What Does An Inclusive Hardcore Punk Festival Look Like?
Six years into Damaged City, the D.C. festival is starting to reflect its younger, more multicultural and gender-fluid crop of artists and attendees.
's music swirled just as much as it pounded, turning some of the stranger, studio-driven moments of its recent album into a live-action stage match. As the band explored every inch of the worn hardwood at All Souls Unitarian Church in Northwest Washington, D.C., stirring up heart rates and exalting the moment, one body would jump from the stage and be immediately replaced by another, all in constant motion. But when a dude leapfrogged over vocalist Brandon Yates' head into the mosh pit, I got a look at the crowd — blacker, browner and with more women than any I'd seen at Damaged City fest in the past — that caught him. Despite the volume of Turnstile's turnt-up hardcore jams, the moment
