Live music review: Hardcore music festival The Rumble featured Hatebreed, Turmoil and more

Sometime around 1999 or 2000, I caught Turmoil at the Odum, a short-lived punk/hardcore venue in Chicago. I was obsessed with their seminal record, The Process Of, and made sure to make the show. I still think about how much I love that record and how it’s still my favorite hardcore record of all time. For a long time, it was a simple “yeah, I caught them back in the day,” and then, in 2007, the band played another Chicago show, which I caught just before I moved to New Orleans.

I don’t remember much about the Odum other than what fuzzy memories dictate: a room, a cheap PA, and maybe 30 kids losing their minds to a record that would become a blueprint for countless bands that followed. That’s all it needed to be.

On Friday, July 17 as part of the annual festival The Rumble, Turmoil made their way back to Chicago for a triumphant return, playing songs from The Process Of and giving it everything they had in the process. I felt like a kid again, bobbing to the riffs of “Let It Die” while screaming along to the opening salvo of the hardest intro of all time, yelling “what the fuck?” alongside frontman John Gula.

Hearing those songs live again brought back the memories, mostly of being in bands, always trying to write a riff like “The Discipline of Self-Loathing” or “Killing Today for a Better Tomorrow.” I never got close.

The Rumble happens every summer since 2010. This year, I was lucky enough to be back in Chicago for the first night. Having missed the festival for years after moving away, I was thrilled to see everything it had to offer. Ringworm leaned into its earlier, more hardcore-rooted material alongside D-Block, Hoods, Hold My Own, and Outta Pocket.

I’m a sucker for places where people still show up instead of just posting about showing up. The Rumble had a distro for fans to participate in, the bands were all set up together in a merch room hanging out with everyone else, and the stage was small and approachable instead of feeling like some overblown festival. Despite taking place in Cobra Lounge‘s parking lot, The Rumble felt like an open-air club show.

Long before I moved away in 2008, Shane Merrill and Empire Productions were already putting on shows. They’re still at it today. I absolutely love that. In a world steadily losing itself to online butchery, Merrill is still putting in the work, keeping Chicago’s underground communities alive. That means something and deserves to be celebrated. Promoters come and go, but it’s the people giving hungry bands a place to crash, a room to play, a hot meal—the good ones who’ve stuck around and done it the right way—who deserve their flowers.

Hatebreed headlined the night, and it was a smart booking because Jamey Jasta knew exactly who he was playing for. The band kept its set focused on Under the Knife, Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire, and Perseverance—the records that built the band’s reputation long before they leaned further into metal. Nobody was there hoping to hear the latest material. With Turmoil as main support, the crowd wanted the songs that shaped their youth. Hatebreed understood the assignment.

The show made me smile because I love seeing the collective underground of my hometown show up. I love that people still support something like this, that it’s still going. As No Idols tore through its punk-influenced set, it was a pleasure watching a younger band play with the kind of hunger that reminds you why you fell in love with hardcore in the first place.

I also loved how genuinely thankful Turmoil seemed. Talking with the band afterward, it was clear they didn’t take any of this for granted. This little band these now middle-aged guys started in their early twenties remains enormously influential, but you wouldn’t know it from the way they carried themselves. Between songs, there was a stream of “thank yous.” Watching them smile through the set, you got the sense they weren’t just celebrating a record—they were celebrating the fact that people still cared enough to scream every word back at them a quarter-century later.

While the lineup featured plenty of younger, up-and-coming bands—just as the second day did—The Rumble ultimately became a testament to the staying power of a hardworking promoter, a scene that refuses to die, and bands that may have once thought they’d been forgotten but still showed up and gave people everything they had. 

Like most major metros, Chicago has lost venues. Scenes age out. Social media convinced everyone the internet could replace community. It can’t. Someone still has to unlock the door, book the bands, make sure everyone gets paid, and hope enough people show up to do it all again next weekend. Hardcore has never survived because it was fashionable. It survives because every generation has a handful of stubborn people willing to keep the lights on for the next one.

All photos and video courtesy of Brian Martinez

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