Iodine Recordings will release "Free Stickers with Every Order: A History of Hardcore Stickers", the first book dedicated entirely to the visual and cultural legacy of hardcore punk stickers out April 17.

Spanning North America from the early 1980s to 2024, the book documents a fleeting and affordable medium that helped define the DIY ethos of the hardcore scene. Stickers were cheap to produce and easy to distribute. Their immediacy made them powerful tools of promotion, protest, identity, and community. Pasted on lampposts, venue walls, record bins, and street signs, they carried hardcore’s values far beyond the shows themselves.

Collected over decades by author Thomas Rackow, this deluxe hardcover pairs full-color archival material with firsthand interviews from across the scene. The book features visual material and contributions connected to bands including 7 Seconds, Quicksand, Earth Crisis, Have Heart, American Nightmare, Integrity, Agnostic Front, and more.

Designed and laid out by André Leigl, the book preserves rare and often long-lost sticker artifacts from a medium never meant to last. Rather than aiming for encyclopedic completeness, it presents a carefully edited archive shaped by what has survived. The result is a focused and honest time capsule of hardcore’s visual language, values, and community, told by the people who lived it.