For years, the Richmond festival United Blood was an annual spring tradition in hardcore — one of the biggest and best fests in the genre. The 2020 edition of UB was set to feature Converge and Cold World as headliners, and it looked sick as hell. The festival didn’t happen for obvious reasons, and it’s apparently not going to happen again. Instead, one of the people behind United Blood has started a new festival dedicated to hardcore and extreme metal, and it’ll hopefully fill the same niche.

One of the bookers of United Blood was Ace Stallings, the Mutually Assured Destruction/Sentinel frontman who books a whole lot of Richmond shows. (I know Ace a little bit, and his great interview podcast Forum Of Passion is pretty much the hardcore equivalent of Marc Maron’s WTF.) Ace has partnered with Sam Yarmuth, the person behind the great hardcore label Triple B Records, to put together a new festival called Big Takeover, and it’ll come to venues around Richmond 5/20-21.

The first night of Big Takeover has two different shows at two different venues — one headlined by DC death metal wreckers Genocide Pact, the other headlined by Richmond hardcore punk heroes Nosebleed. (These will presumably be staggered enough to let you go to both.) The next day, there’s a huge all-day show at the Broadberry, an extremely long and narrow room that should be complete chaos all day. That one has reunited grindcore greats Terrorizer headlining. The festival’s bill isn’t complete yet, but it already has a whole lot of the best bands on the heavy music underground, including Mindforce, Division Of Mind, Dead Heat, No/Mas, High Command, Downfall, Spy, C4, and Final Gasp. This should be a very good time.