In the Chicagoland hardcore scene, musicians tend to wear multiple hats and wear them hard. It is a world built on the assumption that anyone serious about music is playing in two bands, booking a third, and recording a fourth in somebody's basement on a weekend with no sleep. Michael Kulakowski fits that profile precisely. As guitarist and backing vocalist for both Trust In The Serpent and the djent-tinged beatdown outfit LYCVNS, he has spent years in service of the collective, subordinating his own instincts to the demands of the band, the room, and the riff. The Snaggletooth EP, billed simply as an "815 solo project," is his attempt to step out from behind those obligations and answer a different question: what does the music sound like when no one else is in the room? The 815 designation is worth pausing on; it's the area code of the surrounding northern Illinois region (Rockford to be exact), and it's a scene with its own identity, distinct from Chicago proper, shaped by the particular restlessness of smaller Midwestern cities where the venues are fewer, the crowds are tighter, and the music tends to carry a more personal, unglamorous urgency. Rooting IGNORANT$ in that geography rather than the broader Chicagoland umbrella is a deliberate act of specificity. It tells you something about where this project is coming from, emotionally as much as physically. The answer to that opening question: "What does it sound like when no one else is in the room?" and it turns out that it's fast, confrontational, and uninterested in pleasantries.
Three tracks. Five minutes and seventeen seconds. No interludes, no ambient passages, no time wasted negotiating with the listener. This is hardcore punk in the most literal sense of the term, not the metalcore-adjacent, breakdown-dependent variant that dominates the contemporary underground, but something rawer and more direct. Where LYCVNS deals in weight and djent-inflected heaviness, IGNORANT$ traffics in velocity and economy. The shift is meaningful. It suggests that Kulakowski has been sitting on a certain kind of urgency that his primary projects couldn't fully accommodate, and that The Snaggletooth EP exists, in part, to discharge it. The EP opens with "BURN IN HELL," a title that functions less as provocation and more as orientation. It tells you exactly where you are standing and what the temperature is. As an opening statement for a debut solo project, it is almost aggressively unambiguous, and Kulakowski is not easing anyone in, not establishing goodwill before making demands. The track sets the EP's terms immediately: confrontational music made with the confidence of someone who has spent years watching how audiences respond to aggression delivered cleanly and without apology. His experience in live settings across both Trust In The Serpent and LYCVNS is audible in how the track is structured. It moves with the assurance of a musician who knows what it feels like to play a room, to feel the moment a crowd locks in.
That instinct for live performance extends beyond the record itself; for a solo hardcore project, releasing a live recording alongside the EP rather than a polished music video is an entirely consistent choice. It prioritizes honesty over presentation, which is precisely the value system hardcore has always claimed to operate by. It also signals that Kulakowski intends IGNORANT$ to exist as a performing entity, not merely a recording exercise, and that these songs are meant to be tested against a room, against noise, against the unpredictability of a live setting. "WATCH IT FADE" occupies the middle of the EP and provides its most interesting moment of tension. The title implies a certain resignation as a pulling back, a watching from a distance, which sits in productive contrast with the sonic aggression surrounding it. If "BURN IN HELL" is the door being kicked in, "WATCH IT FADE" is the moment after, when the adrenaline is still present,t but the clarity of what just happened begins to settle. It is not a ballad, not a pivot toward melody, but it carries a slightly different emotional register than its predecessor. In a project this brief, that differentiation matters enormously. It prevents the EP from collapsing into a single undifferentiated blast and demonstrates that even within a strict economy of runtime, Kulakowski is thinking about arc and movement.
The closing track, "IWRFB," is the project's most opaque entry as an acronym that offers no immediate translation and presumably means something specific to its author. That deliberate withholding is consistent with the project's general sensibility. IGNORANT$ is not a confessional project. It does not appear to be interested in explaining itself or providing the listener with a map. There is a certain punk orthodoxy to that posture, a refusal to over-articulate what the music is already communicating. "IWRFB" closes the EP without resolution in any conventional sense, which is arguably the correct choice. Neat conclusions would be tonally dishonest here. At the level of craft, the EP reflects the competencies you would expect from a musician with Kulakowski's accumulated experience. The guitar work is purposeful and less concerned with technical display than with propulsion and impact, which is precisely the right priority for music of this type. The production is appropriately unpolished without tipping into the kind of deliberate lo-fi that functions as aesthetic posturing. It sounds like someone who wanted the music to hit correctly and made the decisions necessary to ensure that it did, without spending more time on sonics than the songs required.
The limitations of the project are, in some sense, also its distinguishing features. Five minutes is not enough time to establish a fully realized artistic identity, and yet these three tracks are a calling card, not a comprehensive statement. There are questions The Snaggletooth EP raises that it cannot yet answer about range, about what IGNORANT$ sounds like when allowed more space, about whether the project can sustain this level of focused aggression across a longer format without either repeating itself or diluting what makes these three tracks work. Those are the questions a debut EP is supposed to generate, and by that measure, this one succeeds. What The Snaggletooth EP accomplishes is this: it establishes that Michael Kulakowski has something to say outside the band context, that he is capable of organizing that impulse into a coherent and purposeful piece of work, and that IGNORANT$ is a project worth watching. For a scene that has never lacked for confident voices, that is still a meaningful thing to be able to say.
Go give WATCH IT FADE a spin now!:
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