Free hardcore punk anyone?

Although the actual artifact of rare vinyl can never be replicated, thanks to the internet we can a least enjoy the music of those hard-to-find bands. And enjoying them I am! Stumbling upon Nation of Fire last week was simply the tip of the iceberg — there's more free download sites out there than I thought, and that's only in the realm of hardcore punk!

There's too many for me to list, but I thought I'd post links to the sites I found most fruitful:

Nation on Fire: mainly british anarch-punk and UK82 hardcore, with a good links page to other similar sites. Use the search bar top left to save time, or scroll through the recent posts section to find a band.

Punk As Fuck: a Polish blog with both British and international hardcore, punk, thrash and crust, which can be translated using google. Best thing about this site is all the bands are listed alphabetically down the right hand side! Here I found Crucifix, a band I've been looking for for ages, as well as a lot of other bands that I had heard but never had full EP's of. Check out Boston band Seige... fast and mean! The only downside of this site is the .rar host program only allows one download per 15 minutes unless you pay, so it's time consuming, but well worth the wait.

Budda Khan: haven't downloaded a lot here but the links page is huge, which means there's bound to be a lot more downloads via this site.

Bloodjunkies: this is a real gem. This morning I downloaded about 10 US hardcore bands that are quite hard to find on vinyl, including the classic 'This Is Boston Not LA' compilation and bands like MDC, Circle One, Jerry's Kids, Gang Green, Hated Youth, Necros and YDI. Mainly american bands, they're all listed in regions — but use the search bar to find what you're after. Also, the 'next page' button is in another language but often there's more than one page, so check that out too.

A lot of the downloads don't come as MP3's, so you'll need to convert them if you want to listen to them on itunes or your stereo (however if you have VLC Player or other programs you can listen to them on the computer). On Mac I use Switch, which converts .rar files to MP3, and it's free to download. There's a lot more out there though, so just google them.

I think it may be time to start another band while I'm inspired!