Karate

Boston's Karate unraveled the tightly coiled energy of post-hardcore, playing angular riffs with clean, spacious guitar tones and adding a technical precision often intentionally avoided by their scrappier peers. The band's patient tempos and pensive atmospheres made their first two albums (1995's Karate and 1997's In Place of Real Insight) border on slowcore at times, but they later began incorporating a heavy jazz influence into their already heady brew of punk-adjacent styles, adding improvisation and post-rock touches to albums like 2000's Unsolved. Karate broke up in 2005, but they reunited in 2022 when Numero Group began reissuing their long out-of-print catalog. In addition to individually re-releasing the albums, the campaign also included box sets like 2022's Time Expired, which collected the group's final three studio albums and a smattering of other miscellaneous or previously unreleased tracks, as well as 2023's Complete Studio Recordings, which included almost everything the band put to tape.