Biohazard in the Credits: We All Rise and the Stubborn Weight of Miami Hardcore

Miami hardcore has never needed permission to exist. It has thrived in backyards and dive bars and rooms with no ventilation, largely ignored by a city that would rather sell you a rooftop pool. So it means something when a local band lands a record with a résumé most touring acts would envy — and when that record still sounds like it was forged in a Little Haiti sweatbox. That band this month is We All Rise, and the record is The Beginning of the End.

The single is called "Crown," and it does not ease you in. This is metal-tinged hardcore built for maximum impact — the kind of song that assumes you came to move, not to nod politely. What lifts it out of the local-heavy-band pack is the company it keeps. The Beginning of the End was produced by Billy Graziadei of Biohazard, the Brooklyn crossover institution, and features a guest turn from Evan Seinfeld, Biohazard's bassist and vocalist. Mastering came from Tue Madsen, the Danish engineer whose name is a genre signifier all its own. The sound sits somewhere in the lineage of post-Demanufacture Fear Factory, Sepultura, and a modernized, thrash-inflected groove — heavy in the way that requires actual craft, not just volume.

That pedigree matters, but not for the name-drop. It matters because it drags national-caliber production down to a scene that has spent decades making do. A Miami hardcore band getting Graziadei behind the board and Seinfeld on a track is the local-to-legendary handshake this scene rarely gets on record. It says the players who built crossover hardcore up north see something worth their time down here — and it hands We All Rise a document that can travel far beyond the county line.

The larger story is about endurance. Heavy music in Miami has always been the underdog's underdog — outrun by the club economy, priced out of practice spaces, forever a rumor to people who think the city's only genre is the one with a bottle-service tier. And yet it persists, generation after generation, because the bands simply refuse to stop. "Crown" is what that refusal sounds like when it finally gets the studio budget it deserves: still furious, still local, now armored in production that can go toe-to-toe with anyone.

There's a poetry in the album title, too. The Beginning of the End could read as doom, but in a scene this stubborn it plays more like a dare — an ending nobody's actually agreed to. Miami hardcore has been declared dead more times than anyone can count, and every time it answers with another record, another basement bill, another band that hits harder than the last.

So put "Crown" on loud, and put it on with the context: this is what happens when a scene that's been overlooked for forty years finally gets a fair shot at tape. Then go find We All Rise on a local bill and watch it detonate in a room the size of your living room. The credits belong to legends. The band belongs to us.

Sources: 10 new songs from Miami artists to listen to in August 2026 — Miami New Times