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The profile · researched 23 October 2026
From Canton basements to Atlantic: ASAVA built a detective film and hung an album on it
ASAVA spent nine years as an Ohio club band before a self-made video series and a Revolver feature carried them to MDDN/Atlantic; their label debut Mahjong landed on 28 August 2026 and three dates are on sale behind it.
Nine years in Canton
ASAVA formed in 2017 in Canton, Ohio, though the band's own publicity material is clear that the members had been playing together for well over a decade by that point — parents' basements, friends' backyards, and the local club and bar circuit. The core four are Liam Brocious on vocals, Zach Rusher on guitar, Greg Cochran on bass and Spencer Cindia on drums; Cindia also produces the band's recordings. Listings during 2026 have billed them variously as a four-piece and a five-piece, the touring line-up having grown a second guitar.
A first album arrived in spring 2020, straight into the shutdown. The single that followed, "25", was written out of that period and the band have never dressed it up as anything other than a crisis record. Brocious described starting it "in the Summer of 2020 just after COVID shut the world down", and the publicity at the time said plainly that the song was birthed out of a low point for the band. The accompanying video spliced in footage of his own birth; his account of watching it back, set against a song about wanting to end his life, remains the bluntest thing in the band's press history.
Nothing about that stretch suggested a major-label act. The band were a regional heavy group with a melodic streak, a few thousand listeners and no visual identity to speak of.
Mantras, and the series that came out of it
The 2025 album Mantras was self-released, and it is the record that made the band legible. Rather than service it with conventional promo clips, Brocious began directing, editing and starring in a connected video series called How Long Is Forever? — a dark detective narrative in which band members play the investigators, built around a disappearance and shot with a deliberately grimy, procedural look.
The series has run through episodes carrying the songs "Rue", "Leigh", "Valhalla" and "Saveyourself". The sequence matters because the relationship between film and song inverted partway through: the earlier instalments set images to music that already existed, while "Saveyourself" was written specifically for its episode. Get Some Magazine, reviewing that entry, argued that neither half felt secondary — "they work in complete harmony, each elevating the other" — which is a fair summary of why the project got attention that the songs alone might not have.
Brocious has described "Valhalla" as "a further exploration of the uncanny, and unsettling, horror elements of ASAVA", and said the intent for its video was to "make a grungy underground club scene". That is roughly the register of the whole series: low light, no gloss, horror framing applied to songs about compulsion and self-sabotage.
The Atlantic deal and Mahjong
A feature in Revolver's Spring 2026 issue moved the band from regional to national attention, and the label deal followed: MDDN Records in partnership with Atlantic Records. "Valhalla" was released through that arrangement on 26 June 2026, with "Saveyourself" following on 5 August.
Mahjong, the MDDN/Atlantic debut, came out on 28 August 2026 — sixteen tracks running 53 minutes 22 seconds: "Will", "Leigh", "The Centre", "Repeat", "Saveyourself", "The White Rabbit", "Comatose", "Valhalla", "Again", "And Again", "Until", "All This Time", "Death", "Panthera", "Don't Go" and "The End". The focus track pushed at release was "And Again", about psychological repetition, with its own video.
Brocious framed the record as a break rather than a step: "Mahjong set us free. It has freed us from so much of our past and so much of ourselves." He has called it the album the band aspired to make, and the sequencing supports the claim — the heaviest material is front-loaded, with "All This Time" and the acoustic "Panthera" sitting late and quiet before the close.
How the record has been received
The reviews have been positive without being euphoric, and they agree on what the band are doing: composition over force. Metal Riff Crusher's Matteo Rinaldi scored Mahjong 7.0 out of 10, writing that ASAVA "prioritises soaring melodic structures and evocative textures over mere brute force" and calling the album "a striking display of sonic architecture where every hook feels like a deliberate, calculated move on the board". He singled out "Valhalla" and "Comatose" as "designed for the live arena", and concluded that the writing "rewards the attentive listener" — a backhanded way of saying the record is long and asks for patience.
Too Much Love Magazine was warmer, praising the dynamic range and the way the quiet passages are allowed to stand: "Saveyourself" opening on an eerie soundscape before the guitars arrive, "Valhalla" leaning industrial, "All This Time" softer and lyrically sharper than the singles. Its comparison points were Motionless In White for theatrical edge, Dayseeker and Memphis May Fire for melodic weight.
Get Some Magazine reached for a different set of names — the cinematic scale of Sleep Token and Bad Omens, the emotional intensity of Amenra, the melodic restraint of A Perfect Circle. The spread of those references is telling: the genre tags attached to this band range from alt-metal to progressive metal to alternative metalcore, and nobody writing about them has settled the question.
Where they stand in October 2026
The touring year has been built from single-market shows rather than a tour. ASAVA played a headline date at The Underworld in Camden on 7 September 2026, doors at 7pm with an 11pm curfew, supported by Prodigal, on a 14-plus ticket that went off sale before the show. Twelve days later they were at Riot Fest in Chicago, on the Riot Stage at 12:30pm on Saturday 19 September — an opening-hours festival slot, which is where a band three weeks past their first major-label album normally sits.
Three dates are on sale as of late October 2026. Mercury Lounge in New York on Sunday 25 October and The Echo in Los Angeles on Tuesday 27 October close out the album run, the Los Angeles show with support from Salt. Beyond that, the only confirmed date is Boardwalk Rock at the Ocean City Inlet in Maryland on 15 May 2027.
Two things follow from that schedule. No full headline tour has been announced for Mahjong, which means the record is being worked through press, the video series and streaming rather than through rooms. And the live record is genuinely thin relative to the coverage — there are no published setlists for any of the 2026 shows, so what the set actually contains is still mostly undocumented outside the rooms themselves.
The show, now
The current run is small rooms, not arenas. The Camden headline show on 7 September 2026 ran doors at 7pm to an 11pm curfew with one support act, Prodigal, on a 14-plus ticket that sold out in advance — a single-support club bill rather than a package tour. The two dates still on sale follow the same shape: Mercury Lounge in New York on 25 October, then The Echo in Los Angeles on 27 October with Salt opening and a 7pm start. Setlists are drawn from Mahjong and the 2025 self-released Mantras; no setlist for any 2026 ASAVA show has been published, so the running order is undocumented. The material most reviewers flag as built for a stage is "Valhalla" and "Comatose", both described in Metal Riff Crusher's review as designed for the live arena. The festival evidence is a 12:30pm Riot Stage slot at Riot Fest on 19 September 2026, which is where the band's draw currently sits. Expect the detective-series imagery to carry into the staging — it is the band's main visual language — but the rooms are too small for anything elaborate.
Researched from rocknloadmag.com · metalriffcrusher.com · toomuchlovemagazine.com · getsomemagazine.com · metal-roos.com.au · theunderworldcamden.co.uk · livenation.com · highroadpublicity.com