band had two more shows planned: a matinee at Blå in Oslo, before flying back to the Norwegian west coast for a homecoming appearance in their hometown of Stavanger. 

Numbering around 150,000 residents to Oslo’s 700,000, Stavanger is a much smaller city, but has lately seen a punk and thrash resurgence in many ways reflecting Oslo’s. The Stavanger boom began not in decades-old punk houses, but in communal youth clubs in the city suburbs. 

The crusty hardcore punks in Håndgranat and the thrashers in Autonomie were the first kids to make their mark on the scene, drawing hundreds to all-ages shows in suburban youth clubs from 2021 onwards. The slightly younger kids in Deponi followed soon after.

“I moved to Norway from Chile at 9 years old and struggled to fit in,” said Anthony, vocalist for Deponi. “When I got to know Deponi drummer Cecilia and became a part of the punk scene here, that’s when I started to feel safe. I’m a pretty quiet guy, always have been. The band is the only reason I’ve started talking.”

Not long after they started going to shows together, Anthony and Cecilia started Deponi and performed their first show in November 2022 at Stavanger’s youth club Metropolis. They shared a bill with the aforementioned Autonomie, among others. The band soon became one of the scene’s most active, releasing the Angrip! EP on local label Ond Sirkel in April 2024. 

Ond Sirkel is run by Håvard and Anders, two brothers who had previously put out Håndgranat’s debut EP on cassette. Interestingly, the brothers were also behind the Svart Samtid gigs in Oslo way back when I first started going to hardcore shows, having formed the “Svart Samtid west coast division” named Den Kulturelle Søppelsekken after moving back home to Stavanger, later rechristened Ond Sirkel and expanded to a label as well as a live promoter.

Deponi’s four-shows-in-two-cities-in-36-hours embodies their stint in miniature. In just two effective years as a band, they put out their debut EP, played a bunch of local shows and went on a summer tour of Scandinavia and the Baltics, including festival appearances with the Stupids and a support slot for Dropdead in Oslo. Now, they’re putting the band to rest.

“I’m moving to Bergen to study photography,” said Anthony. “We all have our other projects. I’m making my fanzine, Strid, with photos and interviews. Our guitarist Geir has his own band, Rapid Death, and our drummer Cecilia has started a new band with the Ond Sirkel brothers and Vincent from Håndgranat on drums: Psykostat. They’re insanely good.”

Traveling to Stavanger in March 2025 for the Ond Sirkel Festival, I got to experience Anthony’s testimonial first-hand. On stage is Psykostat with Deponi’s Cecilia front and center, putting forth an intense vocal delivery which reminds me of Exit Order at their best. Later on, local grindcore powerhouse Psudoku has recently transformed from 15 years as a one-man band with an online cult following into a live four-piece, delivering a dazzling set, which travels stateside for a weeklong tour in June. On stage with Psudoku? Kristoffer, who also played the Svart Samtid Fest back in November 2014, then as a part of Staer. 

In punk, you never know how long things last. Bands come and go in the blink of an eye. I think about how the underground scene has evolved in the 10+ years that have passed. There are new branches on the tree, while some of the old ones are still going strong. I love watching the new kids claim their rightful space at the vanguard of the scene, their burst of energy rubbing off on veterans who, in turn, might even pick up a trick or two.

Listen to Erik Egenes’ full accompanying playlist “Near-Arctic State of Alert.”

Erik Egenes (b. 1994) is a writer based in Oslo, Norway. He runs Armering, a fanzine and promoter imprint shedding light on punk and other forms of underground music in Norway and beyond.