Photo by Kris Kirk

Artist: 16 Underground, the four-piece of vocalist Hannah Campbell, guitarist Andy Sanchez, bassist and keyboardist Edward Barraza, and drummer Christian Ramos

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Buzz: Before Sound and Fury this past weekend, I was playing Trouble, the latest EP from Nuovo Testamento, for my Gen X brother who had never heard the experimental dark dance-pop trio before and mentioned how they were scheduled for day one of the fest. “But how is this hardcore?,” was his confounded reaction. And so began the long conversation that hardcore these days has many, many tangent limbs to it, and that the modern day scene isn’t just about artists staying in the lanes of creating heavy and aggressive music. It’s an evolving tree with many branches pulling other sounds in.

Literal minutes passed, and their Angelino peers 16 Underground posted late-breaking news that they would be joining the lineup that night at a Sound and Fury kickoff show featured hardcore-rap bastions Cold World alongside other pit-movers of varying degrees including Big Boy, One Step Closer, and the Difference. Heads in that room surely tilted like my brother’s just as well once the cool-as-fuck sonic concoction of trip-hop and ambient pop crafted by these hardcore scene evolvers moved through a room readier to throw down than chill out.

On these epitaphic days of summer, the arrival of 16 Underground’s second EP, Without a Trace, might just be the comedown needed from the sunlight-overdosed energy the season has held a grip on you with. To get there, you’ll want to let go of any negative preconceptions first — be it on the subject of hardcore adjacencies or about today’s dreamier underground pop music landscape, especially that which tends to lead with aesthetics rather than substance. 16 Underground only focus — blurrily, at that — is on the latter, even in looking forward in the rear view.

As their follow-up to their 2024 EP, Drifting Deeper, their second extended play encompasses five songs that submerges their sound even deeper beneath the surface without getting lost behind a background haze. Backbeats and bass frequencies emboss vocalist Hannah Campbell’s breaths into denser shapes of ethereal longing (“Glimpse of You”, “Angel [On The Run]”) while a condensation forms around her desires through quick-dripping electronic liquid and flickers of shoegazed-crushed riffage (“Fate”, “Mystify”.) “Receding into bliss / Since the last time / Help me come back / To the feeling you left me with,” she sings on the EP’s title track. It’s like the experience of existing in two states of mind at once, where a past life merges into a future premonition — out of body, instead of smashing flesh and bone.

Sound: Weightless headphones hardcore-adjacent listenng with a trip-hop heartbeat to cool your senses.

Recommended: “Glimpse of You”, “Fate”, and “Without a Trace” from their newly-released EP, Without a Trace

16 Underground’s Without a Trace is available now on Sunday Drive Records.