Louisville gets slugged by Knocked Loose as they play the gig of their lives at Louder Than Life 2025.
The backdrop says it all: KNOCKED LOOSE’S LOUISVILLE. “We’re fucking home!” yells Bryan Garris as he arrives, proudly decked out in his home city’s baseball jersey. “I wanna see a circle-pit. If you’re from Louisville, show these motherfuckers how it’s done.”
As local boys made very good, tonight’s show – directly under Bring Me The Horizon on one of Louder Than Life’s two main stages – was always going to be a special occasion. But what the Louisville sluggers deliver from the moment Blinding Faith drops is a jaw-breaking statement of just how powerful a band this heavy can be on a stage this big.
Brilliantly, the shift up hasn’t come at the expense of their feral bite, having managed to pull the vein-popping intensity of a small hardcore show with them. “Are you feeling crazy?” asks Bryan somewhat unnecessarily for anyone who can see the enormous amount of crazy happening in front of him. Isaac Hale’s thousand-yard stare as he surveys the carnage is actually even more intimidating than it would be up close, with even those faaaar at the back feeling like he’s personally getting up in their faces. Then he does a mosh call by simply barking “mosh-pits” and things get even crazier. There’s big production – pyro, trees onstage – but these are mere baubles next to the boiling, gnashing energy they generate on their own, and which hits like a truck being dropped on your head.
Earlier in the day, rain stopped play as a severe weather warning threw a spanner in today’s scheduling. They should probably be equally worried when Bryan declares that “I wanna feel the ground shake” from people jumping. In fact, throughout they’re so heavy that often the cameras for the jumbotrons actually are shaking.
There’s been loads of noisy bands on this stage this weekend, but very few come anywhere near the visceral intensity cooked up by Suffocate, Billy No Mates and Counting Worms. It’s easy enough to downtune and get a fat guitar tone and chunk your way through with a bit of controlled screaming, but the way Knocked Loose do it is much more physical, sweaty and bloody-nosed. Again, to manage such a thing on this scale without losing the gnarly, acidic touch is a rare thing indeed.
There was a point when the band doing that were a young, piss-and-vinegar Metallica in the early ’80s, or a debutant Slipknot as they tore up the 1999 Ozzfest. Now the band taking everyone to school for a lesson in violence, intensity and bullshit-free thrills are five lads from “just up the road”, as Bryan puts it. As they leave their hometown triumphantly and jubilantly smashed to bits, you almost feel sorry for the former of those two legends. They’re the ones who have to follow this at their stadium shows together next summer. Best of luck with that…
