Live music review: Knocked Loose, Denzel Curry Close Out Loud Week in Texas at Moody Amphitheater

Knocked Loose and Denzel Curry split top billing for their “Hive Mind” co-headlining tour at a packed Moody Amphitheater on Thursday, November 5, a few blocks from a Capitol building where the nameplates are about to change. Two days earlier, Texas Democrats ended thirty-odd years of losing statewide races by winning all of them: Talarico for Senate, then Gina Hinojosa for Governor, Vickie Godwin for Lieutenant Governor, attorney general, the whole damn thing, by wide margins. Nobody booked the show as a victory party. The blue tsunami made it one though.

The chairs were gone. Moody usually seats its floor, but for this one the venue cleared it for standing room, which is the only sane way to book Knocked Loose. The Kentucky band have climbed fast: each record lands better reviews than the last, they picked up a Grammy nomination for the Poppy collaboration “Suffocate,” and their shows keep going viral because the crowd treats every breakdown call like a direct order from a superior officer. Thursday’s crowd showed up ready to follow orders.  

We walked in as Boundaries were tearing through the breakdown that closed their set, and the pit was already working. No one treated the openers as optional. Four-band hardcore bills start early, and this crowd had planned around it. The Hartford, Connecticut metalcore band looked like they belonged on the six-week run: their shirts were all over the floor, and people were still talking about the set well after it ended. The pairing goes deeper than the tour poster. Drew Fulk, who produced Boundaries’ new record, Yearning: the unbeautiful after, has also produced Knocked Loose. The family resemblance is no accident.  

Superheaven were the odd fit on paper and the right one in practice. The Doylestown, Pennsylvania band started as Daylight in 2008, changed their name in 2014 after a legal fight with a Spanish band, made two records of fuzzed-out ’90s grunge, and then quietly went dormant. TikTok brought them back. A 2013 song went viral a decade after release, and they came back for real: Superheaven in 2025, their first album in ten years, and they’ve been touring since. Their history with tonight’s headliner goes back further than this tour. In 2022 they shared a bill with Knocked Loose, Turnstile and Basement at Outbreak Fest in Manchester.  

Curry took the first co-headlining slot and gave it 45 minutes without wasting any of them. He walked out in a green mask, and the floor rapped every word back at him from the first song. This crowd had come for a hardcore band, but plenty of them knew his catalog in and out.

That’s what a decade of drifting toward punk and metal gets you, along with “Hive Mind,” the Knocked Loose collaboration that put this tour together. He closed with a Rage Against the Machine double tap, “Killing in the Name” into “Bulls on Parade.” Two days after the election, a few blocks from the Capitol, nobody needed the context explained. 

Knocked Loose took the stage at a crisp 9:45 p.m., late for the neighborhood that tends to cut things off around 11. For one of the most talked about rock tours this year, the Louisville quintet wasted no time getting to their abrasive, jaw-breaking business.

The band has spent the last decade turning hardcore into something that plays stadiums. Laugh Tracks (2016) and A Different Shade of Blue (2019) made them the genre’s next big thing. You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To (2024) made them famous outside it, spurring opening slots with the likes of Metallica and Slipknot on top of major festival appearances. After an appearance at Sick New World Texas on the fest’s main stage that drew what looked like the whole attendance, the Knocked Loose empire is only continuing to grow. 

Knocked Loose didn’t ease in. “There’s only one rule at a Knocked Loose show,” Frontman Bryan Garris told the crowd. “Chaos.” Garris and guitarist Isaac Hale trade vocals like a wrestling tag team, Garris’s high yelp on top and Hale’s lower bark underneath, and every handoff set the floor off again. Walls of death, circle pits, crowd surfers coming over nonstop. Pick your poison. “Mistakes Like Fractures” and “Don’t Reach for Me” were written five years apart and sat side by side without a seam. The band hasn’t softened with the bigger rooms. They’ve just gotten meaner about it.

Boundaries’ Matt McDougal came back out for “Billy No Mates,” off Laugh Tracks, and held his own next to Garris, which is no small thing given what Garris does to his vocal cords every night. Later, Garris congratulated Texas on the week’s blue shift, and the place erupted. Plenty of bands keep their politics off the stage. Knocked Loose doesn’t, and that matters when you’re deciding who gets your money. 

Then the obvious one. Curry came back out for “Hive Mind,” the song the tour is named after, and didn’t treat it like a guest spot. He went bar for bar with Garris and Hale and sounded like he’d been fronting heavy bands for years instead of months. He floated a hardcore pivot this summer. After Thursday, it didn’t sound like a blind ambition even a little bit.

The last leg of madness came with “Suffocate” and “Counting Worms.” Before the final breakdown, Garris and Hale split the crowd down the middle and told everyone to hold until it hit. They held. When the breakdown came, both halves charged at once for a final Wall of Death. At a show like this, the crowd is half the performance, and Austin knew its part. Garris said there was only one rule. Nobody broke it.  

Knocked Loose wraps up their tour in Mexico City with dates coming up in 2027. Tickets can be found via the band’s website.

All photos by Justin Clark

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