Pride Of Nowhere sees The Smoking Hearts play straight-up tattooed-rebel punk’n'roll. Which would be fine, were it not for the hundreds of bands just like them.

A career-spanning retrospective, Decades Apart catches marginal punk icons The Stranglers at their best… but also, rather unfortunately, at their worst.

I don’t know what precedent there is for it, but Crime In Stereo’s new album I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone gives hardcore a good hard kick in the arse.

Matt Skiba and friends are still cranking out the albums… but This Addiction says it’s time for Alkaline Trio to retire gracefully from the field of battle.

Another Welsh pop-punk band? Straight Lines may not be doing anything particularly new, but Persistence In This Game at least has the courage of its convictions.

This is The New Enemy: four Toronto guys with buzzcuts bringing back the vest-clad and swaggering toughness of early proto-hardcore on their Shakedown EP.

Pop-punks Fireworks finish off the year with All I Have To Offer Is My Own Confusion, an album that presses all the right buttons and none of the wrong ones.

London four-piece Hope & State evidently remember when pop-punk went bad, and their Grand Gestures EP captures the moment before that in ragged lo-fi glory.

Congratulations to Australia’s The Amity Affliction for making Severed Ties, one of the few post-hardcore records of 2009 that hasn’t annoyed the crap out of me.

A whole lot of nineties bands have crawled back out of obscurity this year, but few of them deserve a second chance so much as Living Colour always have.