Lou Koller, frontman of NYHC band Sick of it All, dead at 59 years of age.

I wouldn’t say I was ever a massive fan of Sick of it All, but I saw them play live a bunch of times, had a couple of logo T-shirts, knew the hits and braved the pits. They were a feature of my musical landscape from around 1992, and one of the few Noo Yoick hardcore acts who persisted after the genre’s boomtime period, still touring through the Noughties alongside the later wave of ska-punk, post-hardcore and emo acts they inspired. Political without being too preachy, tough without turning into the burly machismo of tackier acts like Biohazard… for me, they always exemplified the best of that particular subgenre, and I think that was true for a lot of other folk as well.

I’m noting it here less because I feel a polestar has dropped from my personal firmament, and more in recognition of what I’m coming to recognise as a distinctly middle-aged phenomenon: you lose a few bright stars in your youth, and it hits you as tragedy, but you get into your forties and you start losing the folk who were just part of the furniture, not to misadventure or self-destruction, but to ordinary, everyday mortality. You are reminded, ever more regularly, that you don’t have forever, and nor does anyone else.

Well, selah. If you get to go knowing you “stayed true”, in the words of the default hardcore motto, that ain’t nothing.

Go easy, Mister Koller—but don’t go gentle. Not that you ever would.