July 13, 2026
@highleverageonline/Instagram
High Leverage, a new record store, will open at 2644-48 Coral Street in East Kensington this fall. Shop owner Billy Philhower specializes in rare records from punk, emo, indie, hardcore and alternative bands.
Record collectors will have a new place to dig through crates this September when High Leverage opens a small storefront in East Kensington.
The upcoming vinyl shop at 2644-48 Coral Street will be led by husband-and-wife Billy and Elizabeth Philhower, who moved to Philadelphia last year and started selling records online and at conventions, flea markets and shows. Billy, who's originally from New Jersey, started collecting records more than two decades ago with a focus on rare pressings under the indie and alternative umbrella.
"I started really getting into collecting when it was still kind of at the plateau bottom-point in like 2005 to 2008, and it's obviously kind of just been an upward swing across every style of genre, every type of collector, every single facet of the industry," he said.
The new space is less than 500 square feet and will share a building with Fireball Printing. The Philhowers plan to start organizing the space later this month and aim to open with limited hours by the end of August or early September. The store will eventually be open Monday through Wednesday from about 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from about 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Transitioning High Leverage from a traveling table and online store into a dedicated shop is a vote of confidence in a hobby they view as a community-driven way for people to engage with music. The store will join a larger wave of small businesses specializing in physical media as a reaction to the limitations of streaming, which tends to push algorithm-based consumption at the expense of social connection. Philly already has a thriving community of record stores that serve a range of genres, and Billy thinks High Leverage can serve another niche for buyers, sellers and traders.
"Some of the records that I like to listen to and that I want to put in the store are challenging records — either they're sonically challenging or lyrically challenging, or just provoking in one way or the other," Philhower said. "I think that aspect has been lost with some of the ways that people listen to anything these days."
Billy, 32, got heavily involved in the independent music scene while attending Boston College in the 2010s. He started his own indie, emo and punk label Too Far Gone Records that pressed vinyl and produced cassettes and compilations for a range of bands. He's worked with math rock artist Oliver Houston and the Montclair, New Jersey, indie band Forth Wanderers, who later went on to sign with Seattle's venerated Sub Pop Records.
"I still view music, and the DIY music community, as something that changed my life, and I want this to be a realization of that," Philhower said.
High Leverage will have more than 2,000 records for sale, some of which are catalogued on the shop's website. They include a mix of 7-inch and 12-inch vinyl formats. The top genres are punk, hardcore, screamo, indie and what Billy terms "weirdo" music. Many of High Leverage's records were pressed in limited runs in the late 1980s and early '90s. Others are from the late '90s and early 2000s, when CDs and MP3s dominated the music landscape
"I'm trying to be deliberate and not pigeonholed as rare records because that puts a lot of onus on us going out and finding consistently quality rare records," Philhower said. "They are hard to find, but we have a big emphasis on outside-the-box genres."
Shoppers at High Leverage will find a lot of records priced closer to $50 than $10, but Philhower said there will be a variety of price points and artists that differentiate his shop from other sellers.
"There's a lot of sellers out there that have tons of classic rock and oldies, and that's fine, but I'm trying to be a little bit more particular," Philhower said. "We've done the last couple Vinyl Con events with 50 or 60 record sellers, and there's probably one or two others that have similar artists."
Among the highlights of Philhower's collection are original Dischord Records pressings of Minor Threat releases and rare pressings of the underground Oakland screamo band Indian Summer, which had a brief but impactful presence in the mid-90s. Other rare records include original 7-inches from Braille, the Philly hardcore punk band that was active more than a decade ago, and original pressings of Pavement records.
"I've also been hunting down records for people," Philhower said. "They'll come up to us at a show, and they'll say, 'I'm after this this record.' If they give me their email and a budget, I love finding records strictly for love of the game."
The name High Leverage is a reference to the term used in baseball for high-pressure situations. Philhower also dabbles in collecting baseball cards and said he hopes his new record shop will avoid some of the pitfalls of card-collecting that have seeped into the world of vinyl. As the hobby has grown, he said many buyers now hunt for records primarily to flip them at a profit instead of appreciating them as music.
"I think there has just been maybe a commodification of records as a non-artform," Philhower said. "There's aspects of tokenism that I feel are coming into records, where you lose the fact that there's an art to participate with and to engage with — whether you like it, hate it or somewhere in between."
More than anything, Philhower said he envisions High Leverage as a place where record collectors can escape the sense that music fandom has drifted away from appreciation of the artistry that goes into creating, distributing and finding audiences for it. Vinyl reminds people that music isn't just background noise.
"Part of records is they're meant to be challenging. They're meant to be manual. It's meant to be almost disruptive, and not just like something you throw on as you're doing other things," Philhower said.
The Philhowers both plan to keep their full-time jobs while running High Leverage and plan to hire one or two part-time employees later this year. Their goal for the new store is to bring people together to listen to records, share experiences and exchange recommendations.
"I don't think success just means selling a ton of records and expanding and all that stuff," Philhower said. "I want to focus on the aspects of records that mean a lot to me, and a lot of that is just the community aspect of sharing and discovering. It's being a space where people can come discover music that they have never heard, and I can learn from them."
