Bryan Garris had to fight to keep a lid on his emotions as he stared down at the words emblazoned across the stage in huge letters: Jimmy Kimmel Live!. A few feet to the vocalist’s right, the late night host held a copy of Knocked Loose’s latest record, ‘You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To’, in one hand as he introduced the Kentucky hardcore band to his massive television audience, most of whom had no idea what they were in for. “I can hear him saying our name,” Garris tells NME during a Zoom call. “I was like, ‘This is insane, how did we get here?’ Then all that adrenaline exploded.”
Exploded is the right word. As they climbed into ‘Suffocate’, their crushingly heavy collaboration with alt-pop star Poppy, pillars of flame shot from the lip of the stage, dramatically lighting up the rain that had begun sluicing from a late-November Los Angeles sky. When the camera reared back, it picked out spin-kicks and circle pits among 500 fans the band had been able to invite along. As the carnage unfolded, it dawned on Garris that a Knocked Loose show had broken out at a TV taping. “It couldn’t have been more perfect,” he says.
In only a couple of minutes, the performance managed to capture the almost contradictory nature of the band’s rise from garages in Oldham County to international prominence. On their way to becoming one of the most popular hardcore bands in history, Knocked Loose haven’t compromised their sound at all. In fact, ‘You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To’ is as confrontational and serrated a hit record as there’s ever been, one-upping the grinding intensity of their existing discography in almost every sense.
“The coolest thing about hardcore is that you’re equal with whoever’s on stage – there’s not this divide”
“No matter where you put us, we’re the same band,” Garris observes, and that’s never been more true than with ‘Suffocate’. Ostensibly the LP’s most accessible moment, it is also a chugging scream-along that both celebrates and subverts hardcore norms. Having a guest vocalist enter the fray to help a song shift gears is a tale as old as time, but having a genre-agnostic iconoclast like Poppy do the honours is not. “When we got the opportunity to collaborate with Poppy, we realised that it was a curveball for a lot of our listeners,” Garris says.
“So, our way to balance that was to make this song insane, to the point where you’re laughing at how heavy some of these breakdowns are,” he continues. “Poppy’s music is all over the place in a very positive way, so we could also do things that are a little bit weirder. The part where she comes in, it’s an off time hi-hat, like a dance beat. Obviously, there’s the reggaeton mosh part. Those were ideas that we already had in the bank, but they felt goofy in the context of a normal Knocked Loose song. When you have Poppy, it makes sense.”
Just a few weeks after setting a fresh benchmark on Kimmel, Garris and his bandmates (guitarists Isaac Hale and Nicko Calderon, bassist Kevin Otten and drummer Kevin ‘Pacsun’ Kaine) looked slick as hell on the red carpet at the Grammys, where ‘Suffocate’ was nominated for Best Metal Performance. Knocked Loose sat in a sense of suspended disbelief as the show rolled on, eventually hollering their approval as French prog-metal titans Gojira took home the prize. “I was so excited to be there, so excited to be recognised on such a major scale, that it didn’t occur to me that we could win,” Garris admits. “We had already won, in my eyes.”
Sentences just like that one have been said countless times before by artists who didn’t mean it one bit. But it’s clear that Garris is totally earnest. “There’s not one ounce of competition in us – we’ve been fortunate enough to make friends with Gojira,” he says. “We were rooting for them. You heard every member of Knocked Loose cheering in that building.”
“We see people reacting positively to all of this chaos that we’re introducing to our sound and we get inspired by that feedback”
This attitude speaks to a wider point, too. Another thing keeping Knocked Loose tethered to their roots in outsider culture is the fact they see their triumphs as part of a circle, not points plotted in a straight line. Hardcore is participatory music sustained by tiny scenes and DIY ethics and, to them, every Redditor calling them sell-outs, every Facebook comment decrying their Kimmel set, every freaked-out tourist at Coachella, is balanced out by the spark ignited in a curious kid watching wide-eyed at the mayhem.
They continue to foster the same dynamic at their own shows, which now take place in rooms like Brixton Academy, where they’ll soon kick off their forthcoming European tour alongside Chicago lifers Harms Way, post-hardcore greats Basement and the ferociously exciting crossover thrash band Pest Control. Their hope is that, after being one among thousands at these dates, someone will look up local bands and get their hands dirty as one among a dozen.
“A goal for us throughout this entire thing is to just remain accessible,” Garris says. “The biggest growing pain Knocked Loose have ever experienced is that the barricade [at shows] is impossible to argue. The coolest thing about hardcore is that you’re equal with whoever’s on stage, there’s not this divide. So, how do we keep that energy? How do we remain accessible, so that this is something that you feel like you’re a part of rather than something you’re witnessing? It’s always been important for us to keep the ethos of hardcore no matter where we go. It’s second nature.”
Given the head-spinning, reality-shifting nature of the past 12 months in Knocked Loose’s orbit, looking too far into the future should be a difficult task. But they have become used to adapting and reacting on the fly. Garris talks as though he’s had all the time in the world to plot a course forwards, even if the small window between Kimmel and the Grammys represented the first opportunity he’s had to draw breath in a while. Their trajectory suggests that when your relationship to your music and your scene goes beyond traditional markers for success and into something real and holistic, your next step will land on solid ground.
“There’s been a lot of processing of how amazing some of these moments have been,” Garris says. “But there’s never been any conversation about lightening up. We’re a heavy band and we’re always going to be a heavy band. If anything, that attention makes us want to double down. We see people reacting positively to all of this chaos that we’re introducing to our sound and we get inspired by that feedback, inspired by past extremes working. That’s how it will stay.”
Knocked Loose will kick off their 2025 UK and European tour on March 17 at the O2 Brixton Academy in London. Check out a full list of dates here.