In recent years, a whole lot of brave souls have been bringing cameras to hardcore festivals, posting up in spots onstage or at the back of the room, and filming bands’ entire sets to post them on YouTube. It’s a whole thing. This happens in every genre of music, but it seems to happen more in hardcore than in most, which makes sense. Hardcore sets tend to be short, and the videos, especially when the crowd is really going off, are wild and physical enough to keep your attention. Sometimes, these videos can be downright transcendent: The Have Heart reunion at Sound And Fury 2019, Ceremony at Sound & Fury 2016. (Also, if you’d like to see me lamely attempting to take cell-phone pictures while people are about to jump on my head, I strongly recommend the first few minutes of Turnstile at Damaged City 2018.)

This past weekend, a skatepark in Louisville hosted the annual hardcore throwdown LDB Fest. This one featured bands like Terror, Bitter End, Fiddlehead, Judiciary, Dead Heat, and Inclination. The videos that have popped up in my Twitter feed — Magnitude! Hands Of God! — have been commendably insane fight-club shit. And then there’s Knocked Loose.

Knocked Loose are the young Kentucky metalcore screamers who have become the latest DIY hardcore band to follow the Turnstile/Power Trip/Code Orange trajectory, catching on among people who do not necessarily spend their weekends spinkicking their best friends. Knocked Loose’s 2019 album A Different Shade Of Blue was one of my favorite of the year. This summer, they’ll play the sorts of festivals that Metallica and Slipknot headline. But this past weekend, they played a triumphant unannounced hometown-hero set at LDB. All available evidence suggests that people went nuts.

The half-hour full-set Knocked Loose video is filmed from pretty far back on the stage, probably for understandable reasons. It’s more of a blur of heads and bodies than might be ideal, but in it, you can see a pretty amazing connection between band and audience. Check it out below.

Shorter videos, from out in the crowd, also give some idea of what type of shit was going down.

Surprise Knocked Loose set @ LDB Fest pic.twitter.com/RziY3YO9Ku

— Shawn Madden (@neddamnwahs) February 9, 2020

@knockedloose turns @LDBFest blue. pic.twitter.com/qbrCrDyg53

— rondo rousey (@dumpster410) February 9, 2020

. @knockedloose " All my Friends" at @LDBFest / 2.8.20 pic.twitter.com/3xDlPIWYXA

— Enthusiast Grade Scremo Lover (@defendmetalcore) February 9, 2020

You might be interested to know that United Blood is coming up in Richmond this spring. Come get moshed on.