The reggaeton breakdown started out as a joke. So did the pyro. As Knocked Loose spent the spring touring their titanic third album, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To, frontman Bryan Garris coined a running gag for the Kentucky hardcore heroes: “In the fall, we try for fire.” In Knocked Loose, if an idea makes them groan or eye-roll or howl with laughter, it’s a sign they need to see it through.
And so this becomes the most illogical conclusion possible for their late-night debut, in late November. Jimmy Kimmel announces that Knocked Loose will perform the Grammy-nominated “Suffocate,” featuring guest vocals from the similarly Grammy-nominated polyglot Poppy, last seen reheating her beef with Grimes. And when they hit the “Gasolina” beat halfway through, the flashpots illuminate a sea of hardcore heads doing spin kicks on national television. In the rain. Garris sometimes does a pig squeal to punctuate a particularly heavy breakdown, as on You Won’t Go lead single “Blinding Faith”; he adds one to the live version of “Suffocate” that lasts about 10 seconds. The next day, outraged parents demand an apology from Jimmy Kimmel Live! for allowing such a distasteful sound to hit the airwaves. Literally, think of the children! I mean, what can you do but laugh?
Even if You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is 28 minutes of demonic shrieks and the occasional pig squeal, bowel-juddering 7-string riffs and double kick drums, it’s also one of 2024’s truly feel-good success stories. In fact, Knocked Loose strikes me as downright wholesome, not just because Garris adopts a cordial Kentucky gentleman tone toward the staff at the Toyota Oakdale Theatre despite their frequent interruptions of our Zoom conversation.
The band is indeed a down-home affair: Garris went to elementary school with bassist Kevin Otten and eventually linked up with guitarist/mosh-call hypeman Isaac Hale while he was juggling college classes and waiting tables. To this day, everyone involved in the Knocked Loose team started out as a friend and remains one. In the summer of 2014, Knocked Loose got their first offer for a “two bands, one van, two-and-a-half-week” tour, and even thought they played for $50 a night, Garris was hooked. “We went down to Florida and it was the first time I went to the beach,” he recalls. “And I was just like … man, this is it.” Their next offer would’ve conflicted with his classes in the fall, so Garris just never went back. He had designs on being a teacher, but we’ll have to just imagine his using the “Blinding Faith” voice to keep a class in line. They still love touring, especially now that they play at venues that have on-site washing machines.
As heartwarming as it is to see any heavy band reach familiar metrics of mainstream success without sounding like Imagine Dragons, Knocked Loose is truly an anomaly in that they did so without causing diehards to turn their backs. Even as music writers and fans like myself spend untold hours doing the same horse-race analysis that besets politics and sports, we long for something that completely defies conventional wisdom and thus frees us from the temptation to continue. And indeed, Knocked Loose have confounded every expectation set by the “next Turnstile” conversation that had dominated hardcore music discourse for the past four years.
After the game-changing success of GLOW ON, most assumed that any band aspiring to a similar level would do so by expanding hardcore’s boundaries to include populations underserved by heavy music; in their arc from scene darlings to stadium fillers, Turnstile signed to a major label, indulged in electronic side projects, worked with a Dr. Dre producer, and hung out with Paramore. Also, they were conventionally attractive guys. That GLOW ON popped off was surprising to nobody—only the degree to which it happened did.
Similarly, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To was already one of the year’s most highly anticipated releases. 2019’s A Different Shade of Blue is a certified scene classic and even before Jimmy Kimmel and the Grammys, Knocked Loose somehow managed to be the one diplomat of heavy music at Bonnaroo and Coachella in 2023. But afterward, they did not experiment with wavy R&B or integrate clean vocals or even work with a vocal coach. “You can't be a bad singer and be in a good band, but you can be a bad screamer and be in a good band,” Garris explains. To be clear, he considers himself to be a good screamer of bad sounds, evidenced by the fact that he “wake[s] up in the morning and every part of [him] hurts,” though he’s never blown out his vocal cords. There was one instance in Europe when he thought he did. “I was like … well, here we go, all the YouTube comments are right.” He booked an appointment with an ENT and it turns out that, in a stroke of relative good luck, he didn’t have busted vocal cords, just COVID.
At least for now, Knocked Loose remain on Pure Noise, a Nashville-based indie label that had a killer 2024 but is still largely the house that pop-punkers like the Story So Far and State Champs built. Though You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To found Knocked Loose moving on from hardcore wizard Will Putney, their new producer was a guy named WZRD BLD who has worked with NLE Choppa, Kevin Gates, and extremely popular metalcore acts who will never, ever see coverage in Pitchfork.
“There's never been any conversation about softening or becoming more approachable,” Garris says. “If anything, it's the opposite. If we can get a Coachella offer with our most extreme music, then how extreme can it get?” After 2021’s A Tear in the Fabric of Life, a concept EP detailing a fatal car wreck, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To somehow managed to make things more graphically violent. I’d describe the video for “Blinding Faith” as Midsommar-goes-metalcore. Yet while there aren’t a lot of melodies on You Won’t Go, there’s nothing but hooks, whether it’s Hale’s face-scrunching riffs, the sudden jump-scare tempo shifts, or Garris doing basically anything with his voice.
In trying to wrap my head around the extent of You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To’s success, I thought back to the bands I’d see on Headbangers Ball during the peak CD era, specifically Pantera—a band that similarly took their success as a mandate to get gnarlier and nastier, often times as a protest against other metal bands that had gotten too pop. Yet, Knocked Loose doesn’t view themselves as a great Southern trendkill. Garris is literally a born-and-bred hip-hop nerd—born to a teenage father who would transcribe Eric B. and Rakim’s Follow the Leader at the kitchen table so he wouldn’t forget the lyrics. But rather than gravitating toward Golden Age boom-bap, Garris heard his future in the likes of Ludacris, UGK, Young Jeezy, and especially Lil Jon and the Eastside Boyz. “If you listen to their early stuff before they blew up, they’re literally just mosh calling,” Garris notes, and the most expensive vinyl in his vast collection is a first-edition “platinum” pressing of Throw Yo Hood Up. That being said, please do not call Knocked Loose crunkcore, because that thing already happened.
Before their appearance on Kimmel, I had assumed that their stop in Orange County in October would be the culmination of their massive 2024. Having not read the fine print, I expected them to be playing at the Observatory, a 1,200-capacity room where I’ve seen bands like Foxing and Animal Collective in the past. Instead, it’s an outdoor festival show with 6,000 to 7,000 people in the audience. Militarie Gun are the first of three openers, themselves a prime “next Turnstile” pick for emerging out of a power-violence past to embrace Britpop hooks. (And like Turnstile, they also landed in a Taco Bell commercial after a breakout year.) Drain are next. They’re a band I’d describe as the sound of crowd-surfing on a boogie board. Overall the openers are pretty standard for Knocked Loose, but this night feels particularly validating for Garris with its inclusion of weirdo rap icon Danny Brown, whose 2011 classic “Bruiser Brigade” is pretty much a hardcore song. They had previously shared a 4/20 bill in 2017 sponsored by Adidas; now, after Brown posted about listening to You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To, the two parties linked up for something more organic.
This is somehow the first time I’ve managed to see Knocked Loose in person; despite living in Kentucky as hype swelled around their 2016 debut, Laugh Tracks, I never managed to drive the hour or so it would’ve taken to see them in their hometown of Louisville. Or, more specifically, Oldham County, which is emblazoned on their most popular piece of merch. This also started out as something of a joke. While the name “Oldham County, Kentucky,” conjures images of outlaws, coal mining, and Justified, in reality, it’s the most affluent county in the Bluegrass State. If you must, think of it as the Orange County to Louisville’s Los Angeles. With their metalcore, suburban roots, Knocked Loose assumed that they wouldn’t be accepted by the more serious bands in the thriving hardcore scene about 35 minutes away. Those fears were unfounded, but the ironic civic pride remained. “[Local bands] still make fun of us and say, ‘Put Louisville on your damn shirt,’” Garris laughs.
There tends to be an assumption that seeing an artist before they blow up provides a more authentic and enviable experience. This seems especially true of a hardcore band like Knocked Loose, so reliant on the energy of a crowd; of course they’d be better without a barricade, at a church basement or a poorly ventilated club. This is not the case with Knocked Loose. Having watched their Bonnaroo and Coachella performances, they simply look like the Hate5Six clips scaled up to include people who are otherwise at the festival to see Frank Ocean and Alex G and just haven’t been given an opportunity or reason to circle-pit for the first time in their lives. It’s actually quite beautiful.
But once bands leave the festival tent and move on to amphitheaters and arenas, as Knocked Loose did on their recent tour with Slipknot, they need to know how to put on a legitimate show for people who have never set foot in a VFW hall. And I am not prepared for the sheer theater of a Knocked Loose performance in 2024. Garris and Hale are engaged in constant crowd work, taking the breaks between their very short songs to alternately tour and taunt the crowd. “I thought this was Orange County,” the duo say often during the show, and yes, a hardcore band does expect a certain energy that is otherwise lacking in nearby Los Angeles (too many industry people) and San Diego (too chill).
Though their core sound and stage presence were incubated in hardcore and metalcore, Garris had to draw on the lessons of crunk club classics to engage with the crowds that bands like Knocked Loose see once the ticket prices start to exceed $30. In 2022, Knocked Loose played the Grey Day Festival, headlined by $uicideboy$, a duo whose Three 6 Mafia–inspired SoundCloud horrorcore has long served as a crucial connective point between hardcore and more extreme versions of popular rap. Meanwhile, the rock bands who join typically have a rougher go of things. (I remember Turnstile in 2021 being mildly received on the same tour.) “It was seven rappers and us,” Garris recalls, including JPEGMAFIA, Maxo Kream, and Ski Mask the Slump God. “I can’t tell [that crowd] to two-step. They’re not gonna know what I’m saying.”
So even if tonight’s crowd at the OC festival is hardcore, they might not be hardcore fans. And so Knocked Loose try to speak generalities to the masses. “You really just have to invite them to have fun or else the majority of the crowd is just going to stand there and just watch,” he explains. “But the second you tell them, Hey, jump, they're like, ‘Oh, I can do that.’” And so Knocked Loose demand that the crowd levitate for the duration of each song, and, in between, that the circle pit expand to swallow bystanders on the side. Thousands are swinging and jumping … until a pocket of fans start waving their arms and forming them into an “X.” The music comes to a dead halt.
Knocked Loose are accustomed to injury timeouts, as smaller crowds tend to have a self-policing policy that ensures anyone who gets knocked cold by a stray elbow is taken out of the venue and cared for on the sidewalk. “Now the shows are at a size where it's very possible that someone could get hurt and the crowd around them would not even notice,” Garris says.
Garris and Hale are relieved that the suffering party is being attended to and that the show can go on after a few minutes. They also lament how the energy beforehand was some of the “most insane” they’ve ever experienced. This is the tricky part for a hardcore band that has leveled up to festivals: How do you maintain the energy of a 20-minute hardcore set when you’re headlining for over an hour and when—not if—the time comes when someone is legitimately in danger and the show has to pause? How do you get the energy back up?
This is where the pyro pays off. “It’s insanely expensive,” Garris laughs. And since nearly all of the band’s stage dressing is not flameproof, most shows on this tour will get only the cryo smoke. Pyro is also surprisingly complicated and unsurprisingly dangerous. Fifteen feet separate the fire blasters and the crowd, and any usage requires the approval of the local fire marshal and two other operators who are responsible for, respectively, making fire happen and making sure it doesn’t happen. One of them hits a button to ensure the flames match their musical cues, and the other guy commands a kill switch that disables the pyro if anyone in Knocked Loose is past a predetermined line in front of the risers. As Garris puts it, “The heat hits you like a brick wall,” and though he questions how Knocked Loose are allowed to put themselves at such a risk, “standing in front of six fire explosions is the most powerful I’ve ever felt.”
Doing so in front of a glowing cross has given certain people the wrong impression. Before Kimmel, Knocked Loose’s most notable backlash came from fans who assumed they were now a Christian band or Christian bands who thought they were using the symbolism in vain. While a good portion of Garris’s lyrics on You Won’t Go are spiritual and, at times, overtly religious, the cross on the album cover serves as a “metaphor for things that tower over you and follow you around”; Garris speculates that this specific metaphor is the most obvious signifier of their Southern roots. While Garris is amused at the idea of an unnamed Christian band calling them out, he realizes that the crucifix does kinda fit. “Some of the pictures that our photographer gets on this tour are blurry hands and you just see the glow of the cross,” he says. “And we were sending it in our group chat, like, this literally looks like Hillsong United.”
No one will confuse the November show in Oakdale, Connecticut, that I spoke to them before for any sort of youth group function—this night’s special opener is none other than local legend Hatebreed. For now, Garris is still in a state of shock about their Grammy nomination, which they learned about only a day prior. While Garris was sleeping, he missed a call from his manager and, subsequently, a text that just said “emergency.” “I called him back and he was like, ‘What are you doing right now?’ I'm sleeping,” he recalls. “And he said, well, wake up, you're going to the fucking Grammys.”
In all likelihood, Knocked Loose will just have to be happy to be there. By no means is this is a slight against Knocked Loose, so much as an honest assessment of what happens for bands of their ilk—the “new guy” in the Best Metal Performance category, where the past five winners have been Tool, Body Count, Dream Theater, Ozzy Ozbourne, and Metallica. As recently as 2015, Anthrax and Motorhead were nominees, but lost out to Tenacious D. Knocked Loose’s competition in 2025 includes Metallica, Judas Priest, and Gojira, another band accused of Satanism this year for simply being metal on television. And so Garris is at least trying to have a sense of humor about it. “I actually have always had this idea in my head that if we ever get nominated, I would like to wear an old-fashioned Nudie Suit,” Garris laughs, and I expect that we’ll see him going full rhinestone cowboy on the red carpet. The fact that it started as a joke means that Knocked Loose are dead serious about it.