Headbangers to the front: Gatecreeper turns The Bottleneck into a continuous circle pit on Wednesday

October 10, 2024

Nick Spacek,

Gatecreeper at The Bottleneck on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024. // Photo by Nick Spacek

Gatecreeper w/ Frozen Soul and Worm
The Bottleneck
Wednesday, Oct. 9

May’s release of Arizona’s Gatecreeper latest, Dark Superstition, coincided with me needing to mow my lawn. The tracks paired with trimming the yard, resulted in me listening to Gatecreeper’s sun-bleached death metal at least once a week all summer long. Not for nothing did we list this show as a must-see back in August, saying that, on this latest recording, the band “lean into a hard-edged groove not present on their earlier releases. It’s a brilliant step forward for the band, while not making past works like their classic debut, Sonoran Deprivation, feel as though they’re the work of a totally different band.”

The excitement I had to hear something like “The Black Curtain” live got me through a very lengthy and boring online on-boarding session and, yes, getting my lawn mowed one last time. I was beyond hyped to grab my camera bag and hop in the car to head over to The Bottleneck Wednesday night.

Opening with Dark Superstition‘s “Puncture Wounds” set the tone for a set that was a fist-pumping, throat-scouring set of audience participation. It felt like the entirety of The Bottleneck had been waiting for this shoe as much as I had, and by the time we were four songs in with “Caught in the Treads,” it was just this cathartic release of every bit of bad vibes to scream and shout along for complete and total release.

I took out my earplugs and just let myself go deaf, and, honestly, it was totally worth the extra sonic damage. As frontman Chase “Hellahammer” Mason said, “When you get to work or school tomorrow, you tell ’em you was bangin’ with the ‘Creeper last night.”

Frozen Soul. // photo by Nick Spacek

Not even six months ago, Texas’ Frozen Soul headlined a Saturday night Bottleneck matinee and they were already back, opening for Gatecreeper. Did their recent stop affect the enthusiasm for their death metal attack? Yeah, I’d say so. The band has added a couple of literal frozen souls to their stage setup—well-lit and spitting fog—setting the tone for their straight ahead death metal attack before the band even stepped foot on stage.

We got a truncated version of the set they played back in July, but it was no less intense for its brevity, with a never-ending stream of folks stage diving and enough headbanging to keep an office of chiropractic doctors in work for years. There’s something about pure, unadulterated, “fuck you” death metal that feels timeless, and the crowd ranging in ages from X’d up kids to gray haired scene veterans made that perfectly clear.

Worm. // photo by Nick Spacek

Florida’s Worm hadn’t been on my radar before they were announced as support for this tour, but 2021’s Foreverglade rapidly became a favorite. They call what Worm plays “gloom”—a mixture of black metal’s searingly sharp vocals and the sludgy riffs of doom, and it works so well. It’s swampy and mean, born of slapping at a zillion bugs while you’re too hot to move. It’s like a Necrot 45 played at 33, and I mean that in the most complimentary of ways.

There was a candelabra, chalice, and skull on a small table before Worm went onstage. Fog machines kicked on, hard. Organs began playing. A sepulchral march of decay began. Their lead singer had a sword. It’s just a series of still images in my brain, dimly lit and obscured by smoke, rent through with riffs that thrummed the entirety of the building and soaring guitar leads that had every hand clawed and reaching to the skies in approval. It was one hell of a start, and wandering back by the bar where, of all things, a baseball game was being played on TV, felt like reentering another world.

All photos by Nick Spacek:

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