Meet XCOMM: The explosive Los Angeles punks ready to take on the world

XCOMM’s first ever song was born of fire. One night, while working at a pizza joint in the group’s home neighbourhood of Venice Beach, California, Michael Gatto gave a bottle of hand sanitiser to a homeless person at the end of his shift. “Don’t drink it,” he warned. To be fair, the man didn’t; instead, the flammable alcoholic liquid was used to start a blaze in a trash can.

“I would sometimes skate from my house to and from work,” Michael, the group’s singer and guitarist, says. “I would get off shift [and] there’s some homeless guy talking to me for half an hour… now I’ve got to make this two-mile, three-mile trek on the Boardwalk, at night, with no flashlight. I was definitely on the verge of some close encounters.”

The fire inspired Time To Burn, the title track of XCOMM’s excoriating Ross Robinson (Korn, Slipknot, The Cure) produced debut album. Relentlessly forceful, with its mixture of breakneck punk and metal chops, its 11 songs comprise the most striking postcard from the area of Los Angeles the group call home since the exhilarating self-titled debut by local heroes Suicidal Tendencies 43 years ago. Like other neighbourhoods in LA, Venice has palm trees and sunshine as far as the eye can see. But it also has homeless encampments, drugs, and a frisson of danger. It has an edge.

“It’s definitely a pirate’s paradise,” laughs the singer.

With designs beyond the beachfront confines of Venice, XCOMM’s liaison with Ross Robinson came to pass after the producer watched from the side of the stage at one of the group’s LA concerts. Believing that he was having a great show, anyway, 14-year-old drummer Revel Young Ian – whose father happens to be Scott Ian, from Anthrax – looked to the wings and saw “the guy who made the records that made me want to make music, losing his mind” at the ferocity of it all.

He continues: “Then, right after the show, he came up to us and [said], ‘Let’s make a record. I’m going to sign you to my label [Blowed Out Records] and you’re going to start pre-production two months from now. We were, like, ‘Okay’.”

Today, we meet Michael and Revel at the very studio at which Time To Burn was recorded. It was just one year ago, they say, that they were listening to its freshly minted output, and looking forward to the day when it would at last be released. Speaking to us prior to its release, when just five songs already available on streaming services, the group’s singer notes with pride that “people are loving it… the love we’re getting back is definitely amazing.”

Certainly, they’ve been getting themselves out there. Three years after first harvesting an audience by putting on their own shows – on the Boardwalk, and beyond, in Venice – in January, XCOMM were invited by Dave Grohl to open for the Foo Fighters at the “Fabulous” Forum, nine-and-a-half miles down Washington Boulevard in Inglewood. As the quintet took to the stage at the historic venue, its young members were stirred by memories of nights spent on the other side of the barrier between performer and audience. Michael saw the Ozzfest here, on New Year’s Eve in 2018. A year later, Revel witnessed what was then billed as Slayer’s last ever show, when he was just eight years old.

“I still think about it, like, ‘Oh my God, we played the Forum,’” the drummer says. “I forget how big of a show that was for me. I’ve been going to shows at the Forum my entire life, since I was really little. It didn’t feel like we were meant to be there, but at the same time, it also felt like we were exactly where we needed to be.”

Out in the crowd, that night, the sight of two circle-pits on the arena’s vast floor, was a sure sign of the progress punishing music has made since the days of XCOMM’s forefathers. In terms of a public profile, today, the Foo Fighters are the equivalent of a group such as Van Halen or Bon Jovi. The very idea that either of these arena-bothering superstars would, in 1986, have invited, say, hardcore herberts such as Dirty Rotten Imbeciles or the Bad Brains to open their show at the Forum is simply unthinkable.

“We did a Nailbomb cover and then later that night Dave [Grohl] was doing Everlong,” Michael says. “That’s pretty polar.”

Inevitably, given the racket emanating from the stage, not everyone loved it. On the evening itself, the members of XCOMM recall older audience members looking at the stage with expressions that suggested they were seeing, as Revel puts it, “literal demons who were slaughtering people”. After the fact, on Reddit, the musicians read complaints from ticketholders who were offended that the band seemed to spend their entire 17-song set screaming.

Today, the two young punks laugh at their ability to polarise.

“That’s what we wanted to do,” says Michael Gatto. “We completed our mission with that show.”

Get your copy of Time To Burn on exclusive orange crush vinyl.

Read this next:

• “People are seeking a sense of belonging, a sense of connection, a feeling of authenticity and real emotion”: Inside the resurgence of hardcore
• 10 reasons why you need Speed in your life
  
• Drain: “It doesn’t matter if you just got into punk music or you’ve been into it your whole life – this band is for everyone”