Old Ghosts,New Regrets? Hardcore punk in the Necrocene

Abstract

This article situates punk and hardcore within the framework of the Necrocene, examining how their aesthetics mediate processes of loss, extinction and ecological collapse that remain otherwise invisible. Drawing on Media Theory and Cultural Analysis in the often ignored ecological dimension of punk and hardcore, it argues that they do not simply represent the crisis of the ecological emergency but actively construct it as lived experience. Through their lyrics and poetics, these genres register the necrotic motion of exhausted ecological and social systems under global capitalism after the Great Acceleration. By close-reading four songs across scenes and eras, the essay foregrounds punk’s ambivalence between nihilism and action as both cultural expression and political intervention. In doing so, it contributes to the Environmental Humanities by showing how these cultural practices diagnose the present maybe without even knowing it while staging fragile forms of persistence within ruins of an epoch marked by loss and extinction.