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When the genre-mashing aggro-rock collective Soul Glo formed in 2014, frontman Pierce Jordan liked to joke around by visualizing wild, seemingly unachievable goals for the group. “I would be like, ‘Yo, if we play Coachella, I’m gonna play that shit fucking naked,” he says. This year, the gag lost some of its sparkle, since the Philly bruisers finally did perform at the festival — and Jordan did indeed run around in a discreet thong that made him look perfectly nude.
Even though Jordan remembers naysayers among his friends telling him that Soul Glo would never play the festival, the negativity never bothered him. “I allow people to tell me that some things could never happen, and it makes it that much better when it does happen,” he says over a Zoom from his home, where he’s dressed supremely comfortably in a leopard-print bathrobe. “It’s happened enough times now where I don’t think people around me really want to try me anymore.”
In recent years, Soul Glo have grown from a down-the-middle screamo group (named after a fake commercial in Coming to America) into trailblazers who play a nuanced, unpredictable hybrid of hardcore punk, metal, and hip-hop. The jagged music, which often embarks on tangents and detours without notice, buttresses Jordan’s shouted lyrics about overcoming depression and making sense of racism in America.
Soul Glo’s most recent album, last year’s Diaspora Problems, begins with the sound of a water-bong burble set to the rhythm of the 20th Century Fox drumbeat. The songs that follow flirt with funky bass (“Spiritual Level of Gang Shit”), samples from Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock’s “It Takes Two” (“Coming Correct Is Cheaper”), and full-on horn lines (“Thumbsucker”) — all while never taking a break from buzzsaw guitar riffs. Rolling Stone named it the metal album of the year.
Despite the self-assured power of their music, It took years for Soul Glo to find their sea legs. “The original idea for Soul Glo was to play local shows in Philadelphia and play with other bands that didn’t have a place in the city’s punk or hardcore shows,” Jordan says. The band issued an untitled debut EP in 2014, with song titles that pointedly reflected Jordan’s perspective. One, “Violence Against Black Women Goes Largely Unreported,” sounds like a car trying to get into gear before finding a heavy-metal groove, while another updates a cringy Minor Threat song title (“Guilty of Being White”) into the freight-train–propulsive “Guilty of Being … Wait.” The music recalled early-2000s screamo like City of Caterpillar, Orchid, and Pg. 99. The only consistent band members from then until Diaspora Problems were Jordan and guitarist Ruben Polo, though Polo exited the band after an ex-boyfriend accused him of rape by deception (an allegation Polo has denied).
The band tightened up its sound and introduced jazzier guitar chords on another untitled release, from 2016, quoting William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” and puncturing it with screams on “Untitled 4.” “‘Do you wish you were white?’” Pierce screams, posing it as a question directed at him before answering, “Don’t I wish instead I was invisible and inanimate?”
Multi-instrumentalist G.G. Guerra joined in 2017 to play bass and add samples to their tracks, and drummer TJ Stevenson came aboard the following year. Soul Glo’s 2019 LP, The Nigga in Me Is Me, found them starting to incorporate elements of hip-hop, noise, and jazz-fusion guitar. The lyrics still sound intensely personal, as Jordan makes sense of current events: “Them white niggas you fuck with turn tiki torch real quick,” he screams on “31,” which balances hardcore punk with hip-hop. “When you were crying on the phone to me, did you consider us friends?/Saying that his life was in our hands, or were we ‘criminals’ then?”
“I’ve noticed with punk and hardcore that a lot of lyrics are outwardly projected,” Jordan says. “That’s cool. But I’m like, ‘Damn, I’m never gonna do that.’ … I don’t want to shy away from that [personal] truth.”
Diaspora Problems represents the blossoming of all their ideas — a polyglot of genres representing a new musical language unique to Soul Glo. Asked what attracts him to aggressive music, Jordan smiles and says he feels he has undiagnosed ADHD. “My mind is never quiet, and I feel like aggressive music, in general, speaks to that,” he says. His dad listened to what he describes as “busy jazz,” and eventually Jordan discovered System of a Down and Linkin Park, which changed his life. “Listening to a grown man scream ignited something in me,” he says. “With both of those bands, ‘genre’ was about taking different pieces of what you liked to make a new thing. I always thought that was the point of music.”
He then found his way to death metal, hardcore, and every other style on Diaspora Problems (the late rappers Pop Smoke and Juice WRLD get shout-outs on the album), and he had something of an awakening. Now Jordan believes that “heavy” transcends genre; he points to James Brown screaming and Etta James’ singing “I’d Rather Go Blind” at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1975 as heavy. He’s been lucky to find bandmates that share his vision.
A big part of Jordan’s journey as a musician and lyricist has been opening himself up to new ways of thinking. Looking back on the late 2000s, when he discovered the deathcore bands Job for a Cowboy and Suicide Silence, the latter of whom had an emo look, he remembers how his friends used to call their music “gay metal.” “If you had swoopy hair and wore tight pants, it didn’t matter how heavy your band is, you were ‘gay,’” he says. “I definitely contributed to that shit, too. I learned all this homophobia and shit, which is funny as fuck because I be suckin’ dick now. But the way that people referred to different types of music and to each other with casual homophobia and racism… It’s just funny how things change. There have been a lot of social movements that have caused us to grow up.”
Jordan also credits coming up in the DIY punk scene with helping him and his bandmates realize that anything is possible. “Music is like a microcosm of the world at large,” he says. “And more and more people are fighting to define themselves on their own terms and outside of what we are buying and what is being sold to us. … There’s a lot of new people coming into hardcore music, not necessarily because it’s a new genre that they’re unfamiliar with, but also because they’re hearing messages and sentiments echoed that they’re not seeing in any kind of music. If you want to start a band, you should do it,” he adds. “Just do it because you want to understand yourself and be understood.”
