“They had to call an ambulance into the crowd”: Knocked Loose on their 5 craziest shows ever, from Billie Eilish watching side of stage, to mosh pits in a morgue

When it comes to crushingly heavy music, there are few artists that can top Knocked Loose. Combining bruising hardcore with elements of extreme metal, the Kentucky-based noise nicks have gone from strength to strength, unleashing their uncompromising brutality in arenas across the world.

After a post pandemic rise, the fans half expected Knocked Loose to go softer- yet there isn’t a single sweetly sung vocal on their critically-acclaimed 2024 album ‘You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To’. Now riding high after a Grammy nomination and scaring audiences silly live on Jimmy Kimmel, Knocked Loose are staking their claim as this generation’s Slipknot.

While they lost out on a Grammy to Gojira’s French Olympics banger, when it comes to anarchic live performances, Knocked Loose reign supreme. Hailing from the sweat-infused DIY hardcore scene where barriers separating crowd and stage are the enemy, spin kicks, stage dives, and 5,000 strong wall of deaths are just a standard day at the office for Knocked Loose. Now as Knocked Loose find themselves becoming one of the biggest names in heavy music, I sit down with vocalist Bryan Garris. As they gear up to decimate their biggest UK stages yet next month - including the legendary Brixton Academy - Garris talks us through the craziest shows that Knocked Loose have played to date.

1. The Borg Ward, Milwaukee, February 16th 2006

“There was an amazing band from the Illinois area called King Maker and we were invited to come and play their last ever show. It was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and it was inside of an old morgue that would throw DIY shows - flat ground, no stage, maybe 150 people could fit inside this building. There’s over 400 people at this show, and it was so crazy, that the band was just in the crowd. You're fully immersed. You're not moving at all because there's so many people. I remember I started the set holding my mic up and I literally couldn't put my hands down, because there were just too many people.

"When you're in a big crowd of people, if they move, you're just moved against your will. So, that was me, as people are throwing things - throwing garbage cans - and I remember the floor was like bowing beneath us. It was just chaos – like something out of a movie. Shortly after our set, the cops were called and they kicked out people until the venue was at capacity. So for the rest of the show, it wasn't 400 kids crammed dangerously into a morgue, but for our set it was extremely crazy and extremely irresponsible.”

2. Championship Bar, New Jersey, 11th April 2017 (Loud Fest)

“We were playing this festival in New Jersey called Loud Fest, and it was a stacked lineup. Sanction, Jesus Piece, Despised Icon, Left Behind, and us. We get there early in the afternoon. We start setting up merch. I start watching bands, and the festival gets shut down. The cops come and they break in, it's a riot and it's just chaos.

"So I go over to my friend Dave, who plays in Jesus Piece. And I was just like, let's do a show - we're already here. You all didn't get to play. We didn't get to play. Let's find somewhere to do a show. So we find a bar in New Jersey, maybe 100 people can fit in there. We post a DIY flyer on the internet, and we're just like, Loud Fest got shut down, we're playing this show. It's 30 minutes away. Everybody go there! While I'm driving the van to that show, I keep getting texts from numbers that I don't know, saying, ‘it’s so and so, can we hop on the show?’ And I'm like, yep! And then I get another text, and another asking. Yep! Bring it on.

"The show was supposed to be Knocked Loose, Jesus Piece, Left Behind and Sanction, and in the 30 minute drive that it took us to get to the venue, the show ended up being Knocked Loose, Jesus Piece, Left Behind, Sanction, On Broken Wings, Years Spent Cold, Buried, Dreams and Laid to Rest. It was just the scariest show and it was in a 100 cap room – we were meant to be at a festival that held 1200 people so 1200 people tried to get in. It's just chaos the whole time. For the lineup alone this one was memorable. If you were to just write down that list of bands and say, they played a 100 cap bar the internet would explode!”

3. Chicago Warped Tour, July 21st 2018

“Chicago is one of my favourite places to play. It's a second home to Knocked Loose. It's the closest major city that we have, so growing up, we would go there for shows, and it’s the first place we ever went when we got our own van. To this day, we have such a loyal following in Chicago.

"So Chicago Warped Tour, I was like, this is going to be chaos - and sure enough, It was one of the craziest shows we've ever played. The amount of people, the amount of participation, it was just a war zone for 20 minutes! At Warped, every band plays 20 minutes. Every Time I Die was there, who we looked up to a lot, and they were Warped Tour veterans. They played it every other year for 12 years. So they're all there to support us. I remember getting off stage and one of them saying, I've never seen a Warped Tour set that crazy, and another one of them saying that it almost brought them to tears!

"We're hopping on this tour late. We're just visitors for the day. And there was a feeling around it that was, 'Knocked Loose is here today. What's going to happen?' The stage had a dry erase board, and the guys that worked the stage had a tally going where they made marks anytime medical had to get called because of injuries during sets. So you've got all the bands that played the stage, so and so had medical called twice. So and so got called once. Every Time I Die, had to call them nine times - Knocked Loose? 17 times.

"It was so crazy that in the first quarter of our set, someone got injured, we had to stop the set and it was such a bad injury that they had to drive an ambulance into the crowd. They had to park the entire crowd, drive an ambulance on and put someone in the back of it. That’s Chicago.”

4. Coachella, California, 16th April 2023

“Coachella - I have to put on there. It felt like we really had something to prove, like we don't belong here. We're going to do what we do harder than we've ever done it and you're either going to hate it or you're going to love it, but no matter what, you're going to be afraid of it. It was during a time period where the band took a year to focus on the album, so we weren't touring a lot. When we got together to do Coachella, it felt so good to be back with everybody, and everybody was so excited.

"We get to go to this festival, and it's a beautiful festival ground. Everybody's taking care of you. They're treating you like you're royalty, because there's massive A-list celebrities performing, and as far as they know you're with them, and we're just there, enjoying the day. When it comes time to play the set, we walk in and there's no barricade. I was like, this has to be a mistake? It must just be early, and they're going to set it up. And then the stage manager comes over to me, and he's wearing an old hardcore shirt, and I was like, ohhh!

"When it comes time to play the set, we're all so nervous, we're shaking. I'm feeling sick. Our manager is even nervous. He's pacing, and keeps poking his head out into the tent to see if there's people there. He comes back and somebody would ask him, 'What does it look like?' And he's like, 'Not great.'

"We're warming up, we're stretching. He pops his head back out there – ‘it's not great’ And we were like, hey, that's fine, we don't belong here. We don't exist here. We definitely had a scenario in our head where nobody watches us, and that's fine. We're on the flyer, we're in the door, this is already a massive success.

"So five minutes before we go on, our manager pokes his head out, and it’s packed. it apparently was so packed that they had to stop letting people into the tent. Then we played, and it was just this explosion of energy. It felt like a Knocked Loose show - it didn't feel like Coachella at all. People stage diving and people pitting and singing - it was truly amazing. We got off stage, like, what just happened?! I didn't see any of it in the chaos of the moment, but we were told after the fact that Billie Eilish was watching us. Ethel Cain was watching us and Travis Barker and Tom de Longe were watching us. That was an amazing moment. I'll definitely never forget that one.”

5. Secret set, LDB Festival, Louisville, 8th February 2020

“I have to give one of them to Louisville, where we're from. We have a festival here called LDB fest. It's been happening for maybe 11 years now and I've been every single year. It's our hometown fest for DIY hardcore. It started super small in a 200 cap venue and it's snowballed into this massive, super legit festival. In 2020 right before everything shut down, Knocked Loose had just finished a world tour. We were in Southeast Asia hearing about COVID, following it, reading news reports about a person who passed away because of this new sickness, and we would look at our tour dates, and we'd be like, well, we're playing there tomorrow!

"Long story short, we get home and every single one of us immediately goes to LDB, not to play, just to see all of our friends. We get there, and Kevin, our bass player, came up to me saying ‘I really want to play’. And I was like, ‘Yeah, me too. I want to freaking play!’ So I asked the people that put the fest on if we could do a surprise set somewhere in the middle of the day, and they were like, yes!

"I have a big mouth. I'm terrible at keeping secrets, especially when it's something that I'm excited about. But I straight up did not tell a soul that we were playing the next day. It was such a surprise that we start plugging in our guitars, and our friends are going, ‘what?!’ Everybody's just looking at us, like, what's going on? I just said, ‘We're Knocked Loose’ and we immediately exploded into five songs, real quick, back to back. Judiciary had just ended their set, so people were funnelling outside to get some fresh air and the second we started, people were running full speed back to the stage.

"It's one of my favourite sets that we've ever played. We were so solid as a band because we had just played 50 shows in 50 different countries – and just the energy of it being a surprise - it felt like such a welcome home. People were jumping off of the speakers. All of our friends were singing, I was just passing the mic around, it was truly so special - and then the world shut down. It was the last show that we played before COVID – and we couldn’t have asked for a better send off.”

You can catch Knocked Loose on tour across the UK in March, and at Outbreak festival in Manchester and London June 13-15th.

Image Credits: Jared Leiobiwitz

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