Sometimes, the story is bigger than the music. In the case of Regional Justice Center, the story starts like this: In 2016, 18-year-old Max Hellesto was sent to prison for six years for first degree assault. Whenever someone goes to prison, that person’s entire family suffers. Hellesto’s brother Ian Shelton, already playing in Seattle-area hardcore bands, needed some way to cope with what was happening, so he started Regional Justice Center, a band named after the jail where his brother was locked up.

Later this month, Show Me The Body and High Vis will head out on tour together. To prepare, the two high-energy rock bands are dropping a new collaboration titled “Stomach.”

Long before his pandemic-era side project Militarie Gun became a big band, Ian Shelton started the West Coast powerviolence outfit Regional Justice Center for a very specific reason. Ian’s younger brother Max was sent to prison for assault, and the RJC project, named after the facility where Max was incarcerated, was about the causes and effects of that kind of incarceration. Sometimes, Max added lyrics of his own. Now, Max is out of prison, and he’s the new singer of Regional Justice Center.

This summer, the city of Paris put on a show for the world. The obvious highlight of last month’s Olympic opening ceremony was the ecstatic vision of beloved prog-metal titans Gojira, all perched on scattered castle ledges like gargoyles, duetting with Marie Antoinette’s severed head and with an opera soprano singing from a passing boat. Two weeks later, blog-rock overlords Phoenix headlined the closing ceremony in the center of the Stade De France, doing a 2009 Will Never Die Bonnaroo Superjam with Air and Ezra Koenig and that one song from Drive. Throughout the two ceremonies, other French and French-enough musicians made their presence felt: Aya Nakamura, Juliette Armanet, Céline Dion, the Minions, that guy with the angel wings and the accordion. It was a lovely spectacle, but at least one strain of vital French music was sorely absent.

Over the weekend, Regional Justice Center made their live return and it looked gnarly. Today, the powerviolence crew is announcing their new album Freedom, Sweet Freedom, arriving next month. The brutal singles “Freedom” and “Take A Step Away” are out now.

Until fairly recently, Militarie Gun was a Regional Justice Center side project. Ian Shelton started the frantic, fearsome Seattle powerviolence band Regional Justice Center when his brother Max was sentenced to six years in prison, and they’ve released a series of absolutely blazing hardcore records. He started Militarie Gun as a solo project, when he was stuck at home during the pandemic. Since then, Militarie Gun have blown the fuck up, and RJC have been relatively inactive. But now, RJC are coming back.

Long before he started Militarie Gun, Ian Shelton launched Regional Justice Center, a Seattle powerviolence band with a specific purpose. Ian’s brother Max had been given a six-year prison sentence for assault, and Ian started RJC as a way to express some thoughts about the criminal justice system. Max would sometimes contribute lyrics over the phone from prison. Now, Max is out of prison, and he’s making music as Vatican Voss.

Three years ago, Militarie Gun wasn’t a band. It was an idea. Within hardcore circles, Ian Shelton was known as the singer, drummer, and sole constant member of Regional Justice Center, another band that started out as an idea. Shelton’s brother, charged with assault, had been sent to prison at 18, and Shelton named RJC after the facility where his brother was incarcerated. Shelton wrote fast, jarring, pummeling songs, and his brother sometimes chipped in with lyrics from behind bars. The band served as an outlet for both of them. Eventually, Shelton moved from Seattle to Los Angeles, directing music videos and hoping to become a full-time filmmaker in between Regional Justice Center tours. But then the pandemic hit. Shelton couldn’t tour, and nobody was hiring him to make videos. He needed a different type of outlet, and Militarie Gun became that.

In 2017, Ian Shelton started his project Regional Justice Center as a way to deal with a traumatic event. Max, Ian’s brother, was in prison — sentenced to six years for assault. Max’s experience gave Ian a new perspective on the inhumanity of the carceral state, and he put those feelings into the frantic, unhinged hardcore of Regional Justice Center. Over time, RJC grew into one of the most ferocious bands on the underground. Then Max came home. Now, Max is making music.

Hey, remember shows? Shows were fun. I’m glad I got to go to some of them.

Right now, Show Me The Body, Candy, and Regional Justice Center are on what looks like an absolute banger of an East Coast tour. On Tuesday night, the tour had an unpredictable start in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The three bands were scheduled to play the Middle East, the long-running club, but the show ended early. As New England Sounds reports, someone did a front-flip stagedive during Candy’s set and, in the process, kicked and ruptured a sprinkler irrigation pipe in the ceiling.

When the Vancouver hardcore punk band Punitive Damage first released their demo back in 2019, its cover art was a picture of a skeleton with two swords, and that skeleton was stabbing both a cop and a klansman through the neck. This was a nice early indicator that Punitive Damage are not fucking around. The band followed that demo with a three-song cassette called We Don’t Forget in 2020, and Convulse Records put both of those releases on a 7″ EP. Yesterday, Punitive Damage returned with a new release called Strike Back. It blasts through three songs in two minutes and 59 seconds, and it kicks so much ass.

A few weeks ago, the three hosts of the consistently great hardcore podcast Axe To Grind pondered a rhetorical question: Is Regional Justice Center’s new LP Crime And Punishment the biggest powerviolence album of all time? On its face, the question itself seems wrong. Powerviolence is a genre that actively seeks to repel most audiences, that delights in its own inaccessibility. Even within hardcore itself, powerviolence is a forbidding little sub-world. Asking about the relative bigness of powerviolence records feels perverse, almost like comparing the box-office grosses of snuff films.

As acts like Nothing and Hundredth have already proved, hardcore musicians make good shoegaze bands. And now there’s another one on the scene, Shine, which features members of Regional Justice Center and Seattle’s New Gods. Shine list ’90s touchstones like Ride, My Bloody Valentine, and Primal Scream among their influences, and their debut EP Stare Into The Sun, out yesterday, proves that they really can hang with the big dogs. Stream it below.

The Seattle-based hardcore band Regional Justice Center started out a few years ago as a songwriting collaboration between drummer/frontman Ian Shelton and his incarcerated brother. Since then, RJC has mostly been Ian’s concern, but the whole project hasn’t lost any of its frantic, visceral hate for a system that mechanistically chews up and spits out its own people. You can hear that all over the band’s new album Crime And Punishment, an ambitious hardcore record that sounds something like a rabid boar screaming at you for 13 minutes.

In three days, the brutally intense hardcore band Regional Justice Center will finally follow their excellent 2018 debut album World Of Inconvenience — as well as other records like 2020’s “KKK Tattoo” and Regional Jurtice Center — with their second full-length LP Crime And Punishment. “Full-length” feels like a bit of a misnomer here, since the 10-song album clocks in at a robust 13 minutes. But when you play this fast and this frantic, it simply makes sense for an entire LP to be half the length of a Godspeed You! Black Emperor song.

Last year, the fast and feral Seattle hardcore punk band Regional Justice Center released a couple of pivotal records — the searing monolith “KKK Tattoo” and Regional Jurtice Center, a two song collaboration with Trapped Under Ice/Angel Du$t leader Justice Tripp. RJC frontman Ian Shelton also started up two other bands, Militarie Gun and Sex With A Terrorist. Busy year! Next month, Regional Justice Center will release their full-length album Crime And Punishment, the long-awaited follow-up to 2018’s World Of Inconvenience. (The term “full-length” is relative here. Crime And Punishment is 13 minutes long.) Today, we get a new rager from the LP.

Since 2016, Ian Shelton has led Regional Justice Center, a hardcore band that addresses the bleak, crushing humanity of American systems in short, sharp bursts. In their few years of existence, Regional Justice Center have carried the torch for powerviolence, the jagged and ultra-fast hardcore subgenre, and they’ve also come to transcend that scene. Though Regional Justice Center has only released one album thus far, 2018’s masterfully intense World Of Inconvenience, they’ve become a massively important band within hardcore. In a couple of months, they’ll follow World Of Inconvenience with their new album Crime And Punishment. It’s about to be a really big deal.

Ian Shelton has been busy this year. Shelton is the man behind the Seattle power-violence band Regional Justice Center, and they have released a pair of great records this year: Regional Jurtice Center, a two-song collaboration with Trapped Under Ice's Justice Tripp, and the monumental ripper "KKK Tattoo." Shelton has also formed a new band called Militarie Gun, who specialize in a catchy, bouncy form of post-hardcore noise-rock, and their debut EP My Life Is Over absolutely destroys. Today, Shelton has unveiled another band, and that new band has the excellent name Sex With A Terrorist.

Ian Shelton, it would seem, has taken the pandemic as a challenge. The Seattle-born and LA-based Shelton is one of the most creative people currently working within the hardcore world. He's a part-time member of Self Defense Family, and he's also the mastermind behind the powerviolence squad Regional Justice Center. Regional Justice Center had to cancel a tour just as the pandemic was beginning, but since then, Shelton has done some great work with a couple of different groups.

"It wouldn't be a final Bane show without somebody -- and this is not a joke -- losing their wedding ring," Bane guitarist Aaron Dalbec tells the room full of sweaty people. "So if you could just find it, we'd really appreciate it." Frontman Aaron Bedard makes a joke, or maybe it's not a joke, about how this happens at every Bane show, as a couple of thousand people shuffle around and scan the floor by their feet. Maybe an hour later, someone passes a wedding ring onstage. "Wedding ring! Wedding ring! Do we have a fucking wedding ring?" The poor unfortunate soul who's sweated his ring off of his finger is standing there amidst the scrum of people at the side of the stage, so Dalbec gets down on one knee and fake-proposes to him. It's all terribly wholesome.

Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week (the eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight). This week's countdown is below, and you can listen to a playlist of all our 5 Best Songs on Spotify.

Regional Justice Center is the fast, turbulent, hallucinatorily angry hardcore punk project led by Ian Shelton, resident of Los Angeles and sometime member of Self Defense Family. Regional Justice Center often operate as a sort of collective, but while he's been at home under quarantine, Shelton has lately been making a whole lot of music on his own. In April, Shelton unveiled a new project, the relatively melodic Militarie Gunn, and released a demo. Last month, he teamed up with Trapped Under Ice/Angel Du$t frontman Justice Tripp for a two-song 7"; Shelton played all the instruments, while Tripp did the vocals. And today, Shelton has released a new Regional Justice ripper that feels like a major work.

Within the fast, brutalist hardcore subgenre known as power violence, the Los Angeles-based collective Regional Justice Center are one of the most interesting things currently going. Self Defense Family member Ian Shelton, the man behind Regional Justice Center, got the project going as a way to rage about his teenage younger brother being sent to prison for years. The band's records -- 2018's World Of Inconvenience, last year's Institution EP -- are raw and ugly and majestic in their anger. Today, we get a new Regional Justice Center record, and Shelton has himself a hell of a collaborator.

When he isn't hosting podcasts or writing podcasts, Patrick Kindlon leads two very different Albany-based punk-adjacent bands. One of those bands, the mighty Drug Church, released the towering one-off single "Bliss Out" earlier this year. The other, the loose post-hardcore collective Self Defense Family, just released something that sounds even bigger and heavier.

Ian Shelton formed the LA power-violence collective Regional Justice Center after his younger brother, the 18-year-old Max, was given a years-long prison sentence for assault. Regional Justice Center make unhinged, ferocious hardcore music, and it's all done from a specific political perspective. Shelton sings -- or, I guess, bellows, about the way the system can chew up and destroy people from a young age. Last year, Regional Justice Center released their debut album World Of Inconvenience, and it was specifically inspired by Max's incarceration. Today, they follow it up with the new EP Institution.