Recourse

Like so many mid-2000s bands, Maryland's Recourse merge elements of hardcore and metal into a Molotov-metalcore cocktail of a highly explosive nature. Only, in Recourse's case, that cocktail's main thrust owes more to the former genre's working-class ethic than the latter's similarly underground but somewhat more high-brow and embellished ambitions. Founded in 1999, the quartet gradually gained followers while honing material and touring around the Eastern Seaboard, eventually putting out a self-titled EP through their own Skinlifter Records in 2002. Three years, much hard work, and a few compilation appearances later, vocalist Troy Norwood, guitarist Bill Hawthorne, bassist Jason Stallings, and drummer Rich Schaefer unleashed their full-length debut, Weakening the Structure, through This Dark Reign Records.