In Conversation: Bryan Garris of Knocked Loose
They've broken every ceiling a hardcore band has ever broken, but Bryan Garris refuses to discard the DIY idealism that birthed Knocked Loose. That doesn't mean there haven't been growing pains.
There’s a part in our conversation where Bryan Garris begins to speak in the hypothetical about the rumor that Knocked Loose were about to get a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance, and the way he talks about this is telling. “I do not expect a Grammy nomination at all,” he insists, and yet even as he was saying it, there was still a sense of knowing between us that we both felt it was coming—and that nomination did, in fact, come down just last week. But the thing I want you to know about Bryan is that this was not an example of false modesty. You know that when you see it. This was an authentic lack of entitlement on his part. There is a massive difference.
Where most other hardcore bands who have crossed over in some way have polished their sound or softened their edges, Knocked Loose have only gotten more extreme. Unhinged, even. This year’s You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To literally begins with full-on blast beats and barely relents over its 28 minutes; there is hardly a melodic element in earshot, much less a commercial radio hit. In terms of mainstream conventions, a band that sounds like Knocked Loose simply shouldn’t be this big.
The thing that’s connecting with people, then, is more than just music. It’s in the way that Bryan and Knocked Loose have gone to great lengths to maintain their integrity—and their integrity is palpable. It’s the way they know who they are, and instead of chasing trends, have only ever approached each successive record by asking, What does the best version of Knocked Loose sound like now? They also know where they come from, and Bryan’s ongoing relationship with hardcore is clearly a way of being at this point. That, too, is more than music to him. “I just know that we liked everything and we went to hardcore shows, so it was this smorgasbord of personal taste mixed with the ethics and approach that we learned from going to DIY hardcore shows,” he tells me. “We just tried to take that with us wherever we went.”
My first real exposure to Louisville hardcore was in 1992, when I went out on my first tour ever. The tour was very DIY and—like most tours from that time—it was probably booked as poorly as a tour could be booked. So basically, we had four or five days where we were just stranded with no place to go. The guys in Endpoint invited us to stay with them, and that was my first experience with the city. It was my first experience with Bardstown Road and Ear X-Tacy. It was the first time I’d ever heard Slint, it was the first time I’d ever really heard about a lot of history of Louisville punk—Malignant Growth, Kinghorse, even Squirrel Bait. Everyone I met had this real sense of pride in their city. I was wondering how aware you were of all of that history by the time you discovered hardcore.
BRYAN: It’s funny that you were there the first time in 1992, because I was born in ‘93 [laughs]. So I definitely missed that wave, but I do take pride in Louisville; I think that’s a great way to say it. And I’ve definitely done my research, so I’m very familiar with the Louisville scene in the early nineties and even going into the early 2000s. I probably started coming around in 2007, but going to shows back then, the lines between what was an actual hardcore show and what was a metal show were kind of blurred. There were a lot of mixed bills—especially in a place like Louisville that’s on the smaller side of things. Like, everybody goes to every show, you know what I mean? It’s a very all-hands-on-deck kind of city. But through that, I found actual DIY shows happening. And once I started making friends that were already in the scene before I started coming around, I started to learn the community side of things: Oh, this is the guy that books. This is the guy that does sound… It’s the same guys every time that keep it going. I immediately dove headfirst into that. I really liked that vibe. And seeing people my age doing it was so inspiring, knowing that it doesn’t have to be this massive thing. It kind of shaped me and my band members and it helped us take that mentality onto the road.
Endpoint recently asked me to write the liner notes for an upcoming reissue, and as I was writing it, I had this realization—which is that “the Louisville sound” is that there is no sound. Louisville didn’t have the same kind of identity or pressure to conform that New York or L.A. or even D.C. had. Louisville was able to take a little bit of everything and create something that was its own. Do you think that’s still how it was by the time you came around?
BRYAN: I definitely do. And I think a perfect example of that is my favorite [band] from that wave of Louisville, Guilt. They have three records where every record is different. They’ve got the 7-inch that’s a little bit more straightforward hardcore. There’s Bardstown Ugly Box, which is a little bit weirder. And then their last record, Further, is just fully weird [laughs]. But I thought that was so cool. It pulled me in because you didn’t really know what to expect from them. And I think that definitely still exists in Louisville because you have people coming from all corners of the music spectrum to be a part of this small scene. There’s room for everybody’s taste.
When we started as a band, we knew that we weren’t a traditional hardcore band. We loved the traditional hardcore bands in Louisville at that time—bands like Another Mistake and Written Off and Damaged Goods. Those were our local bands, but we knew that they were straight up hardcore bands and we were not. So we put “Oldham County Hardcore” on our shirts because we thought Louisville Hardcore wouldn’t like us [laughs]. It’s funny because to this day, you know how Bane has “the Bane hoodie?” Ours is the Oldham hoodie; we still make hoodies that just say “Oldham.” All that stemmed from us being self-conscious that the traditional Louisville hardcore bands wouldn’t accept us, but as soon as we started playing shows, we came to find out that they accepted us with open arms. Because like I said, there’s room for everybody’s taste.
I’m interested in this idea that you came into the scene knowing you weren’t a so-called “traditional” hardcore band. If you knew that’s what you weren’t, did you have any sense of an idea of who you were?
BRYAN: I don’t think so. We wrote for well over a year before we ever played a show because it felt like we liked everything. Truly, in every corner of heavy music, I can find something that I like. There are old Knocked Loose demos on Isaac [Hale]’s computer somewhere from 2011 or 2012 that are just straight-up punk. There was a time period where it was super melodic like Champion, Have Heart, Defeater, and stuff like that. And there was a time period where it was fully like Deathwish or Closed Casket—“dark hardcore,” or whatever you want to call it. It wasn’t until we got to the point where we were itching to play a show that we kind of zoomed in on it and thought, “What direction do we want to go in?” Listening back to our first EP, I don’t even really know what it was that we wanted to do. I just know that we liked everything and we went to hardcore shows, so it was this smorgasbord of personal taste mixed with the ethics and approach that we learned from going to DIY hardcore shows. We just tried to take that with us wherever we went.
From what I can gather, you come from a very musical family.
BRYAN: My grandpa—I call him my Pop—he played my whole life. My mom’s dad was a bass player in jazz and blues bands for my whole life. He toured, he got to tour internationally, it’s how he made a living. And then my grandma on my dad’s side was a country singer. I grew up seeing her perform to hundreds of people. My uncle on my dad’s side was a hair-metal drummer. My uncle on my mom’s side, his son was a guitar player in local metal bands. So it was everywhere, you know? It was truly all around me.
My parents have always had a deep, deep love for music, too, but surprisingly, growing up it was mainly hip-hop [in my house]. It’s still something I carry with me to this day, a deep admiration for early nineties and early 2000s hip-hop. Like, I remember coming home from school and finding my dad sitting at the kitchen table with a boombox, and he’s playing Eric B. & Rakim, and he’s writing the lyrics down on a notepad so that he won’t forget them. Picture it: I walk in from school and it’s so loud that you can’t even really talk. My mom’s got the windows open, she’s cleaning. My dad’s at the table blaring rap music.
I love that you’re telling me this because I was listening to something on the first EP the other day where I thought to myself, “This cadence is completely hip-hop.” It sounded very legit to me.
BRYAN: It’s funny that you say that because there is a song on that EP called “Separate” where the first verse is the exact cadence of “Warning” by Biggie. The way that his verse starts, it’s the same exact flow that I chose to use and I did do that intentionally.
I read once that you learned how to sing from watching YouTube videos, and that just really captured my imagination. Walk me through that for a second. Like, what were your search terms? [laughs]
BRYAN: I had a friend named Jared—he’s been my best friend since eighth grade and I’m still friends with him—and he’s a drummer. I became friends with him strictly because he had a mohawk and I thought we have to like the same things [laughs]. I used to just sit on his bed and watch him play the drums. No backing track, just the sound of his drums. I would sit there and watch him play Blink-182 songs. Eventually, he started jamming with some guys in our school that were older than me, and he was like, “You should come jam with us. You could sing!” And I was like, “I can’t sing! I have literally never tried that.” And he said, “It’s just screaming. Everybody can do it.” So I went, and I just winged it, and it was my first time ever playing with a group of people. It was my first time where it felt like 30 seconds ago we had nothing, but 30 seconds later we have music. It might be terrible, but it was the first time that I experienced creating something from the ground up and I fell in love. It changed my life.
From there, I started trying to take it a little more seriously, so I started looking it up on YouTube. A lot of it was just covers. I would watch people cover songs that I thought were crazy. This is like MySpace era, so it was a lot of deathcore and extreme vocals—bands like Whitechapel or Suicide Silence. I would just watch their mouth-shape or watch the way they were breathing. I would even sometimes search “how to scream,” but, like, anybody can upload that video, you know what I mean? [laughs] There weren't a lot of super credible sources. But the thing that changed how I approached it entirely was when my first little garage band played a show and somebody came up to our guitar player and was like, “Hey, your band is pretty good, but your singer is singing wrong. He’s going to fuck up his voice forever. He’s got to use his diaphragm. He’s going to mess up his throat.” I didn’t even know that. I was just forcing this distortion by damaging my throat. So from there I started looking into how to scream through my diaphragm and how to practice better vocal health.
I never really lose my voice, but I know that if I lose my voice to the point where it affects my talking voice, something is wrong. A year ago, we played a show in Europe and I woke up the next day and I couldn’t talk. We had to play Reading and Leeds [Festival], so I thought, “Great. We’re playing with Post Malone and my voice is more embarrassing than it ever is” [laughs]. I played this terrible, terrible set. After that, I messaged our manager and I was like, “Something’s wrong. I think that thing everybody is always commenting about on YouTube is finally happening. My voice is gone.” So he set me up with an ENT, and when I got to the office, they put me in a waiting room—this was when they had to give a COVID test. So they give me the test, and after a while the ENT pokes his head in, and he’s like, “There’s nothing wrong with your voice. You have COVID.” And he leaves.
Damn, I was not expecting that plot twist!
BRYAN: I came back ten days later and they put the camera down my throat and he was like, “You have great vocal health. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.” It was so relieving because I had no technique. I was just screaming like when you’re mad at somebody. But since then I’ve become a freak about taking care of my voice. If I wake up and it’s sore, I’m drinking tea. I’m warming up every day. I used to not do that. I used to just go for it.
OK, I want to switch gears here. I wanted to talk about church camp [laughs]. You’ve talked about this experience you had as a kid before, and how that experience inspired “The Gospel”—and I think of “Blinding Faith” as a sister song to that one. The way you’ve described that camp, it sounds Pentecostal to me. Is that right?
BRYAN: I’m not sure! I was pretty young and I had an aunt who worked for the camp, so I got to go for free. That’s the only way. I grew up lower class, definitely. There’s no sugar-coating it, really. [We were] very blue collar. So I looked at it like a vacation. The first time I went, I was just like, this is so fun. I was around kids my age, it was two weeks, we’re swimming, we’re doing all kinds of stuff. Like, yeah, we have to go to church three times a day, but everything else is fun. I wasn’t there for the religious aspect of it all; it was just something social to do.
However, the next year I got offered to go again, and my cousin—who was one year older than me—she was able to go, too. But when she went, she took it very seriously, and that kind of inspired me to take it more seriously. So I started to kind of lean into it, and that’s how you get that line in “The Gospel” where I say, “Love like that must cost an arm and a leg / Because my tongue won’t move no matter how hard I beg.” That sounds super poetic and metaphorical, but it’s pretty straightforward: Every single night they would do a church service to cap off the day, and those church services just felt heavier. That’s when they would be like, “If you’re ready to give yourself to God—and I don’t think any of you are ready—but if you’re actually ready to give yourself to God, come down to the altar and God will speak through you. You will speak in tongues.” So I tried. I prayed. I went down there. I did what everybody around me was doing and it just never happened. Nothing happened. And then my cousin did it and it worked. She spoke in tongues. At the time I was like, “Why is that not happening to me?” So from then on, I just had to have it. People would leave and I would stay. I would pray and pray and pray and it just never happened. That lyric is very literal, and it definitely made me resent it. I walked away like, “Well, that didn’t work.” And that closed the door on religion for me until I was well into high school when I kind of reapproached the question, so to speak.
What inspired you to do that?
BRYAN: Well, one thing I will say is that I definitely believe there is something. I don’t know what. Obviously, I don’t follow any sort of religion, but there are things that have happened in my life where I feel like it’s just undeniable, and one thing that I think is constantly shown to me is that people come into your life for a reason. I was in a band in high school with two brothers who were extremely religious—church every Sunday, raised in a Christian home. And then another one of the members of the band was going through this period of discovery. So we had [the brothers] to lean on. At the same time, my grandma, who is the only religious influence in my family, was evicted from where she lived and she had to move in with us. So I started noticing it, noticing that I was surrounded by it, and I kind of started to open up and be a little more accepting of the idea. I had these two dudes that I was in a band with, peers that I could lean on, and then I would go home and I would have another influence to lean on—which is my grandma. So I started going to church again. I started diving in because I wanted to, not because I had any expectations.
But then, full transparency, in 2009 my best friend was killed by a drunk driver. The drunk driver went to my school; they were roommates. She went to pick him up from work, but he had to work late so she popped into the passenger seat and went to sleep. He’s a bartender and he was drinking all day at work. He gets off work, sees her asleep, and decides that he’ll drive the car. He crashes, she passes away, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t do a day in jail. A week before, the three of us hung out and I actually got out of the car because he was drinking. I told her, “I don’t feel comfortable being here”—so I left that night, and they got into a wreck. They were both OK, but a week later, this happened. So I hated him. I still hate him.
I was going to church every Sunday. One day I’m walking up the steps to leave church and I get a pat on my shoulder. I look up and it’s him. He was a scumbag, always dressed like shit, always dirty, and there he was, wearing a full church outfit with tucked-in shirt, tie, pants. I couldn’t say anything. I was just in shock. I walked past him and I was like, I’m never coming back here. I don’t want to be a part of something that accepts him. That was the last time I ever went to church.
It feels like there’s more openness about this question among your generation of hardcore kids in the sense that, even if you look back at the nineties, it felt like things were very black and white. People were either hardcore atheists or religious monks [laughs]. But it feels like even in that story, as deeply as you were affected, you are still leaving room for ambiguity. You were able to walk away and not be completely binary in your response.
BRYAN: It’s a massive question that no one will ever know the answer to. In different periods of my life, it has weighed on me heavy and I’ve always just tried to take that for what it is and not just shut it out based off past experiences. From that experience I just learned that maybe organized religion isn’t for me, and if I’m going to have belief in something, I need to find my own path and not follow rules that are given to me. It’s something I write about a lot in Knocked Loose.
It’s funny that you said “Blinding Faith” was kind of a sequel, because there’s a song on our first album called “The Rain” that is kind of a direct response to “The Gospel.” Every record kind of has “the God song” on it, you know what I mean? It’s gotten a little more edgier with every record—and with “Blinding Faith” being the edgiest, paired with our new album art, it’s just become this huge talking point for us in the past year. But in reality, I’d say it all stems from a genuine curiosity rather than disdain.
I also wanted to ask you about the story behind the album title for a minute. It’s well established that you were on an airplane, that you were experiencing anxiety, and that you wound up spending the entire flight talking to the woman next to you, who eventually said, “You won’t go before you’re supposed to.” But what you didn’t say in this story is more interesting to me: What did you actually spend an entire flight talking about with a total stranger?
BRYAN: Well, it started as we were speeding down the runway. That part, to me, is my least favorite part of a flight—the takeoff. That’s the part that makes me lose sleep. It literally makes me throw up. So as we were speeding down, she’s like, “Where are you headed?” And I just remember being in my seat, going so fast, and in my head I’m like, Why are you talking to me?
What a lot of people don’t know about that story—because I’ve never really talked about it—is that I was going to a funeral. It was an emergency flight. I was really going through it. I was dealing with both the fear of flying as well as the shock of a passing. So at first I just lied to her. I told her I was going to Florida for work. But then I asked, “What are you going to Florida for?” She told me how she was going to a family reunion and how she lives in the Bahamas and hasn’t seen a lot of her family in years. We talked about how she runs a nonprofit for young women in Nassau who want to establish their own independence and find their worth in things that they can do in a professional field. It’s a really uplifting nonprofit. We talked about that for a long time. I was very inspired by it. Eventually, I told her I was a musician and that snowballed into me saying, “Yeah, I have to take like 300 flights a year.” That’s when I told her I was terrified of flying. We talked about food for a long time—I’m very passionate about food—and she told me she was the cook in her family and that if I ever found myself back in the Bahamas I had to find her so she’d cook for me. We exchanged Facebook information…
…OK, wait, does that mean she knows this record exists?
BRYAN: I don’t think so. I’ve thought about this a lot. I have never, in Knocked Loose’s entire career, set expectations. I love every opportunity that we get, and I never want to walk into anything like I am owed something. However, there’s all this talk going around about the band getting nominated for a Grammy. Like, “You’re being considered for Best Metal Performance” or whatever. I do not expect a Grammy nomination at all. However, if it happens, I want to send her something. I mean, she doesn’t know this kind of music. It means nothing to her that this weird little dude that you sat next to in a flight named his album after something you said. But if it becomes a thing where I can say, “This album is nominated for a Grammy and it was inspired by you and you changed my life”—I have thought about that day and if it comes.
Early on, I remember you making a real point about how you wanted to separate your personal life from your musical life, and I’m curious if you’ve held onto that idea or if you actually think that’s even possible anymore.
BRYAN: We’ve been touring for over ten years now. In my time of doing interviews, I think I’ve gotten better at learning how to navigate these conversations and how to share without oversharing. There are still things in my life that I want to be private, you know what I mean? So much of me is accessible. I want to be extremely vulnerable in my lyrics. I can’t help that. I also need it. And a lot of it centers around loss. Like, just now, telling the story about the flight, I revealed to you that it was for a funeral. However, I am not going to be comfortable going into whose funeral. I had to learn how to have these conversations.
Early on, I think I was rubbed the wrong way—and I’m trying to figure out how to say this safely because I don’t want to offend anybody—but we were on Warped Tour, and I did press every day. It was like my job. I would go to the office and be like, “What do I have today?” And they’d tell me where to go. So I went and I did this interview, and I sat down with these two guys, and they were like, “Do you know what we do?” I didn’t. They said, “We let artists talk about their depression and their anxiety so that people who listen to it can relate.” And I said, “Oh, no, I’m not doing that.” They were very shocked. But I was like, “Look, I think what you guys are doing is really great, and I think there’s definitely a place for that to exist, and I’m sure a lot of people really value this thing that you’re doing, but I am not the one to do that. I don’t feel comfortable sitting here and talking about how sad I am. That’s not going to be what I’m known for.” They were pretty bummed, and they tried to reason with me, but I said, “I appreciate the offer, but no, I’m going to pass.”
I struggled a lot with that. Because it’s tricky to talk about mental health—especially on a stage like Warped Tour, where the crowd is so young, and these kids have a very new outlook on what anxiety is or what depression is. So if you have the platform to speak about those things, you have to be careful. I’ve seen people give speeches on stage about depression where I’m like, “What are you talking about? Don’t tell a little kid that they’re going to be fucked forever.” I didn’t like that, so I strayed away from it, and until now, I’ve been learning how I want to talk about it.
That makes complete sense. And I don’t need to know the nooks and crannies of your struggles, even though I do think it’s fair to say that you’ve made those acknowledgements in your music, right? Like, I don’t know if you’ll agree with me here if I say that when I listen to Knocked Loose, there’s a part of me that’s thinking, “OK, Bryan might be going through some shit right now.”
BRYAN: [Laughs] Yeah, yeah, definitely. That style of writing helps me so much. And the more I realized that, the more I also had to acknowledge that I’m going to have to talk about this. And I want to, to an extent. I think that now—with who I am right now—I could probably do that interview on Warped Tour and know how I wanted to speak about this and how I wanted to carry myself. But I was younger back then. I was trying to figure out how I wanted the world to see me. It was the first time ever that people were coming up to me and calling me by my first name and not just as “the singer of Knocked Loose.” It was this growing period of me not really understanding that kind of attention.
But I’ve always tried to nail home the idea that my lyrics are always going to be 100 percent honest, and they’re always going to be transparent. On this album, it’s the song “Sit & Mourn.” That is such an important song to me. I remember getting done with writing it and being like, “I need to get out of the house.” I had to go on a drive. And I drove around just crying. I mean, in that moment it hurts, but it’s so rewarding to get that off [your chest]. The funny part is that I write these kinds of songs and then I do my first interview for the album and they’re like, “So that’s pretty sad.” And I’m like, Oh shit. Now I have to talk about it [laughs]. When I write I am obviously not thinking that I’m gonna have to answer for this later. I spend the entire record cycle figuring out how to answer for this new piece of myself that I’ve shared.
Does that ever bring a self-censoring editor into the writing at all?
BRYAN: No, definitely not, and I really hope that it never does. I would rather stutter through months of interviews figuring out how I want to answer for honest lyrics than censor myself. Because those are always the songs that I feel like need to be written, you know? “Sit & Mourn” tackles watching somebody you love go through something traumatic and painful that is also traumatic and painful for you, but you have to put it on the backburner to take care of the person you love. So it’s like, when do you get to deal with it? How do you deal with it once the time has passed? Do you ever deal with it because you have to be that anchor for the person you love? It’s a very heavy song. And when I write that way, there are several moments where I’m shown that being that honest is the only way to be.
We did release shows for the album, which was the first time we ever played that song. And it’s already hard to sing, but then I looked at the barricade and there’s this girl singing every word, but she’s sobbing. As soon as I saw that, it just destroyed me. It hit me like a truck. I looked to her and I pointed at her and she just lost it, like she couldn’t sing anymore she was crying so much. So I jumped off the stage and I got on the barricade and I held her head to my stomach and I felt her cry and I just kept singing. I got off stage and then I just cried. I just fully, fully lost it. That is something I’ll never forget. Being vulnerable in my lyrics, it comes in waves—reminding me that’s the only way I can be.
OK, I wanted to end with something that came up kind of recently with Jeremy [Bolm] from Touché Amoré. He was talking about how he can get self-conscious when he writes sometimes because he feels like someone, somewhere, is going to be like, “Bro. How have you not figured this out yet?” You made a very similar point once. You said, “I understand that idea of feeling like a broken record here, and asking: How many more songs can I write about being pissed off or bummed out?” Do you think that you’ve broken through that wall yet?
BRYAN: I think I did with this record. It definitely touches on things that I’ve never written about. Like, I have this stupid problem where I constantly romanticize anywhere I’m not. It’s like, the world shut down, and I was in Louisville, and I was like, “I have to get out of here.” So I moved to California. The second I moved to California, I was like, “Oh my God, I miss Louisville.” My partner went to college in Cincinnati, and there are days when I’ll talk to her and be like, “We should move back to Cincinnati.” She’s like, “No we shouldn’t. You did not like Cincinnati!” Why did I miss Cincinnati? [laughs] I wrote about that with the song “Moss Covers All.” It’s like anywhere I’m at feels like it’s trying to swallow me whole and I’m just trying to get out.
I also think there will never be a shortage of things to be pissed off about, so those songs will always be there. If anything, I wrote some of our angriest songs for the new record. But really, I want to get better as a writer, and exploring new topics is important. I think I’m finally at a point now where I can actually give that an honest try.
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