Above Snakes

Two names and one decision

Above Snakes is old west slang for still alive, which turns out to describe the band's method as well as supply its name. The group is the work of two people who arrived at it the long way round: vocalist Johnny Skulls, who had previously played drums, and Dax Dabs, a multi-instrumentalist. Both are from Boston, and both had spent years in Los Angeles cycling through other people's bands without getting where they wanted. In 2019 they moved back east and started again on their own terms.

Speaking to Dead Rhetoric in March 2021, Skulls framed the point as control rather than scale — a vision the pair did not want compromised by anyone. Dabs called the sound nu era, meaning modern hard rock built on the pop music they grew up with, carrying nu-metal weight in the guitars. The division of labour has stayed unusually wide: Skulls designs the merchandise, builds the sets used in their videos and runs a clothing line. On the recorded side they have leaned on one outside collaborator more than any other, the producer Kile Odell, whose credits include Papa Roach, Nothing More and Motionless In White.

The timing was poor in the obvious way. The band launched into a pandemic with no venues open and no live circuit to climb. What they did instead was release singles.

One single at a time

Adrenaline arrived in 2020 and did the small things a first single has to do: it was picked up by Loudwire's Weekly Wire and added to playlists curated by Fearless and Hopeless. Never Alone followed the same year. Nothing To Lose came in 2021, its video released that October. I Feel Bad, also 2021, was premiered by Knotfest and is the most self-examining thing they had written to that point — Skulls has described it as an argument with himself about whether the person he had become could succeed without being pulled back into the habits of the one he used to be.

The Broken Ones opened 2022 with a horror-styled video in February, and Down followed later that year. By then the live side had finally started. In spring 2022 Above Snakes joined The Still Panicking Tour, a package headlined by From Ashes To New with Fire From The Gods, Blind Channel and Kingdom Collapse, running from Pittsburgh on 3 March to Reading, Pennsylvania on 16 April. Interviewed at a stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan halfway through that run, the pair sounded like a band that had spent two years in a room and was finally getting to test the material in front of people.

Support runs became the pattern rather than the exception. Over the seasons that followed they opened for Drowning Pool, Motionless In White, Filter and In This Moment — not co-headlines, not festival billing, but the first-band end of club bills, played to rooms that had turned up for somebody else.

The record that moved the needle

81 (Thallium), released in 2023, is the release that changed their standing. It reached number 52 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart, which reads modest in isolation and decisive in context: programmers were adding an unsigned band from Boston with no label pushing them up the chart. Crash N Burn followed the same year, and All In My Head, their first EP, gathered the run together.

Output since has been steady rather than album-shaped. Ride & Die and Rot came in 2024, then four singles across 2025 — Waking The Savage, My Resolve, Forsaken and Fight Fire With Fire. There is still no full-length album, six years in. The approach is plainly deliberate, and it matches how rock radio and streaming playlists actually consume a new band.

The clearest step up is Make Amends, released in 2026 and co-written with Johnny Andrews, whose credits run to Three Days Grace, Halestorm and The Funeral Portrait. It is the first Above Snakes song built with an outside writer of that standing, and by the band's own account it has charted on both Mediabase and Billboard — their strongest radio showing so far. Fallen Angel, also 2026, is the current single and landed alongside the autumn touring news.

2026: radio first, then the road

February 2026 put them in front of new audiences on The Unleashed Tour, a three-band club run headlined by No Resolve with Shallow Side in the middle. It opened at the Turf Club in St Paul on 10 February and worked east and south through Joliet, Iowa City, Omaha, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Springfield, Toledo, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Lakewood before finishing at the Machine Shop in Flint on 27 February.

On 29 April 2026 the bigger booking was announced. Wednesday 13 revealed the Shocktober Blood Tour, 31 headline dates with Dead On A Sunday and Above Snakes in support; general tickets went on sale on 1 May. The run opened at The Ritz in San Jose on 23 September and ends on Halloween night at the Federal Theater in Denver, taking in Seattle, Portland, Boise, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Anaheim, Pomona, Fresno, Los Angeles, Mesa, Albuquerque, Lincoln, McHenry, Flint, Lakewood, Hamden, Lowell, Harrisburg, Syracuse, Bensalem, Clifton, Leesburg, Raleigh, Richmond, Columbus, Nashville, Sauget, Lawrence and Colorado Springs on the way. Dead On A Sunday sit out a handful of nights; Above Snakes are billed across all 31.

The pairing fits better than the February run did. Wednesday 13's audience comes for horror imagery and theatre, and Above Snakes have been building that visual language themselves since The Broken Ones video in 2022 — the sets Skulls constructs, the artwork he draws. As of the end of September 2026 the tour is a week old and working down the west coast. The Lowell show on 14 October is the closest thing to a home date on the sheet.

What the rooms say

Reviews of the band live remain thin, which is what a mid-bill career looks like from outside. The clearest recent account covers the Mercury Music Lounge show in Lakewood, Ohio on 25 February 2026, where a writer reviewing the No Resolve bill gave Above Snakes more space than a middle slot usually earns. The verdict was that the recorded sound — heavy riffs, hooks placed where a radio single needs them, lyrics written about specific personal wreckage — survived the translation to a small stage, and that Skulls held the room rather than merely filling his allotted time. The phrase used was a band on the brink of something much bigger.

The same review noted what happened after the set, and it is the detail that best explains how an unsigned band has grown a following over six years: Skulls went out to the crowd, posed for photographs and had real conversations. For an act whose entire audience has been won from other people's rooms, converting a share of each of those rooms one person at a time is not a courtesy. It is the business model.