Premiere: The Get Off Rages And Rebuilds On “Trauma Chic”
No music genre channels confrontation quite like hardcore. Pounding intensity and a roaring sound that keep every element front and center, refusing to be ignored. It’s rage laid bare in its most visceral form. Likewise, few experiences demand confrontation the way trauma does. No matter how painful or complicated it may be, it insists on being faced before any real path toward healing can begin. Any collision between those two forces is bound to be powerful, and that’s exactly what we hear on “Trauma Chic,” the blistering new single from Richmond hardcore heroes The Get Off.
Set for release on Friday, March 5, “Trauma Chic” is jagged and transformative, mimicking the amorphous shapes mental anguish can take when it puts down toxic roots within us. The result is a striking reflection on personal wounds that listeners can easily recognize in their own lives, even if the details don’t exactly align. Today, The Auricular is proud to premiere this new track a day ahead of its release with an exclusive stream below, along with deeper insight into the song’s distressed origins.
The title track from the band’s forthcoming EP isn’t just catharsis wrapped in commotion; it’s a deliberate reckoning with the lingering echoes of childhood trauma. From the first moments, a throbbing yet wobbly bass line and a punchy, clear snare hit create palpable tension, mirroring the emotional volatility embedded in the lyrics, which is only amplified when the slashing guitar and fiery vocals make their entrance.
As lead singer and vocalist Leigh Bartlett explains, “I wanted the lyrics and guitar to emulate the anxiety of getting into a fight with your parents and how scary that can be and then coming out on the other side realizing that that way of life doesn’t have to continue.” That heightened sense shapes the song’s structure, its forceful pace reinforcing the resolute climb up the dreaded staircase the lyrics repeatedly evoke.
Lines like “Scare me down from my bedroom\ Stand me on the staircase\ What did I do wrong this time?” capture the familiar dread of childhood conflict with unsettling clarity. Yet the song refuses to linger solely in that darkness. Instead, it pushes toward something harder and more radical: the possibility of healing.
For Bartlett, writing the song was part of a longer personal process. “A lot of the lyrics I’ve written over the last few years, especially for our last EP Destruction Aesthetic, have been a sort of therapy for myself after my mom passed to help me with the anger I felt (and still feel) over her death and to unpack a lot of the emotional abuse and emotional blackmail that went on at home as a kid,” she says. That context reframes “Trauma Chic” as more than just an emotionally charged punk song. It becomes an act of survival through songwriting.
Still, the track’s defining quality may be its refusal to frame healing as neat or immediate. The climactic lyric, “I will take my time\ Washing our sins away,” arrives not as a triumphant resolution but as a quiet declaration of patience. Bartlett underscores that idea directly: “In my case, it was a lot of generational trauma getting passed down to myself and my sisters and that’s not something that can be fixed with one therapy session or one I’m sorry.'”
That honesty about the slow work of recovery sits at the heart of the song. As Bartlett puts it, “The idea that you can one day be, maybe not completely healed and fixed, but at a spot where you can start moving forward is incredibly important to me.”
Hardcore often thrives on immediacy and explosive release, demanding a great deal of mettle and moxie. “Trauma Chic,” in turn, introduces a different kind of strength: the courage to take healing one day at a time.
The song’s latter half leans into that rebuilding process with a stomping cadence that’s equally thrilling and gripping. When Bartlett sings about “building a home where the doors don’t slam” and “painting these walls with joy instead of fear,” the imagery feels less metaphorical and more aspirational, like a blueprint for emotional survival. It’s a reminder, Bartlett says, that “you don’t have to keep beating yourself up or tearing yourself down just because that’s what you were taught you were worth.”
In that sense, “Trauma Chic” rages against the past, but also looks for the future beyond it. Bartlett acknowledges that the path forward looks different for everyone: “Some things take a lot of time to recover from, and that’s okay. You can absolutely move away, cut them off if you need to, don’t cut them off and rebuild that relationship… so long as you stop standing on the stairs and open the windows to the house that is you and let yourself breathe, you can find your own path to healing, no matter how hard it might be.”
That image, that idea of finally leaving the staircase behind? It lingers long after the song ends.
And in its final emotional thesis, Bartlett offers a sentiment that resonates far beyond the song’s genre, and beyond music itself: “We all deserved better than how we were raised.”
It’s a heavy statement, but within the furious pulse of “Trauma Chic,” it becomes something else too. A declaration that the cycle can stop here.
“Trauma Chic” is set for release on Friday, March 6. Make sure to follow The Get Off on Instagram to stay up to date on their next releases and upcoming shows.
