the first ever Japanese hardcore punk band

SS and the birth of Japanese hardcore punk

(Credits: Far Out / Alchemy Records / Discogs)

As a nation, Japan doesn’t need much provocation to produce extreme art. If you think of all of the most abrasive and noisy music you’re aware of in the Western world, Japan has done it much louder, and the same applies to Japanese horror films in terms of their approach to gore and horrifying subject matter. If you want to make yourself feel uneasy, Japan will most definitely have you covered.

In music, reputation precedes bands like Hanatarash, known for their non-musical antics involving bulldozers and chainsaws, and The Gerogerigegege, who mixed deafening blasts of noise with exhibitionist performance art. However, there are also less visually extreme but equally punishing noise acts from the country, such as Merzbow and Incapacitants. However, it isn’t just noise that Japan is renowned for producing, as the country also has a longstanding history with hardcore punk.

When punk emerged in the UK and US in the 1970s, it was brash and boisterous, but it took a little bit of time for it to transform into hardcore punk in both countries. Evidently, the early adopters such as Bad Brains and Black Flag in the US and Discharge and Subhumans in the UK weren’t extreme enough for the Japanese market, and so a group of four young men from Kyoto chose to get together and create their own spin on hardcore punk that was faster, more aggressive, and even more primitive and minimalistic than their Western counterparts.

SS were arguably the very first Japanese hardcore punk act to exist, and they took the stylings of early punk acts such as the Ramones and MC5 and turned them into a ballistic surge of energy. Their songs barely scraped a minute in length, the chord changes were done at a rapid rate, and there was a sheer sense of attitude about them that made the sneer of other punk acts seem performative.

However, despite being trailblazers in their field, very little evidence of the group’s material exists, save for two live EPs that barely scrape the ten-minute mark, and both of these were released in the years following their disbandment in 1979. On top of this, a handful of live videos have surfaced online in an effort to immortalise the band and their legacy, but no record of any studio material exists from the two years in which they were active.

On these EPs, they race through their original material at lightning speed, with a fidgetiness and brutality that is unmatched by their peers. Among the tracklists on their two live records are covers of other punk bands that significantly influenced the group, with versions of ‘First Time’ by The Boys and ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ by the Ramones being faster than the originals. In fact, the influence of the Ramones goes further than them paying homage to one of their songs; the four members all used the same surname, ‘SS’, much like their Queens counterparts, with Tommy, Jun, Tsuyoshi and Takami making up the lineup.

For a band that was so far ahead of the curve, it’s remarkable that very few people discuss SS when talking about the emergence of hardcore punk acts across the globe, but their short-lived existence and lack of available recorded material during their lifespan is perhaps why they’ve remained so buried beneath other acts who are better documented. Despite that, the approximately 20 minutes of material that we do have is so electrifying and full of verve that you barely need to be exposed to any more. It offers everything you could want in a hardcore punk band – it’s brutal, urgent, and completely goes against all convention.