(hardcore music) - I got into music, specifically punk music through my older brother.

I would just go into his room all the time and just steal CDs.

I don't know if he knows that.

I've never heard anything like that before.

I never heard fast music like that.

That's really how I got him to punk and hardcore music.

The first hardcore band that I ever came across with a band called 7Seconds.

I just thought the art looked cool, but like what is this?

Not For the Weak Record started in 2016.

My band Lethal Means wanted to do a tape of our demo.

We wanted to put a label on it to make ourselves seem more legit.

We just wanted to try to seem more serious so we can get on out of town shows.

It definitely didn't work but that was the first time that that logo was on anything.

Around the time of the third record that we put out was the time that I was like, all right we should probably take this seriously and started actually promoting the label as an actual label.

I do the label, I play in Reckoning Force, I play guitar in that.

Lethal Means, I play drums in that band.

I play guitar in Bato and I play drums in Self Inflict.

But my day job is as an accountant and I know that might sound weird.

I'm not like an aggressive person on my day to day.

I just go type on a calculator all day and then at the end of the day I come here, pack some records up, ship them out.

Working as an accountant has definitely helped me with the label.

Accounting is like a big part of any business so it's really just helped me make business decisions, I guess, if that makes sense.

A lot of the stuff I learned was just through other labels, kind of taken what they did and kind of running with it.

It wasn't necessarily like through asking them, it was more or less going to their website like, oh how many records did they press?

That seemed like the pretty common number of records that people are pressing, so maybe I should do that.

When we first started, it was just a thing that we did for our own bands, but at a point I just started coming across stuff that I really, really liked and there wasn't records for them and I would just reach out to the bands and ask them if they wanted to do a record and most of the time when you reach out to a band like that, they're pretty honored that you want to press the record.

So I've had pretty high success from just reaching out to bands and asking if they wanna do a record.

And we've done bands here in the States and we've done a few international bands and we have other projects in the works.

I usually send stuff to people like, what do you think about this?

Do you think that this is cool?

I think it's really awesome, I want your input on it.

I'll do that a lot.

But the operations, the day to days, who's picking what to press and stuff, that's all me.

I think we're doing the right thing and then one time it works and one time it doesn't work out as well as other times but I'm still learning every day.

Just like everybody with everything, you still learn as you go every day.

With the work you put in, you get back from it.

This studio here and we call it 239B, this is actually the second location.

The first location was in Norfolk.

We would do shows there and we knew it was a matter of time before we would get kicked out, but we did it just because hardcore music is really community based.

We needed a place in our scene that we could just always have shows when we needed them.

So if it was gonna be small, we could do it inside.

If it would be big, we could do it outside.

The comfort of just having a place already was huge for us.

Anytime a band hit us out, yeah, we got you, what day?

So the one place that we have now is called West Beach Tavern, and if they're booked up, we just can't do it yet.

There's just no other places that we can do stuff at.

Places around here, once you say you're gonna do punk music or hardcore music, they don't want anything to do with it.

To just have this mindset that hardcore music is violent, is not really painting the right picture in my opinion.

Some people just go to shows to show how tough they are and that's not really in the scene that we're about.

We're just into kind of circle pit kind of stuff where you might get bumped, pushed a little bit.

It's hard to tell people in words that doesn't sound stupid, but I could definitely see how it looks weird from the outside looking in.

Slow dancing looks weird if you don't hear the music and you don't know what's going on.

I don't think there's really a end goal for Not For the Weak Records.

We're not really in the genre that you make money with.

It's more like if you're in love with it, you do it.

But I like to see bands get excited when I offer to do a record for them or something.

If I can just keep getting money from doing records to just do another record or if I can do a recording to get gear to do another recording.

It's really just a love for music.

(hardcore music)