By the time you read this, the band might have changed the description again, but at the time of this interview, OKC/Norman band Jaw/Line’s Instagram profile described its music as “emotional hardcore.”
“You can have emotions about all sorts of things,” guitarist and vocalist A.B. Hill said. “It doesn’t have to be all about breakups and going to the mall. Going on social media and having to deal with constant ads and robots talking to you and the inability to reliably find legitimate information about what’s going on in your world is something that makes me highly emotional.”
Jaw/Line joins Money, Lust Online, Heavytrip, Honor Choir and So Much Heaven for 405 A Day for the City on Saturday, April 5 at Resonant Head, 400 SW 25th St. A showcase of local musicians hosted by S. Reidy and deliberately scheduled for 4/05 in honor of the OKC metro area code, A Day for the City is also a fundraiser for Freedom Oklahoma. All proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to the nonprofit and social welfare organization, which “provides education and advocacy to build a future where all 2SLGBTQ+ Oklahomans have the safety to thrive,” according to its website (freedomoklahoma.org).
Jaw/Line released a six-song EP Maybe I Wouldn’t Feel So Angry in September. In addition to anger, bassist and vocalist Blake Starr said the album’s songs also describe the confusion and desperation he’s felt in the last several years.
“It’s so hard to really know if you’re even looking North — what’s your emotional, true compass?” Starr said. “We don’t know what we’re reading. We don’t know where we’re headed. We don’t know where we want to go. We don’t know what our options are. … If you’re asking somebody for directions and they give you directions, you have to trust that person and trust yourself to trust them. So I think part of the album, at least for me when I was writing, is just ‘Tell me which way to go. Tell me which way is the right way. Tell me where the truth is.’”
Hill agreed.
“You can’t even identify politically as a Democrat or left or anything like that because you zoom out and it’s all just the same thing and you feel almost a little bit hopeless,” Hill said. “It’s like they want you to fight with people that you have more in common with than you think you do, and it almost feels deliberate.”
To avoid further confusion, many of the song titles on the album read like thesis statements. Tracks include “The Great Labor of Exalting Yourself,” “Purity as a Form of Social Capital” and “Compartmentalizing a Strange Grief.”
“Sometimes I get in my own head about it,” Hill said. “I’m like, ‘I want people to know what the song is about, so maybe I should title the song as specifically as I possibly can.’”
Self-identification
Jaw/Line formed in 2022, but Hill and Starr have been friends for about 15 years and playing in other bands for more than a decade. If hardcore were a college, Starr said, they would be faculty members and not students at this point.
“We’re almost at an age where the social observance is more important to us than being like, ‘Hey, we’re from the 580. We’ll beat your ass,’” Starr said. “We’re not young enough to go start beef with hardcore bands in Arkansas.”
Hill and Starr met in North Texas but didn’t play in a band together until they formed Jaw/Line.
“It just took one rehearsal together,” Starr said. “We had known each other and what we liked for years, but we never got to put it in practice and see what happens.”
Drummer John Bindel completes the three-piece.
“I like to think the band’s a democracy more or less,” Hill said. “If I write something someone doesn’t like or vice versa, if we can’t make it work, we won’t force it. … If I bring a simple concept or a skeleton for a song, they are both incredible at taking that and added something to it rhythmically that makes it kind of a different thing almost entirely. … I came in to this like, ‘I wanna do a hardcore band,’ but hardcore is so homogeneous, or it can be at least. … We kind of try to break up that homogeneity with our own flair.”
Jaw/Line’s Bandcamp page (jawlinesux.bandcamp.com) describes its music as “post-hardcore,” but Hill said this genre label has been applied to so many different kinds of music that it’s basically meaningless at this point.
Starr said emo has also gone through so many variations in the decades since the emotional hardcore label was first applied to bands such as Rites of Spring and Embrace.
“When you start talking about the ‘emo’ definition, it takes on many shapes, and there’s all these new waves,” Starr said. “We’ve already lived through three waves, I think. It is constantly changing as far as terminology goes, and it is almost impossible to define. … You almost want to pick the genre to help pick your fans, too. … Influentially, we take a lot from first-wave and second-wave emo as part of this melting pot of sounds that we have.”
OKC band Money (moneykills.bandcamp.com), meanwhile self-identifies as “alternative rock.”
“We get a lot of labels,” said Money’s guitarist Tanner Watkins. “We get called ‘shoegaze’ and stuff all the time, but I just like rock.”
Watkins also plays guitar in cursetheknife with Money bassist Severin Olsen. While Olsen and cursetheknife bassist Branden Palesano are the primary songwriters in cursetheknife, Watkins, who cited ’90s alt-rock acts Alice in Chains, Soundgarden and Smashing Pumpkins as influences, has a larger role in writing Money’s riff-based material.
“It’s just different tastes, pulling from different inspirations,” Watkins said. “Cursetheknife is not as noisy. … In Money, we just play loud rock music. That’s what we want to do with that band.”
Money can be a problem for the band, Watkins said both because “music don’t pay like it used to,” requiring the band members to work demanding jobs that can make scheduling recording and rehearsal difficult, and because choosing it as a band name was “probably not the best idea.”
“We’ve gotten a lot of complaints about not being able to find us on the internet and stuff like that,” Watkins said. “There’s, like, a million artists named Money … but I don’t know, I like it.”
This article appears in Alcoholmanac 2025.