End It's Akil Godsey: 'If you ain't got trust, you ain't got shit'
In (maybe) his first Australian interview, hardcore's king of charisma talks opening for Blink-182, class warfare, and why you should stop being scummy.
“I have this kid’s tooth. I do not know this young man. I’m in possession of his DNA. I have his actual tooth on my nightstand right now.”
Akil Godsey is the frontperson of Baltimore’s End It, one of hardcore’s most exciting bands. He’s calling me from Texas, and over a generous hour1 imparts wisdom on paying it forward, gatekeeping, and how to not be a scumbag. And, yes, he’s also telling me why he has this kid’s tooth.
It went down at End It’s LP launch release show at the Baltimore Soundstage. The band was capping off their first run of US headline shows, touring their debut album Wrong Side of Heaven. Just one month prior, they played two arena shows in support of Blink-182 and Alkaline Trio.
Now, in their hometown, the tour was going out with a bang: local legends Torn Apart warmed the stage with their first show in 20 years, a bespectacled Godsey patrolled the stage in a Bracewar tee, and somewhere in the crowd a child is about to get his shit rocked.
Akil Godsey, a narrator too good to paraphrase: “He’s a taller kid. Old boy is, like, 13 years old, he’s a middle schooler going into high school. He got smoked in the pit. Both of his two front teeth came out.”
“Someone came up to me at the end of the shows. I’m dapping everybody up and they gave me one of his teeth. The security came to ask for it back and give it to him. He comes back in … I got this kid’s fucking tooth in my possession now, and I took a picture with him. Two bloody, fucking gaping holes in his face, stoked as hell that he got knocked the fuck out at the hardcore gig. That’s what I came home to.”2
It’s a fitting introduction to End It, whose music will smack you square in the face and leave you thrilled for the experience. The band’s muscular, propulsive music is proudly indebted to frenetic New York hardcore bands of the 90s, such as District 9 and Neglect, and has an instinctive brilliance to it.
Godsey was drafted into the band around 2017 by friend and Flatspot Records owner Che Figueroa. Since then, he’s commandeered End It through a handful of standout EPs, line-up changes, and their first album. Wrong Side of Heaven has propelled the band to new heights, including their first Australian tour alongside Scowl and Secret World, starting November 28.
“This does not feel real, but it doesn’t feel like we shouldn’t be here,” Godsey says. “You don’t start a hardcore band thinking, ‘One day I’m gonna open for Blink-182.’ You start a hardcore band because you got fucking chip on your shoulder. You’re just angry.
“Now we’re in our 30s, we play hardcore stuff, nothing’s changed. We’ve not been told to tone down our message or change anything. We’re just right place, right time.”
Godsey is half-right, half-humble. It’s true that the latest explosion of hardcore is pushing the scene to heights previously unimaginable (SPEED’s Jem Siow told me something similar in 2024), but End It have stood out from the pack for good reason: their drumming slaps, their riffs sound phenomenal, drawing on guitarist Ray Lee’s diverse listening habits, and Godsey’s vocals are magnetic, molten, and wasting no words.
As a songwriter, he’s as sharp and matter-of-fact as he is in conversation, such as when reflecting on the “freeing” experience of playing to arena crowds.
“These people don’t give a fuck who we are, and that’s perfect for us, because we don’t give a fuck. ‘These are all new songs to y’all, what’s going on?’ Let’s just get up here and do the thing. Look at all these people I get to yell at right now,” Godsey says.
“It’s not personal. They came to see Alkaline Trio, they came to see Blink, then here I am: I got a polo shirt tucked into my pants, talking about the government. They’re like, ‘Whoa, whoa, this is not… is he talking about the Federal Reserve? The fuck is going on here?’.”
Between the talk of central banking and songs like ‘Empire’s Demise’ and ‘Anti-Colonial’, Godsey would comfortably fit the vanguard of hardcore’s latest wave of stridently anti-fascist voices. But he’s reluctant to prescribe any radical aims to his art.
“I look at it this way: if we were going to have a revolution, it would have happened by now,” he says. “I’m sitting around acknowledging the same issues my parents were acknowledging.”
“The poor think they’re rich. You are not a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. You are my neighbour. Our kids go to the same school. Just because you have a Mercedes does not make us of different classes. If I can knock on your front door, we are the same. As soon as people realise that we could come together and then, shit, fuck money.”
Or, as he puts more directly elsewhere in our call: “Steal from work. Show up late. Who gives a shit? It’s not your corporation.”
Akil Godsey not indiscriminate about this: seconds later, he’s again apologising about being late to our call by a few minutes, and often returns to the concept of respecting people’s time.
It comes up when admitting he was “unprepared” during the recording of Wrong Side of Heaven, which was produced by hardcore veteran Brian McTernan (Battery).
“I can be honest now it’s over, but we weren’t necessarily having the best communication with the band, because, again, we’re three grown men with shit going on,” Godsey said.
“By the time I got in the booth and started demoing vocal-wise and writing things, out of not wanting to waste Brian’s time, I just locked in … I know for a fact this grown ass man would much rather be home with his wife and child than here with me as I struggled through these hardcore songs.”
Wrong Side of Heaven met the high expectations set by the band’s previous work, and has given End It the opportunity to take their work global. Their first Australian shows will see them play 11 shows alongside Scowl, finishing off with a Flatspot Records/Last Ride World super-show in Melbourne.
Aside from its propensity to separate teeth from mouths, one of the best parts about End It’s live show is the way Godsey opens the set.
“When I’m on tour, I get diva privilege,” he puts it. “I get to be like, ‘Oh, yo, can you put this song on? I’mma warm my voice up.’ Which is, really, I just want to listen to this song.”
He’ll then sing — often acapella — anything from 50 Cent to Fleetwood Mac, arresting the audience’s bloodlust with vocals forged in a childhood at church choir, right before the band rips into form and shit hits the fan.
On Wrong Side of Heaven, Godsey flashes his range on ‘Could You Love Me?’ a cover of Maximum Penalty’s 1996 yearning, melodic stomper.
“If you with the hardcore, that’s just one of those songs. If you know, you know. But it really is like a b-side, because Max Pen didn’t get the respect they deserved, in my opinion, much like The Icemen, a lot of New York hardcore bands,” he says.
“It has elements in a pop structure, but it’s not like us covering Michael Jackson. It’s a hardcore band covering the hardcore song. I’m glad we got to do it to show a younger generation. If, for every 100, we turned at least three kids on the real 90s, fucking New York hardcore… that’s really what it’s about, is keeping the tradition alive.”
It’s a fitting time to talk about hardcore and its traditions. Hardcore’s mainstream eruption has yielded newfound commercial interest: Turnstile are suddenly eight-time GRAMMY nominees, Knocked Loose played Jimmy Kimmel Live! and SPEED can listen to themselves while playing a WWE 2K game.
But all the new eyes brings an influx of outsiders, some of whom may not fully grasp hardcore’s affectionate culture of consensual communal violence. Godsey is amused and thoughtful when I ask him how these worlds mix, likening it to a wedding.
“You get two different families coming together, and it’s like now by law and by ritual, we are one by law. You paid for a ticket. By ritual, we’re going to the concert, but we don’t live life the same way. Now you about to see some wild shit in this room.”
I suggest Australia might see this around the new year, when Turnstile play their run of headline dates, and Godsey jokes he might stick around to see it.
“You know what’s crazy? At this moment in my life, I really could just casually miss my flight and spend a week in Australia. It really wouldn’t affect much of anything,” he tells me.
It’s a deserved place for one of the most beloved and respected figures in modern hardcore. In a scene where tour abroad scarcely feels within reach, even relative to the already-constricting world of the arts, End It are a standout success story.
With achievement comes new perspectives, and Godsey wraps the call with two thoughts. The first he admits is a “hard conversation” to have, and he speaks broadly without naming names.
“Motherfuckers are gonna take it to heart, but I don’t mean it in any disrespectful way,” he qualifies. “Just because your name has a legacy does not mean it still got the weight it once had. Sometimes it will behove you to co-headline. Don’t headline.”
He analogises it to taking care of his ageing father: “Everyone can win. Oh no, your bills are paid. You wrote this song 30 fucking years ago, and you just paid your rent and your phone bill off of a 20 minute performance to full packed house, you’re welcome.”
“I can’t wait for the day where there’s a younger generation of kids doing their thing. They also selling out Baltimore. ‘Hey, can End It co-headline?’ I’d love to. I get to leave early? Oh, beautiful. I left you kids a note in the green room and a little bit of weed in the jar. I grew it in my basement. I’ll talk to you later, and I can go back to fucking nowhere and shut the fuck up.”
But while Godsey is eager to take care of the generations who earned his trust, his second thought is of the “appreciative” but “weird space” he’s in about requests for him to feature on other artists’ songs.
“Because hardcore is still in this very infantile state to a degree, it sucks that you can’t risk doing a feature for someone, and then you find out that he’s been taking pictures of girls’ feet while they sleep and shit like that,” he says. “Now I’m lumped in with this dude because I decided to collab on a song, and I hate that I even have to have those thoughts.”
“Let’s leave them with this: If we treat each other better, we can all trust each other. You ain’t got trust, you ain’t got shit. Everyone wins if you can trust each other, so just stop being a fucking scumbag. I know it’s hard. I love doing scummy things. The moment I actually gave up the ghost and decided I wasn’t going to live life like that no more, I opened for Blink-182.”
End It is touring Australia from November 28 with Scowl and Secret World, dates and tickets available here. They will also be playing Flatspot/Last Ride World at Melbourne’s 170 Russell on December 13 (tickets).
‘Wrong Side of Heaven’ is out now via Flatspot Records. Listen now on Bandcamp or Apple Music.
Sincere, genuine shoutout to Akil for staying well longer than the allocated interview time: “I believe you’re the first person from Australia I’ve ever interviewed with. I feel like I may have interviewed one other person. So, this can go as long as it needs to go.”
Akil on transporting said tooth from Baltimore to Texas: “It was in my pocket. I walked through TSA with it, and they didn’t ask a question about me having a human’s tooth in my possession. They’re just like, ‘Not a bomb? Cool. Yeah, you’re fine.’ I don’t know what to do, I just get on the plane.”