“I need a big mosh pit – a big mosh pit!”
Singer Bryan Garris is calling for a moment on the dancefloor to match the moment, as his band, Knocked Loose, faces a sold-out crowd of 6,300 packed into the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles. It’s a Saturday night and the biggest headline show of their career, just a day after the Kentucky act released their third album, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To.
Like Turnstile, Code Orange, and Power Trip before them, Knocked Loose is the latest young hardcore act to punch through the usual genre barriers to growth, and are reaching a larger audience ready for their sound of chaos and raging hooks. The first sign that something unusual was happening with a group that was little-known outside of hardcore circles came in 2023 when Knocked Loose was booked to play to the masses at Coachella, Lollapalooza, and Bonnaroo, a sweep across America’s leading music festivals.
Standing onstage now at the 98-year-old venue, Garris leans forward in a white button-down shirt, surrounded by an elaborate set designed to recreate the image of their album cover: a large cross glowing ominously in the woods, reflecting the ambivalent attitude about religion expressed amid the crushing rhythms of its first single, “Blinding Faith.” As a giant circle pit opens up below him, he screams, “I want you to go fucking crazy!”
The new album has already been praised by critics from Pitchfork to Kerrang! And while the band has also been embraced by the pop stars Billie Eilish and Demi Lovato (Eilish watched their Coachella set from the side of the stage; and Lovato declared, “Working with bands like Knocked Loose would be sick!”), there is nothing on You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To that is designed to ease Knocked Loose onto anyone’s pop playlist. No punches were pulled. The album is a wildly intense collection of noisy guitars and speedy kick drum beats, with Garris’s vocals locked into a furious high-pitched attack of the confessional and enraged. Brace yourself.
The album was recorded by Garris and his brothers in hardcore: lead guitarist Isaac Hale, rhythm guitarist Nicko Calderon, bassist Kevin Otten, and drummer Kevin “Pacsun” Kaine. And to see them move onstage or backstage, there is nothing to suggest much has changed since they were playing shows for 50 people, even if the stakes are inevitably higher now for a band watching its popularity swell.
“We started playing in houses and taco shops and DIY spaces, VFW halls, and it’s gotten bigger and bigger over the years and now we’re having conversations that I never thought we would have — brand new decisions to make and we’re just trying to keep up,” Garris says backstage, hours before showtime, as some scratchy sounds from support act Show Me the Body echoes from across the venue.
Knocked Loose hail from just outside of Louisville, Ky., except for their newest member, guitarist Calderon, who is from Indianapolis. “I like being able to relate with everybody in my band about where we come from,” says Garris, wearing a worn-out Garth Brooks T-shirt. His paternal grandmother was an active performer of country music covers in the 1990s and early 2000s, singing the songs of Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn.
“I try to incorporate where we’re from in a lot of things with our music,” he adds, noting the use of southern terms like “holler” in the lyrics. He dropped a line from Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothings” into the 2021 track “Contorted in the Faille.” “That is another song that my grandma would sing to me,” Garris recalls of the ancient country-pop hit. “I love incorporating that.”
The album’s title was taken from an experience that Garris had on tour a few years back, as he was tense about one too many cross-country flights. The woman sitting beside the singer helped him stay calm, then assured Garris that, “You won’t go before you’re supposed to.” The weight lifted, and the comforting words stuck with him ever since.
For this album, the band enlisted producer Drew Fulk (Disturbed, Motionless in White, Papa Roach), who helped guide the band to a bigger, fuller sound of extremes without compromise. A follow-up to their darkest record, 2021’s A Tear in the Fabric of Life, the new project had to deliver on high expectations for both inside and outside the band.
After Knocked Loose sketched out song ideas during writing sessions in the SoCal desert of Joshua Tree, drum and guitar tracking began at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 in L.A. The lead Foo Fighter popped in one day to hang out with the band, sharing ideas on recording drums and heavy music.
“He was just pulling all these references from bands that we love,” remembers Garris. “The guy loves music. It doesn’t matter if it’s blues or jazz or if it’s the heaviest death metal, the guy knows his stuff. Being there was an amazing experience.” Vocal sessions then moved across town to Fulk’s studio in Silver Lake for vocals, which Garris finished on the road.
After a decade of road work, albums and EPs with Knocked Loose, Garris says he has studied the history of past heavy music contenders that inexplicably became widely popular to a generation of listeners. The band decided to push for new sophistication in their stage show, looking to the examples of Korn, extreme metal vets Meshuggah and their metalcore peers in Motionless in White, and do more than add some LED screens to their stage.
Meanwhile, at larger venues, Knocked Loose are often required to use a barricade at many of their shows, which now draw crowds that are too big. “That’s just a growing pain that we have to get over,” says Garris. “So we can’t rely as much on stage dives, mic grabs, the things that you would see at a stereotypical hardcore show. So what can we do? We have to create a show.”
Moving from a van to a tour bus was a major step Knocked Loose didn’t take lightly, and they delayed that evolution as long as they could. “We loved the van and we stayed in the van for a very long time,” Garris says, recalling their first van purchased from a church back home for $1,500, none of them with any experience as vehicle owners. When Kaine joined in 2015, he wondered about the health of that van. “He was like, ‘When’s the last time you guys got an oil change?’ And we were like, ‘What?’”
The band has learned a lot since then. With their increasingly higher profile comes new opportunities and new collaborators. In a few hours, Knocked Loose are joined onstage by the singer Poppy, in a baby blue tie over a white top and khaki skirt, black hair whipping through the air, to recreate her raging duet with Garris on the album’s third single, “Suffocate.” The idea for doing a song together came directly from the eclectic metal/pop/avant-garde singer.
“Poppy reached out to me on Instagram and was like, ‘Love your band. We should do music together.’ And I was a big fan of her, so I was like, yes, absolutely,” he adds. The new album was finished, but Garris and Hale wrote something new and made room for it. It was another welcome challenge for his longtime songwriting partnership with Hale. “Isaac is my creative partner,” he says “If you locked us in a room and said, write a country album, I believe that we could write a good one. If you locked us in a room and said, write a techno record, I believe we could write a good one. He and I just have insane chemistry.”
You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is the latest sign of the expanded horizons of Knocked Loose. That’s especially true now that they have aggressively but comfortably exploded into the consciousness of the larger population of music fans who are newly open to getting very loud. The future seems open-ended.
“I daydream a lot about things that we could do,” Garris says, sharing his ideas beyond music-making. “I would love to do a video game. I would do a movie. I’ve had a hand in directing our music videos recently, and that’s been fun. I think Knocked Loose can do anything.”