Primitive Man @ Lodge Room, Los Angeles
Highland Park’s Lodge Room served as an evocative setting for a night of experimental heaviness featuring Guiltless, Today Is the Day, otay:onii, and the ever‑crushing Primitive Man. The room’s ideal layout, intimate size, and remarkably clear sound helped make it feel less like a standard show and more like a carefully curated plunge into the outer edges of heavy music.
Guiltless opened with a slow‑burning, doom‑laden set that immediately established the roadmap for what lay ahead. The band may be relatively new, but its members bring deep experience from past projects spanning sludge, post‑metal, and noise. That depth shows in how confidently they execute their craft. Their recent album, Teeth to Sky, folds industrial textures and suffocating atmosphere into a doom framework. Live, that density translated into a bleak, deliberate crawl that felt like a mission statement for the entire evening.
When Today Is the Day took the stage, the energy in the room shifted into something more unpredictable. The band has been a fixture of the underground since the early 1990s, when Steve Austin first fused noise rock, extreme metal, and psychedelia into a sound that helped define an entire strain of heavy music. Decades after landmark records like Supernova and Temple of the Morning Star, Austin still performs with the unnerving, shape‑shifting intensity that made those albums so important, veering without warning from grinding chaos to locked-in groove. The trio felt less like a legacy act and more like a band still testing the limits of what their songs can withstand.
otay:onii’s solo performance reframed the night in one stroke. Under that name, multidisciplinary artist Lane Shi explores a world where voice, electronics, and noise collide with movement, theater, and sound design—drawing as much from her work in film and installation art as from her background in heavier bands. Moving between piano, harsh textures, and physical confrontation, she brought the sensibility of a sound artist and composer to a bill otherwise dominated by riffs, pulling the room into a more avant‑garde space. Slotted just before Primitive Man, her set made it clear that the through‑line of the night wasn’t just “heaviness” in the metal sense, but emotional and conceptual complexity.
By the time Primitive Man emerged, my anticipation had curdled into something closer to dread. Since forming in Denver in 2012, the band has earned a reputation for some of the most oppressive doom in contemporary heavy music, blending funeral‑paced riffs with sheets of noise and a starkly nihilistic worldview. Opening with “Social Contract,” they unleashed a mass of sound so loud and dense it nearly triggered my fight‑or‑flight response.
Frontman Ethan McCarthy’s performance—screaming upward into an angled microphone, eyes wide—looked like an exorcism. Outside Primitive Man, McCarthy has long been a pillar of Denver’s DIY underground, running venues, organizing events, and fronting projects like Vermin Womb and Spiritual Poison. That community‑driven, no‑compromise mentality saturates the band’s live presence as well. Beneath the monolithic riffs, faint choral smears, wavering harmonics, and moments of fragile dissonance surfaced briefly, adding depth without relieving the pressure. The weight, as always with Primitive Man, was both sonically and psychologically heavy.
What made the night truly remarkable was how deliberately it was assembled. Guiltless brought modern, industrial‑tinged doom rooted in veteran experience; Today Is the Day contributed decades of boundary‑breaking noise rock and extreme metal; otay:onii bent the lineup toward performance art and sound design; and Primitive Man dragged everything to its bleak, cathartic end. It wasn’t a casual show, but a carefully plotted journey through different expressions of extremity, funneled into one continuous kaleidoscopic descent.
