The Story

You ever hear the one about the guy who went to law school but decided not to practice law, and instead run a punk and hardcore record label?

Josh Grabelle fell in love with punk rock when he was 13. In college he began putting on hardcore shows in the basement of his parents’ New Jersey shore home, quickly growing it into a must-play DIY show space for touring bands. In 1994 Grabelle started a fanzine called Trustkill - and music began moving even more toward the center of his life. He put on countless shows, joined a band, toured the U.S. and Europe with other bands, and gathered experience behind the scenes of a burgeoning independent music industry. It turned out that Grabelle had a number of skills and talents that served him well in this new and dynamically changing music industry - from marketing and graphic design, to an ear for what people like - and he wanted to see just how far it could all go.

In 1998, as he began law school at Syracuse University, Grabelle turned Trustkill into a record label - and the rest quickly became essential knowledge in the story of heavy music. Throughout the early 2000s, Trustkill Records helped launch the careers of heavyweight artists like Poison The Well, Eighteen Visions, Most Precious Blood, Terror, Throwdown, Walls of Jericho, Bleeding Through, Hopesfall and Bullet For My Valentine among many more. Trustkill dominated independent rock, showing up not only in basements, clubs and concert halls around the world, but at Ozzfest, Warped Tour, Hot Topic, MTV, The NY Times, and everywhere in between. By the time Trustkill stopped putting out new music in 2010, the label had sold an incredible 2 million albums worldwide. Grabelle never did get around to practicing law - metal and hardcore were way more fun.

When Trustkill closed its doors in 2010, Grabelle carried his same vision, work ethic, and eye for what’s next into Bullet Tooth - a new home for the next generation of loud bands. But the template set by Trustkill remains essential to the story of loud rock music, and its influence can be seen around the globe today - in contemporary bands and record labels that learned how it’s done, at least in part, by watching a kid from New Jersey. Trustkill Records leaves a decade-plus legacy of not only helping to sustain independent punk and hardcore music, but helping to move it forward.

And the future? Yeah - there’s that, too.

- Ronen Kauffman (August 2021)