This past week’s booking of Knocked Loose & Poppy as the musical guest on late night talk show ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!‘ wound up being a bit of a cultural moment for the latest breed of metalcore bands. Despite Knocked Loose‘s unrelenting heaviness, the group continue to kick down big doors, with this only being the latest.
Amid their ongoing rise, the Kentucky-based outfit also memorable bookings in 2023 at the the annual ‘Coachella‘ festival in Indio Valley, CA, as well as that year’s edition of the flagship Lollapalooza‘ festival in Chicago, IL.
This year saw the group continue to soar, making a sizable splash on the charts with their latest album “You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To“. That record’s third single, “Suffocate“, featured a guest appearance from alternative metal/pop artist Poppy, and earned Knocked Loose their first GRAMMY nomination (Poppy previously scored a ‘Best Metal Performance’ nomination back in 2021.)
Of course, they’re collectively up against some stiff competition in the ‘Best Metal Performance’ category next year, facing off against metal royalty in Metallica & Judas Priest. They’re also up against a band who have enjoyed a comparable meteoric rise of their own, Canadian alternative metallers Spiritbox.
And then there’s French progressive metallers Gojira‘s prestigious Paris Olympic Games opening ceremony track “Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça ira!)” — itself likely the biggest event in metal for 2024, and seemingly the odds-on favorite to win some gold of its own.
“Suffocate” however got a big boost in visibility this past week. Thanks to a raucous performance of the song airing on ‘Kimmel‘, Knocked Loose & Poppy were introduced to an entirely new audience.
Commentary on social media from bewildered and disgusted parents, and their apparently traumatized children, made that performance go viral. Hell, the term ‘junt’ (used by an apparent angry parent to describe the band’s guitar sound on the show,) has already become a meme, appearing on unofficial merch and more. There’s also some stats to back up the hype, as the the performance of “Suffocate” has already racked up over 1 million plays in the four days since it was uploaded.
There’s of course been attempts to downplay the accomplishment. Knocked Loose are by no means the first, nor the biggest, metalcore band to play ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!‘. Multi-platinum metalcore mainstays Killswitch Engage have played the show more than once, and that’s just one example.
However, with Knocked Loose, the band represent a younger generation. In a sense, their aforementioned performance serves as validation to an army of younger metal and hardcore fans and bands that you can make it without sacrificing your ideals of compromising your sound. Knocked Loose bootstrapped themselves to success and they very much represent lightning in a bottle for a genre often overlooked, if not derided, by more mainstream outlets.
As such, it’s kind of fascinating to now read Knocked Loose vocalist Bryan Garris‘ take on the matter. The latter shared the following post regarding that on social media yesterday, November 30th:
“You may have seen it already, you may have not. I’ve been lucky enough that my timeline is flooded with so much support that I see it every time I open my phone. But I wanted a chance to post about it myself. The other day Knocked Loose performed on @jimmykimmellive For a long time now our goal has been to see how far we could squeeze this band into places where we don’t fit and I think this may be the biggest one. National television. It feels like the ceiling gets higher for EVERYONE, every single day. We celebrate this together. Thank you so much.
Walking down the hallway as we were escorted to stage Im looking to my left and right and seeing photos of all the celebrities that have been on the show over the years. Presidents, actors, musicians etc. I leaned over to @caasihale and said “this started in your garage”. He grabbed onto me and squeezed as hard as he could. That’s a moment I’ll never forget.
PS if it scared you, good.”
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