All Shall Perish

Out of the East Bay

All Shall Perish formed in Oakland, California, in 2002, assembled from members of three local bands: Antagony, End of All and Boof. The founding line-up was Ben Orum on rhythm guitar, Matt Kuykendall on drums, Mike Tiner on bass, Caysen Russo on lead guitar and Craig Betit on vocals. Their debut, Hate, Malice, Revenge, arrived in 2003 through the Japanese label Amputated Vein Records, and it was that record which drew Nuclear Blast, who reissued it in 2005 and signed the band.

The reissue mattered because it placed a young Bay Area act with a heavy hardcore streak on the same roster as established European death and thrash bands. By the time they cut a second album, the line-up had changed at both microphone and lead guitar: Hernan "Eddie" Hermida had replaced Betit, and Chris Storey had taken over lead guitar. That pairing, Orum and Kuykendall behind them, is still the core of the band today.

The record that stuck

The Price of Existence was released on 8 August 2006, produced by Zack Ohren at Castle Ultimate Studios in Emeryville, a few miles from where the band had started. It runs eleven tracks and roughly forty-three minutes, from the opener "Eradication" through "Wage Slaves" and "The Day of Justice" to the near seven-minute closer "The Last Relapse". "Eradication" was aired on MTV2's Headbangers Ball that year, which for a deathcore band in 2006 was as close to mainstream exposure as the genre got.

Reviews at the time were strong rather than rapturous: Blabbermouth scored it 8.5 out of 10 and AllMusic gave it three and a half stars. Its reputation has grown since, and it is now routinely described as one of the albums that fixed the deathcore template of breakdowns, blast beats and melodic lead playing. Its songs remain the spine of every set the band plays; "Wage Slaves" and "There Is No Business to Be Done on a Dead Planet" are the two most-performed songs in the band's documented history, with more than a hundred recorded outings each.

Awaken the Dreamers followed in 2008 and became the band's first chart entry, debuting at number 126 on the Billboard 200. The same year they toured Siberia, billed at the time as the first all-American metal band to do so. Storey left in 2009 and was replaced by Jason Richardson, who in turn departed for Born of Osiris in 2010, the year Adam Pierce took over drums from Kuykendall. The fourth album, This Is Where It Ends, was released on 26 July 2011 in the United States and three days later in Europe. Its closing track, "There Is Nothing Left", would become the band's customary final song on stage.

Lawsuits, a departure and a long silence

In 2012 the band found themselves on the wrong side of their own publisher when World Digital sued 80 fans for downloading All Shall Perish material over BitTorrent. The band sided publicly with the fans, and the case was dropped. It remains one of the few instances of a signed metal band openly opposing litigation brought in its name.

The bigger rupture came in 2013, when Hermida joined Suicide Silence following the death of that band's singer Mitch Lucker. All Shall Perish said at the time that they would continue, and in 2015 announced a reunion of the original members, but nothing substantial came of it. On 21 April 2020 that reunion was formally cancelled, and the band's active years are usually recorded as ending there.

The return, 2024 to 2025

On 7 February 2024 the band announced they were back, in a statement that read: "We have awoken from our dogmatic slumbers to find ourselves in a strange world, where Deathcore lives and the kids are alight." The returning line-up was Hermida, Storey, Orum and Kuykendall, and two festival dates were booked: Big Texas Metal Fest in Austin over 24 to 26 May 2024, their first show in eleven years, and Inkcarceration at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield on 20 July 2024.

What followed was a full year of work. Setlist.fm holds 39 documented shows from 2025 alone, from a two-night stand at San Francisco's DNA Lounge in early January to a run of North American club dates through the spring and autumn. On 24 April 2025 the band announced their first European and UK headline tour in more than a decade, twenty dates from Berlin's Hole 44 on 21 November to Stuttgart's Im Wizemann on 13 December, with PeelingFlesh as direct support throughout and Vulvodynia, Arcanius and Necrotted rotating on selected nights. The London date, at the 800-capacity O2 Academy Islington on 25 November 2025, ran with Vulvodynia and doors at six.

For the road, Kuykendall records but does not tour; Andrew Baird, formerly of Fallujah, plays drums live, and Adrian Oropeza handles bass.

Twenty years of The Price of Existence, and a Kickstarter

On 12 May 2026 the band announced a North American tour marking the twentieth anniversary of The Price of Existence, with the promise that they would play "the ENTIRE record" and that several of its songs had never been performed live in the album's original era. The run opened in Fresno on 4 September and closes at The Ritz in San Jose on 3 October, taking in Denver, Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Montreal, Brooklyn's Saint Vitus, Baltimore, Atlanta and San Diego's House of Blues along the way. Support comes from Carnifex, Extermination Dismemberment and Mauled, with Carnifex on the largest share of dates.

The more significant news arrived the weekend the tour began. On Friday 4 September 2026 the band posted a snippet of a new song, "Be As Kings, Be As Gods", their first new music in fifteen years, and launched a Kickstarter to fund a fifth album with no label involved. The target is 75,000 dollars across fifteen backer tiers priced from five dollars to two thousand; by 5 September it stood at 26,500 dollars, roughly a quarter of the way, with 28 days left. The new track was recorded by Zack Ohren, who produced The Price of Existence, mixed by Nick Loiacono and mastered by Seth Munson. A second song is promised if the goal is met.

The band's own framing was blunt: "We are finally blessed to be here with NO label, NO contracts, NO manager, NOTHING but YOU, the amazing fanbase that has waited too long." They also insisted the gap was not for want of material: "We never stopped writing music, we have tracks on tracks on tracks." No release date has been given, and Nuclear Blast, which issued the previous three albums, is not involved.

What the show is now

Through 2025 the set was a compact survey of the back catalogue. Across the 21 fuller setlists logged that year, "Eradication" opened every single show, and the average running order moved through "There Is No Business to Be Done on a Dead Planet", "Black Gold Reign", "The True Beast", "Deconstruction", "Wage Slaves", "Never...Again", "Awaken the Dreamers", "Stabbing to Purge Dissimulation" and "The Day of Justice" before "Laid to Rest" closed the main set. "There Is Nothing Left" served as the encore at 14 shows, though at ten others the band simply left without one. A headline show at Trees in Dallas on 3 May 2026 ran thirteen songs in an hour, from ten to eleven at night, and a festival slot at Milwaukee Metalfest on 7 June 2026 was trimmed to ten songs in forty minutes.

The anniversary tour has changed the shape of the night entirely. At Urban Lounge in Salt Lake City on 8 September 2026 the set was the album in sequence, all eleven tracks from "Eradication" to "The Last Relapse" including the instrumental "Greyson", followed by "Be As Kings, Be As Gods" as the single new song and closer. That gives a headline set of twelve songs in something under an hour, in rooms that range from three-hundred-capacity clubs to the House of Blues in San Diego. There is no production to speak of, and the band has never traded on staging: the appeal is the precision of playing a 2006 record at its original tempos with three of the four people who wrote it.