The verdict on You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To appears to be well settled among the Knocked Loose faithful. That’s if the reaction videos for “Blinding Faith” are to be trusted—and they probably should, since the lead single of the Kentucky quintet’s titanic fourth album is all reaction shots: That’s a seven-string Ibanez Iceman; oh shit, a SECOND breakdown; 3 members of the band screaming within 5 seconds is fucking god-tier. That’s not entirely accurate because Bryan Garris is not really screaming, but making a death metal gurgle so heinous that it can’t be compared to any actual vocalizing so much as Banned from TV, Joe Theismann’s leg injury or the Alien chest-burster.
But can Knocked Loose break out? This sort of question has surrounded the band since they appeared at both Coachella and Bonnaroo in 2023, not just as each festival’s biggest draw in contemporary metal, but the only one, an emissary for the totality of heavy musics for the most casual but curious of listeners. If You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To draws this demographic, it does so as the exact opposite of a “crossover event.” Rather than expanding outward, Knocked Loose have amplified and concentrated their aesthetic into something so dense that it has its own gravitational pull.
So, despite what you might assume from those Slipknot opening gigs and the presence of a producer who’s worked with NLE Choppa, Beartooth, and Disturbed in the past two years, there are no clean vocals, no alt-metal choruses or wavy trap drums, no rage-rap guest verses. In short, nothing that might suggest Knocked Loose had reached their logical endpoint with a concept album about a fatal car wreck and could only make their heavy heavier by contrast. They’re a hardcore band in practice, an action/horror franchise in spirit, one that takes its escalating success as a mandate to re-up a self-imposed arms race—the stunts, the thrills, the killshots, they all need to be bigger, badder and bolder before something hungrier takes its place.
And if the breakdown has indeed replaced the riff as modern metal’s lingua franca, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is about as eloquent as it gets. Bring back the nasty riff but slower? Maybe that was enough in 2016, but “Piece By Piece” is going to bring in a new nasty riff and also an ultra-hammered China cymbal that sounds even gnarlier. Half-time breakdowns? “Thirst” achieves the heretofore inconceivable quarter-time tempo switch, while the Southern shuffle riff on “The Calm That Keeps You Awake” turns Pantera’s “Walk” into a funeral procession. The breakdown on “Don’t Reach For Me” hits, but mostly because there’s at least a half-dozen little teasers of silence where it doesn’t happen first.