In describing various aggressive styles of dance collectively glossed as “moshing,” participants in the hardcore punk subculture often claim that the music “makes” them move without conscious thought. Such “involuntary” responses to musical gestures echo common descriptions of affect as precognitive or pre-discursive (Desai-Stephens and Reisnour 2020). Drawing from ethnographic research in United States hardcore punk scenes, this paper thus considers how affect might be productively mobilized to theorize music’s capacity to initiate moshing. I argue that affect, in dialogue with subcultural practices and discourses, spurs specific movements in the mosh pit, and that these embodied experiences are integral to participants’ engagement with the subculture. Utilizing Garcia-Mispireta’s concept of “sonic tactility” (2023) and Kapchan’s “aesthetics of proximity” (2021), I suggest that affect acts as conduit between proximal sounds and bodies in the mosh pit. Through specific sonic gestures, musicians engage in a sensory dialogue with audience members to encourage particular, often physically violent kinds of movement, retained in participants through an ongoing process of affective entrainment. I discuss affect’s role in fostering community and intimacy through moshing, while paradoxically normalizing violent behavior. I thus consider how these sonic and affective intensities inform nuanced subcultural ethics surrounding the acceptable threshold for violence in the mosh pit. Following recent scholarship on the “affective turn” in music studies, I posit that a deeper understanding of the music’s affect lends crucial insight into the role of sound in reflecting subcultural politics, which often aim to subvert normative behaviors and cultural formations.