Click here to watch a Gallows video clip

Click here to watch a Bad Brains video clip

Click here to listen to and download a hardcore iMix

When Gallows were paid £1m for two albums, it was a symbolic moment, as if hardcore had finally parlayed the pervasive influence it has had on rock in the past three decades into tangible, commercial success. The band’s front man, Frank Carter, is still buzzing about it. As we speak, he is about to pack for a two-month world tour.

“We can do whatever we want now,” he says. “There’s no pressure to write a second album that’s going to shift units, because we were signed on the fact that our live show is incendiary. We keep control of our merchandise and our artwork and our songs, and those are the three important things. People think that to be in a DIY hardcore band, you’ve got to play to 15 people for 20 years and continuously lose money. But if it starts working, why should that be a problem?”

The band, in their early twenties, have been going less than three years. Their rise has been swift. “In the first two weeks of this year,” Carter recalls, “we were in a Royal Mail van that didn’t even have all its windows. Now, we have people to drive us to shows, in a bus. It feels brilliant, but it was also an extraordinary case of right time, right place.”

Hardcore has been a small, but constant presence in alternative rock since its inception in the USA at the tail end of the 1970s. It began, hot on the heels of punk, with four bands: Bad Brains and Minor Threat, from Washington, DC, and, in California, Black Flag and Dead Kennedys. Three of them lasted just a few years, but Bad Brains are still going, 30 years on. Four rastas who intersperse their ultra-fast, complex and melodic hardcore with dub-reggae jams, they always sounded a big step removed from punk, though Darryl Jenifer, their bassist and spokesman, cites the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and the Damned as influences.

“Hardcore developed,” he explains, “when we started to adopt roots and rasta culture while still holding onto our rock ideas and aspirations. We always wanted to feel we had a message to our music. So when four black youths from DC started to sing about I Luv I Jah but also Destroy Baby-lon and FVK [Fearless Vampire Killers], other groups started to do it, too.” But it was not only the message. “Hardcore starts with the music stepped up a little faster,” Jenifer says, in the understatement of the year.

Bad Brains have had personnel changes over the years, but it is the original lineup who have made a new album, Build a Nation, and who are playing in London this week. The reunion is big news for the world-wide hardcore scene. Build a Nation is produced by Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, who were a young hardcore band in the fledgling New York scene of the 1980s. “I wanted to keep it raw,” Yauch says of the Brains album, “the way I remember them sounding when they played at CBGB – like it was so loud that the PA was about to explode.” Bad Brains brought progressive elements into hardcore from the start – even jazz fusion – and virtuoso musician-ship. Though they’ve never quite broken into the mainstream, their new songs have had more than 400,000 plays on MySpace. They are the connoisseur’s hardcore band.

As Mike Haliechuck of the Toronto group F***ed Up says: “It’s true that Minor Threat and Black Flag are examples of the unadulterated hardcore style, but if you talked to anybody in those bands, they’d be able to explain to you why Bad Brains were the most important.” F***ed Up are part of a growing North American hardcore scene with a tantalising variety of subgenres: from the wonky Butthole Surfers-style concoctions of Pissed Jeans to the complex time signatures and structures of the Dillinger Escape Plan, to F***ed Up’s own hardcore-meets-classic rock. For Haliechuck, being a hardcore punk is “an approach rather than a sound”. He mentions the Who and Pink Floyd as inspirations: “What a hardcore band does is distil influences down and make them insanely loud.”

As for Gallows, nobody can doubt their hardcore credentials: Carter was tattooed on stage during their set at the Reading festival this summer, and at the end of last month, he had to cancel two shows after an on-stage accident caused five days’ concussion. But, he says, he loves Sinatra, James Brown and Ray Charles. Underneath the maelstrom of guitars is a sense of melody that recalls Nirvana in their more obscure moments. Carter is partly correct in his “right time, right place” assessment: hardcore has been on the rise recently. And it has, of course, happened before.

“To me,” Yauch says, “Nirvana getting big was hardcore becoming mainstream. It was like someone had recorded a hardcore band and then mixed it like a pop record.” Still, however much thought goes into Gallows’ music, nobody could say their Orchestra of Wolves is mixed like a pop record.

Bad Brains play the Astoria, WC2, on Tuesday; Gallows tour the UK from November 19 to December 9.

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010