Knocked Loose: The Sound and the Fury
This year, Knocked Loose defied expectations with their latest album, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To, becoming torchbearers of a genre and introducing a new generation of fans to the cathartic delirium of hardcore
Louisville, Kentucky punches above its weight when it comes to cultural exports. Even if you’ve never watched the Kentucky Derby or hit a baseball with a Louisville Slugger, your last sip of bourbon was almost certainly distilled in Jefferson County; the state produces the lion’s share of it. But now, for many people, the tawny spirit has been overtaken by a hotter new commodity: hardcore.
The small southern city is far from the genre’s historic US epicentres of New York City, Washington, D.C. and Boston, but it’s burnished its beatdown bona fides thanks to Knocked Loose. Through relentless touring and barnburner records, like their breakthrough 2024 album, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To, the hometown five-piece have become contemporary heavyweights.
The album starts with a jump scare. Seconds into Thirst, vocalist Bryan Garris takes a sharp breath in and then lets rip an unholy screech, which segues into a clattering metallic breakdown. It sets the tone: it’s not an easy listen, even at fewer than 30 minutes, but the band doesn’t want it to be.
Knocked Loose have been together since 2013, but the members have known one another for far longer. They’re from Oldham County, around 20 miles outside Louisville. Garris met bassist Kevin Otten when they were kids, and shortly after high school, they befriended guitarist Isaac Hale and drummer Kevin ‘Pacsun’ Kaine. After line-up changes, guitarist Nicko Calderon, a longtime friend, joined in 2020.
“We were immediately welcomed as peers,” Garris remembers of Louisville’s hardcore scene. “There was no room for egos and attitudes because the scene was so small. Everybody plays so that it can keep existing. If you did any gatekeeping, it did nothing but hurt the shows, and you wanted to see them flourish. Everybody was welcomed with open arms so long as you were contributing to the scene, not just trying to take from it.”
As a perceptive listener might suspect, the band’s musical tastes vary wildly. Garris is a huge hip-hop fan. When Detroit rapper Danny Brown shouted out You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To on his podcast, it seemed like worlds colliding, but Garris let everyone know: Knocked Loose had supported Brown at New York City’s Webster Hall several years before. Kaine’s introduction to heavy music, meanwhile, was nu-metal – a gateway subculture for millions of his generation.
But they all found common ground in 90s and early 00s tough-guy hardcore bands like Harm’s Way, Disembodied and Terror, and looked up to Kentucky groups like Another Mistake, Written Off and Damaged Goods, with whom Knocked Loose released a split EP in 2015. “It was the first thing we ever did as a band that was pressed to vinyl!” Garris enthuses.
Besides inspiration, Louisville hardcore also offered a refuge. Governance in Kentucky is deeply conservative and Christian, and has churned out a shocking slate of racist, anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice legislation. It can be a difficult place for anyone who doesn’t fit into the strict, white Republican mould – which is why this inclusive scene has meant so much to the band and the people they came up with.
“Growing up, women, people of colour and trans people were contributing to hardcore; that’s just how things were,” Garris says. “So when we went on the road and we realised it’s not like that in all places, it reminded us that we have to wear that on our sleeves. This is who we are, this is how we’ve always been and this is how things should be.”
As the mammoth, glowing cross adorning their latest album art and stage show might imply, those cultural and political surroundings still left their mark. Kentucky is in the Bible belt: the majority identifies as Christian, with almost half identifying as Evangelical. Blinding Faith, from You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To, is an industrial-tinged banger that sees Garris spit out: “No promise of heaven will make me march/ With my final breath/ I deny the church.”
In the early days, Knocked Loose were sweating it out in basements and punk houses, and piecing together rent money from whatever jobs would keep them on the road. Hale dropped out of high school and finished his classes online so he could keep playing. “I decided that touring was going to be my job, no matter if I made money or not,” he explains. “We were just going to make it work.”
Knocked Loose released their debut EP, Pop Culture, in 2014, followed by the aforementioned split with Damaged Goods. Their touring tenacity and the raw power of their performances led to support slots for Counterparts, The Acacia Strain and Stick to Your Guns, which exposed them to audiences outside of Oldham County. In 2016, they unleashed their first album, Laugh Tracks, a pummelling slab of kinetic metalcore muscle; from there, things quickly escalated.
The nihilistic groove and iconic “arf! arf!” midsong bark of Counting Worms turned the track into a breakout hit on TikTok, and the band started getting invites to play on bigger stages. First, they toured with Every Time I Die, Comeback Kid and Eighteen Visions. Then they survived every date of Warped Tour 2017, and celebrated by announcing their first US headlining tour alongside Terror and Jesus Piece.
Amid the packed schedule, they released their second album, 2019’s A Different Shade of Blue – their fastest and ugliest release to date. From there, the songwriting got leaner and the breakdowns meaner. 2021’s A Tear in the Fabric of Life is a concept album about grief that skronked and roared its way into near-death metal territory. It was accompanied by a short film, emphasising the band’s interest in exploring visual elements.
After a decade in the underground, the band broke through. They toured arenas with gothic metalcore outfit Motionless in White and British game changers Bring Me the Horizon, and in 2023, they played Coachella, one of their most important shows to date. They’ve since won fans in A-list pop stars Demi Lovato – who said she’d love to do a song together – and Billie Eilish.
In its first week of sales, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To was the second highest-selling vinyl album, across all genres, on the Billboard chart, right behind Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department. The band’s headline North American tour this spring, in support of the album, sold out every night of its six-week run.
“If we’re throwing in a reggaeton beat or a Poppy feature, there may be some who think that’s out of bounds, but there’s nothing we could do that’s off the table as long as it makes the song more intense”
“We came from touring in a van and playing shows, and now we’re touring in a bus and creating shows, doing production and bringing bigger crews,” Garris marvels. As exciting as it’s been for them to branch out, the transition from DIY gigs to major stages has come with hardcore-specific growing pains, like the dreaded barricades that now accompany most of their bigger gigs. They try to convince venues to ditch them, but safety concerns tend to win out. Eventually, they began to relish the challenge.
“It was important for us to translate our show into a different atmosphere – to learn how to perform on a barricade and how to work around it,” Garris explains. “Every time we would do something that was exciting to us, it opened our mind to being like, ‘OK, what’s next? What’s bigger than this?’ Incorporating lights, video walls, a giant cross on stage to match the album art – we’re at a point now where we can make that work.”
Among all this, their commitment to playing the heaviest music possible hasn’t wavered. “The band is heavier and more abrasive now than it’s ever been,” Garris says. “We wanted an intense record that was uncompromising in its heaviness, and to add elements of songwriting that we’d never dabbled in before. But every new aspect needed to bring something and not detract from how intense the band is.”
One new aspect was Drew Fulk. Grammy-nominated, with close to 20 Billboard Mainstream Rock Airplay-topping singles to his name, the LA-based producer’s work centres around stadium rock (Disturbed, Ice Nine Kills) and rap (NLE Choppa, Lil Wayne) – projects that are far from the fast-and-loose world of DIY hardcore. Fulk admits that he seemed like an unlikely pick to produce Knocked Loose’s next album, but, actually, he grew up on hardcore and had been following the band’s career.
When Garris and Hale were introduced to Fulk in early 2023, they were looking to better their fans’ expectations of the album-to-come – and saw that a change in perspective behind the desk could be the way to go. Fulk was immediately impressed with their raw talent: “Honestly? I felt like the coach on the sidelines of an all-star football team.”
Photography: Liam Stewart
Growing up, Fulk idolised Converge, whose technical prowess, crushing dynamics and inventive songwriting have made them hardcore icons. “I first saw Converge when I was 18 years old and felt completely overwhelmed,” he says with a grin. “I remember thinking, ‘I’ve never heard music sound this extreme but so memorable,’” he emphasises.
“It’s very easy to make extreme music, then be like, ‘OK, got it’ – and never want to listen to it again. It’s also very easy to make memorable music that has no edge to it. [Converge frontman] Jacob Bannon’s vocals are specific and memorable. Bryan’s vocals are, too. I held on to that memory: ‘How can I make the world feel the same way about Knocked Loose, now, as I did about Converge, 20 years ago?’”
From this, a set of guiding principles emerged. “I wanted the album to feel like a panic attack. What makes Bryan sound more intense? What makes the drum sound more unhinged? What makes the guitars feel like a tidal wave in your headphones?” he rattles off. “Even if an EQ move is technically wrong, and another producer wouldn’t do it, let’s do it, because it’s going to make the song sound crazier. Let’s break the rules of what heavy music is supposed to sound like.”
After producing and then seeing the reaction to 2023 singles Deep in the Willow and Everything Is Quiet Now, Fulk was sold. That summer, Knocked Loose recorded the music for You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To with Fulk in five weeks; then, for four months, Fulk and engineer Zach Tuch worked painstakingly with Garris on vocals, on and between tours. “That’s another thing hardcore bands don’t do,” Fulk insists.
“They go in [to record] for a few weeks, finish up and hit the road again, often because they just have to. We treated this more like a pop or rock album: it’s done when it’s done, even if it takes a year. The band were in too good a place and the excitement was too high to rush it.”
They recruited friends to bring new elements into the mix. Chris ‘Motionless’ Cerulli, of Motionless in White, joins them on Slaughterhouse 2, conjuring a brutal sequel to his own band’s 2022 track, Slaughterhouse, which features Garris on vocals; and on Suffocate, oddball pop-metal artist Poppy’s sylph-like voice slices through the track’s tension like a hot knife.
These cross-genre collaborations may catch some hardcore heads off-guard, but Knocked Loose aren’t interested in litigating the “are they or aren’t they?” argument that’s tailed them for years. “If we’re throwing in a reggaeton beat or a Poppy feature, there may be some people who think that’s out of bounds, but to me, there’s nothing we could do that’s off the table as long as it makes the song more intense,” says Hale. “As we bring new stuff in, the band gets more exciting to write for.”
Fulk drew on his rap and rock production experience to make the music as memorable as possible. Field recordings from Kentucky – blowing wind, textures and other natural sounds – were woven into tracks to create an atmospheric underbelly. “Bryan told me anything I do production-wise needs to increase the energy of the song, not distract from it.” On Suffocate, “Bryan’s not singing,” he says, “but there are repeating, hooky moments the audience can latch onto. I mean – Hatebreed had choruses,” he laughs. “You don’t need to be Freddie Mercury, singing your heart out; it’s just more structured, in the right way.”
Unlike typical hardcore recordings, where vocals are “tucked into” the music, “the vocals on this album are as loud, clear and dynamic as a pop song”. This is where those four months spent on vocals come in. “The mix for You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is not dissimilar from hip-hop; there’s low end, kick and vocals up-front, and I just tried to find the space for everything else. Bryan sounds very commanding,” he asserts. “When a song from this album comes on, you have no confusion, whatsoever, that it’s him.”
Knocked Loose’s willingness to play alongside bands from across the heavy spectrum may have irked hardcore purists, but it gave them the opportunity to spread their beatdown gospel. Their genre agnosticism – which saw them share stages with A Day to Remember and old favourites Harm’s Way in 2019 – is a callback to their early days, when DIY was the only rule that mattered, not who you performed with.
Photography: Liam Stewart
Now, Garris sees Knocked Loose as part of a new generation of artists – alongside bands like Turnstile, Drain, Scowl, Code Orange and Sunami – who are bringing hardcore to the masses. When the crowd at Coachella lost their minds during Knocked Loose’s set, they weren’t thinking about whether or not the band checked all the appropriate boxes, or if they were moshing correctly – they were amped up on the pure thunder of the music. There’s no time to complain about bands selling out when you’re three seconds away from being crowd-killed by a 19-year-old in an impossibly chic outfit.
“One thing I’ve noticed about the kids coming in from other genres is that they’re not afraid to do anything,” Hale says. “They want to rage, they want to unleash themselves. They’re all there for the same reason, and that’s to go nuts, you know? Think about when you were a kid, and you were going to a show for the first time – seeing moshing, seeing a heavy band – and how amazing it was, and how that changed you. That’s happening more than ever right now and that’s a very, very beautiful thing.”
Reflecting on the runaway success of You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To, Fulk agrees. “Right now, especially in the US, it’s an extremely divisive time, and many people feel comfortable in extremes,” he says pensively.
“Knocked Loose is an extreme experience that some people feel very connected to; they might even find comfort in how divisive it is. Alice Cooper did this. Nine Inch Nails did this. Marilyn Manson did this. They all had wildly different music and messages, of course, but they were all so polarising that they made outcasts feel like…” he says, searching, “a tribe. Knocked Loose have their own version of that.”
The band are gearing up for another long, hard season of touring. In October and November, they’ll tour the US with Drain, The Garden and Militarie Gun as their support. This month, they’re supporting nu-metal godfathers Slipknot, taking their signature fury to a whole new level. Garris can’t quite believe it’s happening, but the cross-generational appeal of both bands lends itself to some interesting connections. In 2021, Clown, a current and founding member of Slipknot, invited Garris to appear on his podcast, Electric Theater, and shared that his teenage son put him on to Knocked Loose.
“I had an uncle that had a Slipknot VHS tape. I remember watching it in the eighth grade and being legit scared of it,” Garris recalls. And when Knocked Loose’s drummer discovered heavy music, he had a Slipknot CD. “His parents thought it was devil music, so they threw it away,” Garris says, “so this is a crazy, full-circle moment for him.”
It seems inevitable that Knocked Loose’s star will continue to rise, and that’s certainly a good thing for hardcore. “You see a lot of bands pop up and feel like they have to play a character – to be the big, scary, heavy band – and it just puts them in a box,” Garris says. “What we would like you to see is just a couple guys that you can relate to on a stage, no matter how big it is.”
“I’m a firm believer that a rising tide raises all ships,” Hale says, in agreement. “Every time these doors get opened, there’s room for everybody to benefit from it. Bringing new kids into hardcore is always the goal, because you want to see this grow.”
You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is out now on Pure Noise Records
ADVERTISEMENTS