There’s no ceiling for hardcore — even an outfit as uncompromising as Knocked Loose can turn up in mainstream-adjacent spaces and win over new fans. But there’s a center to what they do that will never change.

“Knocked Loose is always going to be a heavy band,” Hale asserts. But, he adds, growth potential is also key: “I want to be able to play the festival to 10,000 people, and then I want to be able to play to 50 in a pizzeria. It needs to come across in both environments. At the same time, in order to grow, we all have all these different influences and different highbrow ideas of where we want to take things.

The whole thing has been, how do we add those influences tastefully into what’s still, in essence, a hardcore song that has mosh parts and breakdowns?”