Live music review: Toxicity at the Track – Sick New World Texas Debut

The inaugural Sick New World Texas heavy metal music festival hit Fort Worth on Saturday, October 24, packing a sold-out crowd of 80,000 into Texas Motor Speedway. Produced by the management behind headliners Deftones and System of a Down, the festival marked SOAD’s first Texas show since 2005. A year of hype came down to a bill that put Slayer’s 40th anniversary of Reign in Blood on the same grounds as Knocked Loose. Four stages, constant set overlap, and a crowd you had to wade through to get anywhere: SNW was a twelve-hour endurance test that didn’t let up until midnight.

By late morning, thousands had already packed the track. The grounds were mostly gravel, boxed in by acres of concrete and grandstand glass that threw the sun right back at you. Texas fests are always hot, and October usually buys us a break. It wasn’t as punishing as Austin City Limits or Levitation back in September, but it was close enough to drop plenty of dehydrated fans before sundown. Food and merch lines ran long, and with nearly every set overlapping another, nobody had time to stand in them. Most people grabbed whatever was closest between bands and ate on the move.

Los Angeles trio Failure opened the day right. The grunge-adjacent space rock revivalists leaned hard on Fantastic Planet, and thirty years on, the heavy guitars and gravel truck bass are fully intact. Portland’s Dying Wish drew thousands of loyalists into the midday heat for a clinic in modern metalcore, Emma Boster flipping between shredded screams and clean hooks over detuned riffs and hardcore breakdowns. Filter brought the day’s first wave of radio nostalgia and did exactly what they were paid to do: play the hits, loud enough to rattle the grandstands. Richard Patrick did a stint in Nine Inch Nails, and it still shows.

The two side stages, the Diablo and the Spiral, fought sound problems most of the day. PeelingFlesh took the worst of it, with the Oklahoma City slam crew’s Memphis-rap-meets-death-metal set cutting in and out for whole stretches. The diehards moshed their asses off anyway.

Back on the Gold Stage, nu metal survivors P.O.D. only needed “Boom” to turn the field into a 2002 singalong. Dallas thrashers Power Trip followed on the adjoining main Blue Stage and drew one of the most devoted crowds of the day. They were the defining thrash band of the 2010s before vocalist Riley Gale’s death in 2020, and they’ve since rebuilt around Seth Gilmore of Skourge and Fugitive, who has fronted the band since a surprise set at Austin’s Mohawk in 2023.
He doesn’t imitate Gale. He just belts it like he belongs. Old favorites “Executioner’s Tax (Swing of the Axe),” “Hornet’s Nest” and “Manifest Decimation” sat comfortably next to “Precinct 3” and “Scavenger,” the first new Power Trip songs in nearly a decade. A full album lands in spring 2027.

Mastodon followed on the Gold Stage, touring behind latest studio effort Marrow Deep, their Three Fates concept record and first album since Brent Hinds left the band in early 2025 and died that summer. Guitarist Nick Johnston and keyboardist João Nogueira are full members now, and the new material sat easily next to the classics.

Bassist Troy Sanders and drummer Brann Dailor still carry the vocals, and the band plays like it’s grieving out loud, which might be the best tribute Hinds could get. The group has also enlisted John Baizley of Baroness fame as a touring member for this run, and with mythical sludge cuts of his own, he fits the fold with puzzle-piece precision.

Knocked Loose hit at the day’s halfway mark, when the grounds were already at their fullest. Bryan Garris barks the orders, and guitarist Isaac Hale enforces them. If he spots you standing still with your hands in your pockets, he’ll point you out, and the pit will take care of the rest. The Kentucky road dogs tore through a set that included “Suffocate” and “Hive Mind.” Denzel Curry, their current tour mate, didn’t come out for his verse, but nobody let up until the last note of “Counting Worms.”

Deafheaven’s George Clarke had already sat in with Knocked Loose a couple of hours earlier, and by the time his band took the Diablo Stage, he looked like he’d been warming up all day. The San Francisco black metal experimentalists caught the side stage’s sound mostly fixed and tore through a short set of their signature shoegaze-infused metal, three weeks after surprise-dropping new EP At Work in the Fields of the Bomb.

A top hardcore punk prospect of the day came with San Jose’s Sunami. Made up of members of Bay Area bands including Gulch, Drain and Hands of God, Sunami is part of the scene that’s spearheading a new generation of hardcore that reaches younger fans. Their set was a tangle of D-beat gallops, crust punk grime and thrash riffs that scuttle like something under a rock, all of it slamming into breakdowns slow enough to time a punch to.

After our side stage excursion wrapped, we pushed toward the front to post up for Slayer’s first DFW show since their 2019 farewell tour, a goodbye that lasted five years before the West Coast thrash innovators came back in 2024. Evanescence was finishing up on the adjoining main stage, and we sang along to “Bring Me to Life” before the lights dropped for an hour of punishment.

No hello, no chitchat, just flaming upside-down crosses and pentagram business. “South of Heaven” opened, and “War Ensemble,” “Mandatory Suicide” and “Dead Skin Mask” followed to a sea of devil horns. Then the band tore into an abridged run through Reign in Blood for its 40th anniversary.

Tom Araya, Kerry King, Gary Holt and Paul Bostaph sounded as vicious as the darkest corner of the Big Four ever has. “Angel of Death” is still the genre’s blueprint, and when “Raining Blood” capped the set, the riffs and the chaos in the pit made it the peak of the day. Nobody wanted it to end.

Deftones were the day’s letdown. Chino Moreno looked and sounded flat, and songs like “Change (In the House of Flies)” and “My Own Summer (Shove It)” didn’t meet the expected intensity of one of alternative metal’s most prominent names. The crowd showed up ready to hang on every word and instead got a band coasting through the motions. By the time they wrapped, the field had already turned toward the night’s main event: Glendale’s own System of a Down.

Appearing out of the dark to close a 12-and-a-half-hour day at the racetrack, co-vocalist and guitarist Daron Malakian promised the crowd some “System of a Down style rock and roll.” With 85 minutes before the midnight curfew, the West Coast alt metal figureheads ran the politically charged material that makes their rare appearances some of the hottest tickets in heavy music. “Suite-Pee,” “Prison Song” and “Violent Pornography” jolted 80,000 people back to life, most of whom had been on their feet for more than 10 hours.

With five albums to pull from, System played a true career-spanning set, crowd pleasers and deep cuts alike. “B.Y.O.B.” landed mid-set, Serj Tankian’s yelp as unmistakable as ever. Malakian dedicated “Bounce” to Slayer, who’d set the bar hours earlier, and thanked the SoCal thrash kings for being one of the first bands to take SOAD on tour.

“Chop Suey!” hit next, a song so ubiquitous that people who’ve never owned a metal record know every word. The field swayed through “Lost in Hollywood,” an arena anthem of cathartic proportions. A few songs later, “Toxicity” and self-titled career-maker “Sugar” closed the night, and the band walked off without ceremony or returning for an encore.

Sick New World’s first edition outside Las Vegas ran 12 hours on gravel and concrete, and nobody left early. For a band that hadn’t played Texas in 20 years, System of a Down and the company they brought made it feel like they’d never left. 

All photos by Justin Clark except where noted. Featured photo by Andrea Escobar 

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