Heavy music that hits you with something harder than just impact will always be made by artists who make you feel like you are genuinely being brought within an inch of your life. Botch, Converge, and Hatebreed? All trailblazer examples. This is essentially the entire allure of Knocked Loose and an apt explanation as to why the Kentucky metalcore quintet’s following has exploded over the course of the last half decade. Between harvesting a living, breathing bestial sound that defines brute physicality through a thinking person’s POV of a world on the brink of collapse, and the ensuing live spectacle that is crowd violence as its own artform to match that energy, Knocked Loose are a force by reckoning way of cataclysmic riffs and auricular muscle that has made them newly crowned heavyweights of the scene’s latest wave. They most certainly aren’t just playing up those impulses for show either. That drive comes from some place very real, even when entrenched inside of the human psyche. On their third studio effort, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To, it’s exponentialized to confront the most terrifying of existential matter through all of Knocked Loose’s sonic devastations set forth so far on their biggest, hardest, and fastest collision course with oblivion yet. A top of mind panic attack is the catalyst of the listen, stymied by frontman Bryan Garris’ phobia of plane flights and the album title being taken from the kind of comforting things people tell us to make us feel better when we think we are about to stare down our own deaths from thousands of miles above ground while inside of a steel vessel soaring through the sky. Blind faith, fake prophets, fake friends, and struggling under the weight of everyday anxieties surge through the mind across the listen, and Garris alongside guitarists Isaac Hale and Nicko Calderon, bassist Kevin Otten, and drummer Kevin Kaine are hellbent on smashing through each and every one of them. Stylistically, they’re still very much the savages of shifting tectonic plates from the Earth’s core they were on their 2019 breakthrough, A Different Shade of Blue, even from the gravity of a bigger stage. Though now bolstered by production of mainstream metalcore studio guru Drew Fulk, there’s a greater degree of intensity and weight behind the way their sound hits the sensory surface. Blastbeats are turned up more explosive. Livewire currents and samples fraying from static electrocute the ground. In anthem, it sounds like Garris is fighting for his life from being torn by the cortex. Instead, with Hale and Calderon’s axes grinding and Otten and Kaine pulverizing mechanically, those big, scary intrusive thoughts are the ones which meet their ends, ground down until they resemble something smaller than a dust particle and buried deep beyond any place of escape. When it’s over, you’re left out of breath, soaked with sweat, and brandishing battle wounds with them. Thank god, or whatever it is that controls this cosmic mess, to having come out of the other side of the pit with (most of) your limbs still intact.

Highlights: “Piece By Piece”, “Blinded Faith”, “Sit & Mourn”

Knocked Loose’s You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is available now on Pure Noise Records.

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