All-ages hardcore hub The Redroom picks up momentum

Known for its mixture of metal’s power and punk’s rapidity, hardcore music has gained popularity in the past 20 years as a uniquely American form, founding its most solid bases along the urbanized coasts.

To its loyal fans, hardcore is not only a genre of music but a lifestyle, sometimes exemplified through fans’ abstention from harmful substances, i.e. being “straight-edge,” and intense city pride.

For proud residents of the 253, one need look no further than the fans who flock every weekend to The Redroom at 2313 Tacoma Ave with “Tacoma” emblazoned on their chests, as documented in the venue’s grainy cover photo from Facebook.

Whether or not hardcore music is your cup of tea, The Redroom should be on the radar of any music listener, as the local hub for a vast music culture and also, perhaps more significantly, as it gradually becomes one of the region’s premiere all-ages venues.

The non-profit organization’s reputation has only just begun to make an impact on local musicians beyond hardcore bands, even reaching the folksy singer-songwriter demographic, who have become attracted to the prospect of unique audiences offered by an all-ages venue; an unfortunate rarity in Tacoma.

But recently, on The Redroom’s Facebook wall, an acoustic musician asked, “Is this mostly a hardcore venue?” to which the venue’s promoter replied, “The majority of the time, there are hardcore bands playing but we highly encourage music genres from all over the spectrum.”

Certainly, according to The Redroom’s current schedule, hardcore bands still seem to dominate the roster.

For example, tonight at 7pm, The Redroom will be hosting Sidetracked, Dead in the Dirt, Heartless, Dehumanized and Exogroth for a consistently hardcore night of entertainment. Tickets will be $8.

Then this Sunday, June 3rd, Archimedes, Watch Out!, Thirtyseven, Toxic Kid and Undefined will release an uncompromising array of breakdowns and two-step beats, starting from 7pm until roughly midnight. Tickets will be $7.

For the region’s numberless angsty teens, The Redroom provides not only a haven for hardcore music, but also a source of pride as one of the few all-ages venues in Tacoma to openly support such cutting-edge music.

Equally for Tacoma at large, it expresses the particular ability of an all-ages venue to bring seemingly disparate musical communities, both young and old, together under one roof as one definably local musical community.

Apparently, hardcore has settled at The Redroom for now but the venue won’t thrive until other genres are continuously included every weekend in order to meet the demands of Tacoma’s ever-expanding scope of musical interest.