10 DIY Screamo Records You Might Have Missed

New Forms are no strangers to DIY Conspiracy. Back in 2019, we described their debut EP as “ferocious emo-violence. Short, straightforward, intensely passionate,” and almost seven years later that still pretty much nails their approach. Since then, the Boston band have toured with some of the best in the genre and appeared at festivals most bands would kill to play, putting them a few levels higher on the screamo iceberg than when I first encountered them. Thankfully, Nothing’s Sacred Anymore shows no urge in polishing away what made New Forms exciting in the first place. These five tracks are still loose, frantic, and overwhelmingly passionate, barreling forward with not a moment left for breath or respite. Beneath all that intensity, the lyrics are steeped in homesickness, alienation, deterioration, and the feeling of surrendering yourself to the natural world. Nothing lasts longer than two minutes, but New Forms pack an exhausting amount of passion and feeling into every second. Short, desperate, and absolutely fucking intense.

UK screamo band Cady are back with Limitations of the Human Form, which is a brilliant ten-track release that barely gives you a second to recover from its emotional and physical intensity. Instruments constantly shove each other out of the way in a compressed mass of distortion, while guitar and bass player share vocal duties, unleashing high-register screams, wounded wails, and the occasional neo-crust grunts that all sound permanently on the verge of collapse. Beneath that immense, devastating chaos, though, Cady leave plenty of room for angular twists and moments where everything briefly opens up before being crushed again. The lyrics are just as harrowing, circling grief, mortality, anxiety, religious (dis)belief, ideological manipulation, and the ways mistrust can be exploited by authoritarian warmongers. I haven’t revisited Cady’s older records recently enough to make grand comparisons, but Limitations of the Human Form feels like another triumph. It’s frantic, ugly, intelligent, and achingly human.

I think I have a soft spot for bands named after The X-Files references. Berlin four-piece Krycek released a killer emo-violence demo towards the end of 2024, and while they could easily have disappeared into the graveyard of short-lived projects, they resurfaced with shows and new material in summer 2026. After dropping a new single in July, Krycek return with second demo Die Affen von Gibraltar, released on tape by seminal label adagio830. Krycek’s raging, passionate screamo draws a direct line from the intense ’90s Bremen hardcore school to the generations of German emo-violence that followed through labels like adagio830 and React With Protest. Die Affen von Gibraltar tears through its title track in three equally frantic parts before revisiting 2024 opener “am Tag als Robin Zukunft kam,” now preceded by almost five unsettling minutes of noise and spoken-word political samples. The tape also adds the minute-long ripper “Letzte Nacht.” Raw, pummelling, and cathartic screamo in the best traditions of the German scene.

Italy arguably has the best screamo scene in Europe right now, both in terms of quantity and mere quality. Milan’s dagerman. arrived fully formed with their debut LP two years ago, and now return with Di fronte a noi il nulla, an eight-track album released through an international network of labels, including familiar names like ZBR and Shove Records. Translating roughly as “In front of us, the void”, the record swings between gut-wrenching screamo and beautifully melodic moments of respite. The production is tactile and textured, with an attention to detail that occasionally brings Italian greats like Raein and Øjne to mind, even if reducing dagerman. to comparisons would miss the point. The band take their name from Swedish existentialist and anarchist writer Stig Dagerman, whose work wrestled with morality, conscience, love, justice, sexuality, and social philosophy, and the Italian band carry a similarly searching spirit into their lyrics. If their debut revolved around capitalism as an endless accumulation of tragedies, Di fronte a noi il nulla is built around indifference. The numbness that settles in while wars rage, conflicts multiply, and right-wing governments continue taking power. Based around Milan’s historic Cox 18 squat and committed to a political DIY tradition, dagerman. make screamo that is as thoughtful as it is emotionally moving.

Brazilian band H.ISS were completely new to me before This Exhaustion Is Not Ours! landed in March 2026, but the passion and sheer heaviness packed into these five tracks immediately grabbed me. Formed in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais around 2024 from the ashes of older band Eu, Sozinho, H.ISS have somehow arrived at an astonishingly fully realized sound only two years later. Their self-released 10-inch / CD draws from classic late-’90s screamo while folding in the crushing intensity of modern bands like Eyelet, Dreamwell, and Frail Body, alongside the mammoth post-metal of Isis and Neurosis. The songwriting is impressively dynamic, shifting through different textures without ever losing its emotional persuasion, while Jack Shirley’s mix and master at The Atomic Garden in the US gives every eruption a crisp, destructive impact. H.ISS also bring plenty of intellectual and political strength to their lyrics, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, left-accelerationist writers like Mark Fisher, Nick Srnicek, and Alex Williams, and, more importantly, the band’s own working-class experience in the Global South. “Keep acting like you’re not going to shoot me” is one of the album’s most direct tracks, addressing Israeli settler colonialism and the genocide in Gaza. This Exhaustion Is Not Ours! is an incredibly solid release, and I’m damn sure that H.ISS would already be receiving far more attention if they happened to come from the Global North.

Little Rock, Arkansas band .HORSE FUNERAL. are definitely the weirdos on this list. Their self-titled record twists the mathy sasscore of the ’90s San Diego underground and labels like Gravity and Three One G into something much stranger than a simple Antioch Arrow or Blood Brothers rehash. The band describe their sound as an antithesis to hardcore’s hypermasculine archetypes, and that comes through in everything from the theatrical dual-vocal attack of Rachel and bassist Nelly to the oddball instrumentation, including occasional theremin, arguably one of the most fascinating instruments ever invented and one I’ve had the pleasure of messing around with myself. The lyrics are just as unruly, assembled through cut-up techniques, tarot, kabbalistic references, exquisite-corpse writing, and fragments of Rachel’s existing poetry. Across songs like “Salome,” “Sazerac Drinker,” and “Cupid, Cupid,” funeral imagery, religious symbolism, sex, gender, booze, family ghosts, and social inequality tumble into one another in fever-dream combinations, while “He Who Gets Slapped” and “Casket City” turn that surrealism toward work, power, and social misery. The album is chaotic, flamboyant, abrasive, funny and morbid. It’s one really difficult to pin down, which is why .HF. should be at the top of your list of bands to check out.

When I hear the phrase Dutch emo-violence, I immediately think of the wildly intense aural destruction of bands like Shikari and Laatste Halte. Dooie Mus take a slightly different route, though, leaning less toward grindcore and more toward classic late ’90s screamo while holding tight to the same DIY-or-die spirit. The Haarlem two-piece formed in early 2016, and their name literally means “dead sparrow” in Dutch, taken from the expression “iemand blij maken met een dooie mus”; essentially, getting someone’s hopes up only to leave them disappointed. Thankfully, this record does the exact opposite. This is gloriously lo-fi screamo shifting between noodling instrumental passages, frantic eruptions, and high-pitched vocal anguish, with plenty here for fans of Jeromes Dream, The Spirit of Versailles, and To Dream of Autumn. The production has that wonderfully rough, basement-recorded authenticity, while the Dutch-language lyrics move between introspective questions of self-perception and broader political concerns around class and social inequality. Most tracks burn out in two or three minutes, but closing epic “Humans (II)” stretches past 13 minutes, continuing the themes of 2020’s “Humans” with a bleak meditation on humanity’s domination of other animals, nature, and the planet.

Las Cuatro Revueltas is one of those collaborative records where the political and aesthetic ideas feel just as important as the music itself. Bringing together Luna Sedata (Yucatán, Mexico), Kenopsia (Lima, Peru), Malplena (Santiago, Chile), and hanakotoba (Mexico City/Puebla, Mexico), the ten-track split unites four women-fronted bands from across Latin America around a strongly anti-authoritarian, feminist, and DIY spirit. The record opens with Luna Sedata, probably my favorite band on the split, whose rough post-hardcore and screamo erupts with mathy twists and an almost tidal sense of momentum. Kenopsia move into denser neo-crust and blackened territory, while Malplena lean toward more traditional screamo and post-hardcore, and hanakotoba close things with a more expansive, hopeful sound that recalls the emotional sweep of Envy and Habak. Lyrically, Las Cuatro Revueltas is equally compelling. Luna Sedata write of anger, memory, and resistance; Kenopsia circle pain, disappearance, and grief; Malplena illiuminate dissident identity, systemic violence, and the disappearance of Chilean land defender Julia Chuñil; while hanakotoba turn toward camaraderie, collective care, rebellion, and the possibility of finding shelter in one another. Conceived by Luna Sedata’s Serena Cuevas in response to the lack of space for women and dissident voices in music, the split feels less like four bands sharing a release and more like one sustained act of solidarity.

Peruvian DIY punk collective Movimiento Circular de los Árboles was involved in distributing the Las Cuatro Revueltas split above, but they’ve also helped connect a much wider network of bands through a series of international splits and compilations. This 5-way intercontinental screamo split isn’t their latest release, but it’s the one that grabbed my attention the most, bringing together Jamais Vu (Malaysia), Razones para el olvido (Peru), Portia (USA), Löri (Germany), and Ümit (Mexico). There’s no single sound or concept holding these nine tracks together, but that’s part of its DIY appeal. Jamais Vu open with two frantic songs in Bahasa Melayu dealing with personal despair and the wider horrors of war and genocide; Razones para el olvido follow with anxious, dramatic screamo centered on confinement, dependency, and trying to escape destructive cycles. New Orleans band Portia contribute the oddball “Jazz Hostage #2,” recorded on the spot to four-track cassette and carrying both personal and anti-capitalist message. Löri slow things down with “Soare,” a sombre five-minute song about grief, memory, and losing a parent, before Mexican duo Ümit close the split with three gut-wrenching tracks moving through wounds, loneliness, and fragile hope. Here’s five different countries, scenes, languages, and approaches stitched together through the camaraderie of the international DIY screamo.

Back in 2017, Øjne drummer Jacopo wrote a Bandcamp Daily feature about what was then a relatively small and underexplored emo and screamo scene across the Balkans. A lot has changed since then. New blood has flowed throughout the former Yugoslav region, while blogs like xDekonstrukcija Yugoviolencex (run by Filip, who also writes for DIY Conspiracy) have been digging much deeper into those local scenes. In July 2026, Filip took the next logical step for the blog and released Gledaju nas kao ptice, its first compilation of screamo, emo, and post-hardcore from across the post-Yugoslav area. The 18 tracks vary wildly in sound, language, and recording quality, moving from rough bedroom recordings and blown-out emo-violence to cleaner post-hardcore and slower, more melodic pieces, with bands singing in both English and their native languages. A few names, like Mališa Bahat and YÖU, were already around when Jacopo wrote his 2017 Balkan screamo article, but most of the compilation goes much further underground, gathering bands that would be almost impossible to discover without projects like this. That unevenness is part of the charm. Gledaju nas kao ptice is not a genre sampler but an archival document and shows sincerity that’s paramount to punk records from less privileged regions of the world. A real gem, and I really hope the upcoming physical tapes disappear fast.