DOORS: 6PM | SHOW: 7PM | ALL AGES

Get ready to throw down! Alabama's heavy-hitting powerhouse Gideon storms the stage in Springfield. Known for their crushing riffs and unrelenting intensity, Gideon is bringing their no-holds-barred live show striaght to you with support from UnityTX — blending hardcore grit with hip-hop swagger — it's guaranteed the pit will be moving from the first breakdown to the final scream. This is more than a show — it's a full-on sonic assault.

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Since forming in 2008 in Tuscaloosa, AL, Gideon had been making a name for themselves by defying convention, creating their own distinct sound and never settling for anything that was just run of the mill or ordinary. Rather, the band—completed today by founding member and drummer Jake Smelley, vocalist Daniel McWhorter, guitarist/vocalist Tyler Riley and bassist Caleb DeRusha—kept stretching the boundaries of their sound to great acclaim and to increasing commercial success. 2011’s debut album, Costs, established them as powerhouse of the metalcore scene, but that’s something the band simultaneously pushed away from it, incorporating elements of melodic hardcore and hardcore punk into the fold of their songs, but always with an underlying sense of positivity and defiance. Impressively prolific, the band released their next two full-lengths, Milestone and Calloused, on Facedown Records in 2012 and 2014 respectively, before signing to Equal Vision Records.

Their first album for EVR was 2017’s Cold, followed by Out Of Control in 2019, a record that deservedly saw the band’s profile rising steadily. And then, of course, the pandemic hit. And all that hard work and dedication, and the progress they’d made vanished in an instant. In fact, Gideon were mid-tour on that album cycle when touring came grinding to a halt and forced the band to return home to Alabama, frustrated and disillusioned with a situation that—like most touring bands—thought might mean the end of what they do. Thankfully, it didn’t, which brings us to Gideon’s 6th full-length studio album. Recorded/mixed/mastered by Randy Lebouef at Graphic Nature Audio, MORE POWER. MORE PAIN. is a brutally intense burst of violent noise that both nods to the band’s past, musically and thematically, but also establishes itself in its own context.

“We had to walk through fire and break down walls to get to this chapter” says Smelley, “We’re done explaining why we are the way we are. This album is for the misunderstood, the dreamers, the broken, the damned, the ones that refuse to fall in line. When everything and everyone tells you to give up, your mind can take you to dark places. We came to realize that there was strength in that. Instead of letting it consume us, we fought like hell.”

One of the best examples of that is “Too Much Is Never Enough”, the first single from the album. A pummeling blast of vicious, metal-tinged hardcore, it’s full of acerbic guitars and chugging riffs, over which McWhorter viciously spits ‘Nothing was given to me, that shit was earned the hard way.’ It’s a line that sums up not just the song, but also much of the album as well—and the underlying positivity that underpins all of it.

“That song really encapsulates what the theme of the record is,” says Riley. “It talks about how much work it takes to stay ahead. Especially when it feels like there are people around you that don’t believe in you, and that may not believe you’ve earned your place, even though the pain of sacrifice is felt deeply every day—and how you have to let that fuel you. It's about how much shit we took just to get here, but trying to embrace that process as a positive instead of a negative—that no matter how much is coming at us and distorting our vision, we’re still looking at goals beyond it, and letting the pain fuel us to the finish line.”

“You can go through all our albums,” adds Smelley, “and see the chapters of pain and the other things we've dealt with through the years. But where MORE POWER. MORE PAIN came from was us genuinely understanding that in order to gain more control over our lives, we have to be willing to bite the bullet and go through whatever it takes to get there.”

That defiance, however, isn’t just present in that one song. It’s a running theme throughout the whole album, from the punishing first song proper “Locked Out Of Heaven” through to the bruising final song proper “Back To Basics”. On both, the band unleash their full unrelenting power. In between, the title track is an intense surge of sacrifice and determination on which you can literally feel the band living out its lyrics, “Take Off” continues the band’s uncanny knack for subverting the genre by incorporating.

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“It just feels good to scream at the top of my lungs,” admits UNITYTX vocalist Jay Webster. “And not even at anyone. Sometimes you just need to scream.” Truer words have rarely been spoken in the context of recent history, and on their debut Pure Noise LP, FERALITY, UNITYTX confront the last few years head-on with a blistering cocktail of car crash energy, sludgy horror-show macabre, industrial metal sheen and sinister subliminality.

Produced by Andrew Wade (A Day To Remember, Wage War), FERALITY follows the band’s 2019’s Madboy, their first EP for Pure Noise that elevated the Dallas-based quartet (Webster, guitarist Ricky Cova, bassist Kendrick Nicholson and drummer Jonathan Flores) onto tours with the likes of Silverstein, The Amity Affliction and Poppy and shone a spotlight on the genre-bending sonic blend UNITYTX have been building in the underground since 2014.

“We put out Madboy and then COVID hit. It was like we were having to start back at square one,” Webster admits. “That anxiety, the feeling like it’s not good enough no matter how hard you’re working – it really took a toll on me. It feels like you’re an animal in a cage, dealing with repetition and anger until you hit your breaking point.”

From its evocative cover art through its 11 tracks, FERALITY is a case study in inner turmoil, awash in what Webster, one of the most versatile new vocalists in heavy music, describes as a “Jekyll and Hyde split personality.” “I’ve been trying to not be at war with the world as much,” he says. “You’re always going to have hardships with people in life, but a lot of the album is a real look in the mirror, me at war with myself. I feel like this is a different beast.”

There’s not much self grace given, from the opening notes of “ROTTING AWAY (GORE),” bathed in seven-string doom, to the haunting “STING” and album standout “LOST IN DAYZ,” which paints an all-too-familiar cycle of anxiety-induced anger and lost innocence that bubbles to the album’s most harrowing chorus (“We were all just kids / So what the fuck I do / Cuz every day is like I want to blow my brains out”).

But when UNITYTX cut these more caustic moments, whether with the swinging verve of “ROC SH!T,” leading with full-chested machismo and swagger, or their some of their most brilliantly melodic material to date (“BURNOUT,” “DIAMOND DIEZ” and the Meteora-inspired “PICTURE THIS”) FERALITY really begins to take shape, marrying the brutality of turn-of-the-century hard rock, swagger of hardcore hip-hop, and shapeshifting spirit of new-age metalcore, careening through the last 25 years of heavy music while pushing the genre forward in captivating new ways.

“I started doing this because I wanted to play music with my friends, then eventually I realized it had potential because I could write and say anything I wanted,” Webster explains. “I want our music to be hip-hop-adjacent but also into old-school nü-metal and hardcore and metalcore – all of it. People always say, ‘Oh, you sound like this band or that band.’ Bro, I’m just a songwriter.”