Chicago, IL · skate punk · melodic hardcore

Horace Pinker

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Long-running Chicago-via-Phoenix melodic punks — gruff, fast, and criminally slept-on, lifers with a record collection's worth of craft.

Horace Pinker began in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1991 and later relocated to Chicago, taking their name from the villain of the film Shocker. The band works in melodic punk and skate punk: fast tempos, gruff shouted-sung vocals and guitar hooks kept tight and unfussy, wrapped around lyrics that lean political rather than personal.

They have recorded steadily across three decades for a series of independent punk labels, releasing albums including Power Tools, Burn Tempe to the Ground, Pop Culture Failure, Copper Regret, Red-Eyed Regular, Texas One Ten, Carnival Nostalgia and Local State Inertia. They have also turned up on compilations such as Fat Wreck Chords' Fat Music for Fat People and a split EP with Face to Face.

The band has toured widely in the United States and Europe, largely outside the mainstream attention given to their contemporaries, and pushed further afield too, including a 2010 run through China, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

Recent years have brought the EP Recover, the pandemic-delayed House of Cards, recorded at Sonic Iguana with producer Mass Giorgini, and the album Now and the Future. The current lineup pairs founding members Bryan Jones and Scott Eastman with Greg Mytych and Don Meehleis.

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skate punkmelodic hardcore