Locals Only

This one arrives with something resembling a chip on its shoulder. The production is tighter and more confrontational than much of underscores' catalog, with guitars that have a garage-recorded immediacy and drums that hit with the kind of blunt force that suggests a live room rather than a plugin. There's a defiant, almost sneering quality to the vocals — the kind of performance where the voice is weaponized against an implied audience, sharp and a little contemptuous. The song is about authenticity as a site of conflict: who gets to claim belonging, who polices the perimeters of a scene, the way community can calcify into gatekeeping without anyone noticing when the shift happened. It has the specific energy of someone who grew up loving something deeply and then watched that thing get used as a credential. Within underscores' Wallsocket-era output, this track skews toward the more aggressive, politically textured end — less interior collapse, more outward confrontation. Sonically it owes something to the post-hardcore tradition without being beholden to it, and there are moments where the production tears open in ways that feel genuinely surprising. You'd listen to this while walking fast and angry, or while writing something you needed to mean.