Outta Pocket

Outta Pocket formed in the Bay Area, California in 2020, and from the beginning the intention was to play heavy music without flinching. Vocalist Lee Michel-Santana, guitarist Chris Oropeza, bassist ED, and drummer Dylan Gillespie came together with influences that pointed directly toward the harder end of the hardcore spectrum: beatdown, death metal, the rawer corners of metalcore. What they built out of those influences is music that is purposefully dense and relentlessly physical.

Their demo landed in 2020 and the Purest Pain EP followed in 2021, establishing them in the Bay Area hardcore scene and beginning to attract attention from outlets that cover serious heavy music. Waste of a Man, their debut full-length, arrived in July 2023 through Streets of Hate, a New York-based hardcore label known for releasing uncompromising material, and it was the record that brought them wider recognition. Stereogum described the album as recklessly heavy. Brooklyn Vegan highlighted it as a standout. The praise was warranted.

"On Sight" had already appeared as a 2020 single before finding its home on Waste of a Man, demonstrating the band's early commitment to a specific sonic identity that they developed and sharpened over the following years. "Despair" opens the full-length and establishes what the listener is in for: not relief, not resolution, but fourteen minutes of focused aggression that gives shape to something real. "Wrong Hand" features Julian of Grounds of Execution, a collaboration that places Outta Pocket within a community of bands who understand what they are doing and why. "Something More" rounds out the record's catalog of tracks, each one serving the overall architecture of an album that never loses sight of what it wants to be.

In 2025, Your Last Breath arrived as a new EP on Streets of Hate, extending the catalog and confirming that Outta Pocket had not moderated their approach. "Pray For Salvation" leads the four-track release, a title that carries the weight of desperation without irony, backed by music that earns the emotional register it operates in.

The Bay Area has been home to some of the most important hardcore and metal in American music history, and Outta Pocket are working in full awareness of that lineage, bringing the intensity of beatdown and the punishing precision of death metal into a sound that is entirely their own.