Nicole Brice
Oct 7, 2026
Adjacent punks making noise.
Punk rock to me is everything. Ever since I was a teen, it's been my favorite genre of music, next to hardcore. In my early 20s, I tried to catch every big punk show that came through New Orleans, from my faves like Flogging Molly to Anti-Flag to Pennywise, Less Than Jake, Face to Face, Bad Religion, AFI, Sick of It All, Sum 41, etc. You get the picture. Over the years, though, newer punk bands have been somewhat lost on me. I blame it on the industry shifting away from an MTV culture and into a cluttered mess of music. No, seriously. So much clutter.
Sometimes the best way to cut through the clutter is to discover new music through your local hometown music scenes, and that is exactly where I found Headcannon, a very charismatic punk/grunge band out of Jackson, Mississippi. Gage plays bass and does vocals, JD plays drums and keeps time, and Isaac rounds it out on guitar and vocals. Their sound is very full, rich, fun, and loud. Just my type of music. It reminds me of Melvins meets Fu Manchu. It’s gritty and just perfect.
I had the opportunity to speak with these guys not once, but twice for this interview, and well, the joke about speaking to them twice is that the first time we tried to do this interview, there was a bad internet connection on their part, and it made for a hilarious first introduction between us all that definitely broke the ice. We ended up having to reschedule so they could do the interview somewhere else with a stronger internet connection. But, on a side note, when we did conduct the rescheduled interview, my connection glitched for a moment, and the guys made sure to give me hell about it. Ok, officially in my circle of new fave bands.
Headcannon has two full albums out: Punk Adjacent (excellent name, by the way), released in 2024, followed by their latest, Sucker Bet, on September 12, 2026. Both are incredible. Sucker Bet blends more grunge with the punk aesthetic, and it’s just really freakin good.
Learn a little more about Headcannon below.
*edited lightly for clarity
MaM: Yo! What’s up! Let’s try this again today. I can hear you, yay!
Headcannon: We were actually going to try to prank you and talk all delayed.
(laughter)
MaM: Hey, it was a great way to break the ice last time. Ok, let’s dive in. What year did you guys get started? Take me through a little of your history.
Gage: Officially, in 2022, at the end of 2022, is when we started as Headcannon. It started with Isaac and me, and we’ve known each other for a while. We worked together as kids a long time ago in a completely different city. I saw him on Instagram, hit him up, and we decided to jam, so he sent me his address, and it turns out we live right down the street from each other. We knew each other from a city about 45 minutes away. Pretty cool, small world, and we had another drummer with us for the first year or so, and he’s an awesome dude. Still love him. Shoutout to Gene. Anything on “Punk Adjacent”, that’s him on drums. He had a family and a busy life, and we wanted to do more out-of-state stuff, so he stepped down, and the timing was good. JD was in a band called Lady Gun; you should go listen to them.
MaM: I will – noted.
Gage: Basically, their guitar player moved away, and it was just perfect timing. It was pretty seamless, and happened pretty quickly.
JD: I jumped in, and we started going.
Isaac: (to JD) Yeah, you learned all our songs in like a week for a show.
MaM: Let’s talk about your sound – you have two different sounds. You are punk, but then you’re grunge. You kind of straddle that line. Was that intentional, or more of an evolution of the band's sound?
Isaac: It was all organic. I don’t think we had a thought process going into it. We just get together and try to write songs, and whatever it sounds like, it sounds like that.
Gage: Pretty much, yeah, it was pretty organic. Even some of the “Punk Adjacent” songs we play now sound a little different live, obviously because JD is the drummer now, but we sound different now, and it’s crazy. There are certain songs that used to be our favorite, and we’ll go to practice and be like, “Eh, we don’t like this song.” And then we’ll move on. I will say there are times when Isaac or I will come up with a riff; I’m probably the worst about it, but then we’ll think something sounds too poppy, so we kind of stay within the lines we’ve created. Maybe our next album will be a little country.
(laughter)
Gage: Nah, but this is the way I look at it. “Punk Adjacent” was Headcannon establishing itself. “Sucker Bet” was us finding our rhythm. JD, Isaac, and me finding out who Headcannon is. I think our next album is going to be super awesome because it’ll really be synonymous with Headcannon. I think the next album will have a little more variety. In my mind, I think it’ll be a mix of the first two albums.
MaM: As far as influences with you guys, who has influenced your music the most?
Headcannon: We’ll go left to right.
Gage: I’ll put it this way: we all love Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age, things like that, and then from there we branch out pretty much differently. Isaac and I like a couple of the same bands, and JD and I like a couple of others.
Isaac: What probably connected me and Gage first musically was our love of Fugazi. One of my all-time favorite bands, but I love all the East Coast hardcore; Bad Brains is one of my all-time favorite bands, too. As for JD and me, we have a special connection because I was a KISS kid. I have all the boxed sets. I have Halloween pictures of me dressed up as somebody from KISS. And JD comes from that 70s and 80s hard rock, so that’s where we all kind of connect. We all meet in the middle, but I listen to a lot of stuff. A lot of local regional acts, too.
JD: Yeah, for me, that 70s and 80s hard rock, but some of that stuff in the 80s gets bad towards the end. Same thing with Grunge, too; then, toward the late-90s, it all started sounding like vanilla ice cream, and all the same. I also like Queens of the Stone Age, Fu Manchu, and Butthole Surfers. Gotta give them a shoutout.
MaM: I love The Butthole Surfers – I’ve got my daughter liking “Pepper” these days.
JD: I’m all over the place. I like pop music, too.
MaM: Same
Isaac: No disrespect to all the bands from the 80s because there really were some good bands.
MaM: There were some good bands, but then there was a period where it was all cheese. It was all this formulaic hair-metal cheese.
Isaac: Hair metal, yeah.
MaM: I was a Mötley Crüe fan growing up, and I can’t listen to them now. Vince Neil, aka Vince Meal, just disturbs me now. Dude can’t hit a single note. Looks like he is miming on stage. How active are you guys in the local scene these days? Been around since 2022, so I’m assuming you’re pretty active.
Isaac: Gage didn’t get to talk about his influences.
MaM: Oops, my bad. I got on a tangent there about hair metal.
(laughter)
MaM: Gage, you’re up!
Gage: My influences begin with Funkadelic and Parliament. That was what made me want to make music myself. As for my influences in what I write and play, Ty Segall is one, and I also like some more modern ones like Upchuck out of Atlanta. They’re fucking awesome if you don’t know them.
MaM: I don’t, but I’ll have to check them out.
Gage: Upchuck – cool ass people, and then Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol is another one. They’re a little out there, but I love their shit. Ty Segall and Funkadelic are the two big ones for me.
MaM: To me, when you have that many influences, it makes you more well-rounded as a musician. You can appreciate the different textures in styles in music. So, back to the scene up there in Jackson, I’m not familiar with it. Tell me more about it.
Isaac: There is a lot of variety here. There’s the alternative scene, but there’s also a hardcore scene that kind of branches into the metal scene. There’s an EDM scene, too. We also have a noise scene and an emo scene. The Midwest emo scene is pretty good.
Gage: The cool thing is, honestly, the DIY scene. It’s all the outlying genres. The only scene with its own big following is metal, which they really built from the ground up, and it's a healthy scene for the most part. Honestly, the best part about Jackson, and something that I didn’t realize, is that there are a lot of cities that are not cool with genre mixing on bills at all, but here in Jackson, the DIY scene is what’s happening.
Isaac: It’s a pretty welcoming scene, and not all scenes across the country are super welcoming.
Gage: We’ve played plenty of bills where it’s us, an emo band, and then a singer/songwriter, or like us and then a band that is super indie pop, and then with a heavy metal band. Like heavy metal. We play with all kinds of bands. I think the Jackson scene is really good at blending things like that.
MaM: As far as songwriting, is there a process for when you go into the studio?
Isaac: The songs are usually ready to go when we get in the studio. They’re usually road-tested and approved.
Gage: Well, with both albums, we had a song that was finished at the studio.
Isaac: We needed nine songs, so we needed one more song.
Gage: So most of it. I guess that’s kind of our thing now; we choose one song that just isn’t done and then finish it in the studio. I would like to piggyback off that, though, because one of my favorite songs on our new album that I think is really cool is that we got another local band here called Kicking; they’re awesome. Super cool people. Their lead singer is named Bobbie, and we had this instrumental on our album. It was good, but we kept feeling like it needed lyrics, so we decided to come up with something, then had Bobbie listen and see what she thought. We all practice in the same building.
Isaac: Yeah, the same jam space. We’re all in the same building.
Gage: It’s like twelve different bands all in the same building. That’s where our recording studio is. Bobbie came up one day to listen, took a demo recording on her phone (a voice note), went home, and six days later had something she wanted to show us. JD and I went and met up with her along with our producer, and on the first take – she nailed it. JD and I thought it was awesome, so we recorded it right then and there. That’s how we came up with “Uncle Butch”.
MaM: What are your plans for the rest of this year and into next year? Shows, I assume?
Isaac: We’re working on some new songs, and we have some tour dates rounding out the year. We’ve got some songs in the sheath we have been playing with for a while; I mean, we probably have like five or six.
Gage: We’ve got a lot of cool out-of-town stuff coming. We’ll be in your area in Houma and New Orleans, too.
As Headcannon prepares to bring their supercharged sound to the masses for the rest of 2026 and beyond, be sure to peep their tour schedule and catch a show if they come near you. In the meantime, stream all their tunes on your favorite service today. This is a band to watch. They have the drive and ambition to take their sound to the next level.
To learn more about Headcannon:
Facebook:
Instagram:
HEADCANNON (@headcannonofficial) • Instagram photos and videos
Spotify:
Apple Music:
YouTube:
Bandcamp:
