RICHMOND, Va. — Richmond’s United Blood music festival made a triumphant return to Shockoe Bottom this past weekend after a five-year hiatus.
Hundreds of hardcore, punk, and metal fans from across the country and overseas flocked to the Canal Club for over 30 sets of moshing, stage dives, and community.
“I’m coming from California,” said Jennifer Baltazar. “Richmond has a really cool hardcore scene and I kinda wanted to see what it was all about.”
David Foster and Colin Ackerman started United Blood in 2007. After the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the planned event for 2020, many were unsure if the festival would return.
“In that moment, after everything that had happened in the world and after the run that we had had as a fest,” said David Foster, one of the founders, “I felt like I had done and achieved everything we wanted to, and I said maybe that’s the last one. You know, 2019, and we decided not to do another fest.”
But to Foster, after spending the past few years traveling to other hardcore music festivals and seeing his friend’s bands, there was something deep in the pit of his stomach that didn’t love how United Blood ended.
“It felt like it was kind of taken from us,” Foster said.
“Basically, ever since we called it quits,” said Ryan Wall, a promoter of UB and member of Richmond hardcore band Bracewar, “Everybody in this music community has been in our ears begging us, ‘Guys, you gotta bring it back’.”
“The overarching theme that I heard from a lot of kids from here but also a lot of people that travel was that they really missed what United Blood did,” Foster said. “Just how it seemed like this perfect melting pot of all different types of punk and hardcore. But it was special because it was in Richmond and it was just special to the city, to the scene.”
With that confidence from the hardcore scene, United Blood 2025, the 14th festival of the series, was announced last December.
In-person tickets for locals sold out in a day at Vinyl Conflict Record Store, and online tickets sold out in less than 10 minutes, according to Foster.
“I immediately had to buy tickets. I had to be here. Virginia hardcore is the best in the country in my opinion,” said one attendee from San Francisco, California.
Noticeable among veterans who have been part of this music scene for decades was a younger wave of showgoers. Joe Skinner said he enjoys sharing that experience with his son.
“I’m 52 years old, so I’ve been going to shows since the early 90s," Skinner said. "I’ve lived in Colorado for a bit, I’ve seen shows all over, but coming back to Richmond and Richmond having such a scene is huge. My son’s 19 and he’s playing drums in a few bands so he’s immersed in the scene, and he’s going to VCU, so it’s a lot of fun.”
“The coolest thing is when you see kids that are coming to this show like United Blood that have never been to a festival before,” Foster said. “We haven’t had a show in six years, and the last time there was a United Blood, somebody might have been 12 years old. Now they’re 16, 17, 18, and maybe they spent the last five years listening to this stuff and haven’t gotten to see it. So now they get to experience the excitement of seeing bands from all over the world and feeling stoked on it and feeling that energy, and then they say, 'I'm starting a band, I'm writing a demo, we're going to try and get on a show this weekend.' And that's the coolest part of hardcore. It's so tangible. You can go to a show, watch a band play in front of a thousand people. They get off the stage, and you can walk up to that singer and say, 'Thanks man, that was awesome,' and they say, 'Thanks for checking us out.' That's not reality for most music.”
“Hardcore has always been something that a lot of people will tell you it’s a youth movement. It started as a youth movement,” said Wall. “But what’s been really cool to see as time moves on in the greater hardcore scene, people are getting older and still choosing to stay around because they can still find some reason to connect with it. There’s a lot of us that have families, have real jobs, real careers that we work towards but we still find the value in being involved in this and we want to contribute to it and we want to leave it in a better place than we found it for the generation that coming up behind us to carry it forward.”
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