“I know it’s Utah, and people scoff when you say you grew up in a rough area or a rough place, but...where we grew up was rougher,” says Anthony Lucero, frontman for scathing hardcore act Cult Leader. Anthony grew up in Kearns, about half an hour southwest of Salt Lake City, which he describes as far less hospitable than Utah's Mormon caricature would suggest. “We had some pretty crazy shit happen when we were kids -- drive-bys, stuff like that. The hardcore scene and straightedge scene was super violent where I grew up. Just lots and lots of fights, all day, every day where I went to school. All of that’s got the backdrop of just the total Mormon domination over all the laws and culture. Anywhere there is something extremely regimented, there is also very strong outsider pushback.”
Anthony describes the population in Kearns as pretty diverse, with considerable Latino and Polynesian communities (the latter a byproduct of the Mormon church doing lots of missionary work in the Pacific Islands), though he says the hardcore scene was mostly made up of frustrated white Christian kids. And while he himself wasn't raised Mormon -- “I grew up in my own intense fundamentalist religious situation,” he says -- he still noticed how much the church’s stranglehold on the state caused kids to react with extreme hostility, making hardcore their new religion.
“There were just so many kids who grew up with some sort of religious oppression,” he recalls. “When they found punk or hardcore, it grew into this excuse, almost, to let loose on a whole different level. Their lives were super regimented, and under the thumbs of their families, but at a show you could do whatever the fuck you wanted. I’d never been exposed to anything like that before, so when I got to the first show, it was just...it made sense. The violence was really scary, but it was also exhilarating. Everyone goes through their own dark life bullshit, but the way I grew up, where I grew up, and discovering the hardcore scene there, it dug its claws in really, really deep.”