2026 Gulf of Doom - Saturday (1/24)

Enmy

Kash'd Out

Nik Parr and The Selfless Lovers

Matte Blvck

Koffin Kats

The groundwork for what has become the relentlessly touring sonic assault known as The Koffin Kats was laid near Detroit, Michigan when Vic Victor (Lead Vocalist, Upright Bass) joined forces with long-time friend Tommy Koffin (Guitar). After adding Damian Detroit (Drums), the band kicked off in June 2003, stopping for nothing. Now, with over 12 years of touring internationally, over two thousand live shows, and a few lineup changes. The touring trio’s current home is out on the open road. The Koffin Kats began by putting together songs with such subjects as dealing with the horrors of the real world, as well as Science Fiction. The band started in small local bars playing for beer, hoping for gas money, and eventually made their way out of the Midwest. The next couple of years contained positives; including numerous North American tours, and negatives concerning changes at the drumming position with Damian being replaced by Katch Katcher. During this time they released their first three albums: Koffin Kats (2003), Inhumane (2005), and Straying From The Pack (2006). All on Hairball 8 Records. The three album releases and their supporting tours gained attention for The Koffin Kats and helped get the band noticed in the wide world of punk and psychobilly. Eric “E-Ball” Walls was the bands first drummer before being replaced by Damian in the bands beginning months. In 2007 Vic and Tommy re-connected with E-Ball to record the band’s fourth studio album, Drunk In The Daylight (2008), and catalyzed what the band is now known for: love for their fans and the road, and playing everywhere for everyone willing to watch and listen. In the years following the release of Drunk In The Daylight, The Koffin Kats have established their name performing in Europe, and have also been included on tours with some of the tops acts in psychobilly, including, but not limited to, The Rev. Horton Heat, Mad Sin, Nekromantix, and The Meteors. In 2009 the trio released their fifth studio album, Forever For Hire, and Tommy departed KK at the year’s end. Shortly thereafter, “EZ” Ian Jarrell took over the guitarist position and joined the band on tour. While on the road they worked on the material that would become featured on their split album with fellow psychobilly act 12 Step Rebels, From Our Hands To Yours (2011). The Koffin Kats signed with Sailor’s Grave Records in late 2011, and released Our Way & The Highway in January 2012. The trio supported their sixth studio album’s release with non-stop international touring, finally ending in summer of 2013. In autumn of the same year, they released another full-length album with Sailor’s Grave Records, Born Of The Motor. Early 2014 brought another change to The Koffin Kats’ member roster. Ian had left the band to handle personal business at home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Not wanting to bring someone too far removed from The Koffin Kats family into the fold, Vic and E-Ball enlisted John Kay (Guitar). John was the engineer on numerous recording sessions for the group, and producer of both Drunk In The Daylight and Born Of The Motor. New Years day 2016 marked the departure of John Kay. John has since gone on to pursue a career with his own music, as well as sound engineering. Tommy Koffin has returned from musical hiatus and is now back playing guitar. KK released a track with Tommy called “Cold Blood, Dead Eyes.” The Koffin Kats will be touring the US and Europe in 2016 and have plans to record a new album.

Strung Out

It was always going to be different. Regardless of what ended up happening between Strung Out’s previous record—2019’s Songs Of Armor And Devotion—and this new collection of songs, it was always the band’s intention to step away from themselves a little bit with it. Although Dead Rebellion­—the band’s 10th album of their remarkable 35 year career—was written during the height of the pandemic and is, as all Strung Out albums have been, a reaction to the world at large and their own personal experiences within it, the band had already decided to end that chapter before Covid. A new beginning had long been in the works.  “We got to that point where I felt like if we kept going we’d be repeating ourselves,” explains vocalist Jason Cruz. “And you know, we’re a fucking metal band—a punk metal band—and there’s only so much you can do before people start writing you off as losing your roots or whatever. We all have side projects, so we use those to go into left-field, but I think that this is the most we can do and keep our fan base and actually take them in just a little bit of a slightly different direction. It’s more mid-tempo and more heavy, less worrying about speed. We were trying to be more melodic.” That’s not to say these 12 songs don’t pack a punch, but, at the same time, the way the five-piece—these days completed by guitarists (and founding members) Jake Kiley and Rob Ramos, bassist Chris Aiken and drummer Daniel Blume—focus on melody over riffs is definitely noticeable. Take, for instance, the way opener “Future Ghosts” begins in a frenzy of riffs and drumbeats before settling into a kind of hypnotic aggression, or how the frenetic undercurrent of “White Owls” quietens down, its power condensed into a hushed whisper before once again soaring off in an impassioned burst of emotion. Similarly, “Life You Bleed”—one of many requiems here for modern living—tiptoes quietly at first but then accelerates into a fully-fledged rock anthem. Elsewhere, “Cages” is a vicious indictment of the fractious, polarized and technology-driven nature of society, while “Empire Down” is a self-reflective ode about living up to the pressures and expectations of being in this band. ‘We are the orphans of a revolution song,’ sings Cruz; elsewhere in the song, he quotes the chorus of the 1964 Nina Simone song, ‘Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’. When the album ends a few tracks later with the breakneck (yet still melodic) intensity of ‘Plastic Skeletons’, Cruz returns to the importance of that same revolution song. ‘Everybody dancing for applause,’ he sings, ‘when the song is how we rise above.’ “People always talk shit about religious people and spirituality,” says Cruz, “like ‘Oh, you believe in a man in the sky.’ But then the same people come up to me and look to me like I, or my songs, have the answers to their questions. Because everyone’s looking for something, everybody needs something. Sometimes, as a dad and as a husband, I wish I could call my dad or somebody and just ask ‘What the fuck do I do here?’ Everybody needs a Northern star. So while those two lines kind of contradict each other, at the same time they lend to each other that we’re all just looking for something and we all put our belief in something, no matter how ridiculous or superstitious it is. And those things can let you down, but they also can rise you up.” Regardless of the pressure it may have put on the band, and despite Cruz’s insecurity that being a Northern star could let people down, Strung Out’s songs have been lifting people up for three-and-a-half decades now. Dead Rebellion is no different. In a world that Cruz sees as incredibly divided, one that—as he outlines on the afore-mentioned “Cages”—sees people constantly building what he calls “ideological walls” around each other, his hopes are this record can help tear them down. “The key to this record,” says Cruz, “is technology and divisiveness—divisive language, divisive attitudes, divisive ideologies. I feel I was abandoned in a way, by a lot of things. What happened to bringing people together? I thought that that’s what we started doing this for. It’s still a huge part of who I am and it seeps into the lyrics - trying to just find some common ground with people again and remind people that we’re all the fucking same. At the end of the day, when the lights go out, we all want the same thing. And that’s where the title Dead Rebellion came from - like, we got so far and here we are right back again, just fragmented and at each other’s throats constantly.” That, then, is the crux of Dead Rebellion. Produced, mixed and recorded by Shawn McGee at Artistry Recording Studio in Las Vegas, it might represent a new chapter for Strung Out, but it’s guided by the same principles that have always driven them. And while Cruz he says he’s never thought of Strung Out as political band, this record—like all Strung Out records—has captured the zeitgeist and the self-destructive political climate, especially in the USA, perfectly. “I struggle with the political thing,” says Cruz. “I don’t think we’re political. I think we’re just human. We’re a bunch of guys who are like everybody else. We’re not that smart. We’re just five guys that had nothing in common and we’ve proved to the world that you can come together and make something beautiful if you put your bullshit aside. It’s as simple as that.” Overtly political or otherwise, Dead Rebellion is nevertheless a record informed by and reacting to the world we live in, as well as all the experience and wisdom that Cruz has attained over the years. It’s also one built on the unwavering principles that the band have had at their core from the very beginning. So while Cruz hopes that it can help unify people, he’s more than aware that that’s very likely too much to ask. But that doesn’t mean he’s not going to try. “I know that’s not going to happen,” he admits. “We’re too far gone. There’s a saying ‘You can never go back home’, and I feel like the horses are out the stable and they’re running wild. So this is my declaration of war, in a way—a war to stay true and to just go down like the person I know I am, to stay true to myself and to stay true to my brothers--and go down believing what I know is right, to look people in the eye and give them a chance, and to listen and to try my best to bring people together. And that’s the that’s the hill that I’m going to die on.”    

80s Video Dance Party

Lucero

Lucero has long been admired in their hometown of Memphis, where they have hosted “The Lucero Family Block Party” every spring for a number of years. At the 2018 Block Party they celebrated their 20th anniversary as a band, with the city’s Mayor Jim Strickland officially declaring it “Lucero Day.”   The group found their name in a Spanish/English dictionary. “Lucero” is variously translated as “bright star” or “morning star.” None of them can speak Spanish.   It’s been two decades since original members Ben Nichols, Brian Venable, Roy Berry, and John C. Stubblefield (keyboardist Rick Steff joined in 2006) started playing shows in Memphis. The band’s first show was April 13, 1998 at a warehouse space across the street from what is now the National Civil Rights Museum, the infamous Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Their first set was six songs played to about six people. On August 3, 2018, record release day for Among the Ghosts, the band will be co-headlining Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado.   The band’s ninth studio album, Among the Ghosts, is their first for noted Nashville indie label Thirty Tigers. It was recorded and co-produced with Grammy-winning engineer/producer and Memphis native Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price, Drive by Truckers) at the historic Sam Phillips Recording Service, the studio built by the legendary producer after outgrowing his Memphis Recording Service/Sun Studio.   Recorded primarily live as a five-piece, Among the Ghosts eschews the Stax-inspired horns and Jerry Lee Lewis-style boogie piano featured on some of the band’s past recordings for a streamlined rock & roll sound that pays homage to their seminal influences as it seeks to push that legacy into the future. For a band who carried the torch of the alt-country movement back in the 90’s and helped pave the way for what is now called Americana, Lucero have re-discovered what inspired them in the first place. The sound is more their own and at the same time not exactly like anything they’ve done before. This is a band settling into their craft. The 10-song disc’s title is both a tribute to the spirits which roam the streets of their fabled city, as well as the hard road the determinedly independent band set out on 20 years ago. The band played around 200 shows per year for many of those 20 years.   With a nod to his younger brother Jeff Nichols, an acclaimed filmmaker whose movies include Loving, Mud, Take Shelter, Midnight Special, and Shotgun Stories; Nichols has written songs that are cinematic short stories, steeped in Southern gothic lore. There are nods to regional authors like Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner, as well as newer writers like Larry Brown (Big Bad Love, Fay), Ron Rash (The Cove, The World Made Straight), and William Gay (The Long Home).   As the first album he’s written since his marriage and the birth of his now two-year-old daughter Izzy, Nichols approached the task as a narrator rather than in first person. It’s a dark palette that includes tales of a haunting (“Among the Ghosts”), a drowning (“Bottom of the Sea), a reckoning with the devil (“Everything has Changed”), a divorce (“Always Been You”), and a shoot-out (“Cover Me”). And that’s just Side A. Side B is a letter from a battlefield (“To My Dearest Wife”), a crime (“Long Way Back Home”), a straight-out rocker (“For the Lonely Ones”) and even a spooky spoken-word cameo from actor Michael Shannon, who has appeared in every one of Nichols’ brother’s films. The song’s title “Back to the Night” references a line from Nick Tosches’ Jerry Lee Lewis biography, Hellfire. In addition, there’s a song Nichols wrote for his brother’s movie Loving, which appeared in the film and on the soundtrack, re-recorded for Among the Ghosts with the whole band.   “You could also say there’s a rescue, a getaway, a survival story and a middle finger to Satan himself,” laughs Nichols. “It’s all in your perspective.”   Several songs juxtapose going off to battle with a rock & roll band’s endless touring, shifting time periods like the spirits which haunt the album, the happiness of domestic bliss undercut with fears of loss and the specter of mortality. Among the Ghosts simultaneously reprises the past and looks to the future, while being firmly anchored in the present.   Musically, the band highlights range from co-founding member Brian Venable’s Dire Straits-meets- War on Drugs guitar pyrotechnics in “Bottom of the Sea” and “Cover Me” to the Springsteen vibe of “For the Lonely Ones”, Rick Steff’s skeletal piano lines on “Always Been You”, John C’s bass lines in “Everything Has Changed” and “Long Way Back Home”, and drummer Roy Berry’s dynamic shifts from the powerful and brutal title track “Among the Ghosts” to the marching drive of “To My Dearest Wife” and the subtlety of “Loving”. Throughout, Nichols’ bourbon-soaked growl has become even more distinctive and commanding.   Among the Ghosts offers a timeless perspective on Lucero’s distinctive sound. The lyrics could’ve been written 200 years ago or yesterday. Representing a new South compared to the one that’s been mythologized, Lucero have formulated their own ideas and culture which, in some cases, contradicts what came before them (no Confederate flags), but also updates and reconsiders those traditions in a new light.   “I think we’ve tried to remake this place that we love and cherish in our own fashion. We are very proud of where we are from and we’ve spent the last 20 years trying to bring a bit of our version of home to the rest of the world... It may have taken 20 years, but everything has fallen in place right where it needs to be,” acknowledges Nichols. “There were some dark days in those middle years, but we’ve learned how to do this and survive. We still write heartbreak songs, but now, with a family at home, it’s a whole new kind of heartbreak.”   Among the Ghosts lays out that new territory with alacrity, as Lucero shines their Morning Star, burning just as brightly, if not more so, 20 years later. As one of the album’s song titles so aptly puts it, “Everything Has Changed”, but one thing hasn’t... Lucero’s music remains more vital than ever.