Big Boy

San Jose, 2019, and the thing that stopped being a side project

The Santa Clara Valley hardcore scene began drawing attention outside California around 2019, when a cluster of bands from San Jose and Santa Cruz — Gulch, Sunami, Drain — started exporting a slow, heavy, deliberately unsubtle style of the music. Big Boy arrived in the same window. Their first release, Demonstration 2019, went up that year, and the band's own Bandcamp page has never carried much more than a city and three words: REAL BAY SHIT.

That phrase belongs to the wider circuit as much as to the band. RBS was also the name of the renegade show that demonstrated how far the scene had got: on 19 June 2021, in a San Jose parking lot, with the location announced two hours before doors, Gulch, Sunami and Drain played to a crowd put at more than 2,000, on an improvised stage run off generators with sound equipment lent for nothing. Local reporting at the time noted that the pandemic, which should have stalled the scene, had accelerated it instead.

Big Boy came out of that circuit rather than arriving next to it. When No Echo listed newer hardcore bands worth following in 2024, it filed Big Boy as a side project containing members of Sunami and Eightfold Path whose groove-driven material had already outgrown that label, citing festival sets at Tied Down and Sound and Fury the previous year. Brandon fronts the band; by May 2025 the hardcore podcast HardLore was describing him as one of the most naturally charismatic frontmen in the genre.

Three promos and under eleven minutes of love songs

Six years in, the recorded catalogue still fits comfortably on one side of a tape. Demonstration 2019 in 2019, Winter Promo 2021 two years later, Spring Promo 2023 in February 2023 — three short releases, roughly one every eighteen months, and no album at any point. Spring Promo 2023 is the one that travelled: five songs, and the record that put them on festival bills outside the Bay Area.

Love Songs, their fourth EP, appeared without warning on Monday 21 April 2025, announced on Instagram and released through Daze, the Connecticut label that has become the clearing house for this generation of the music. It runs five tracks — When I Prayed… at 1:24, Mystify at 1:40, 365 at 1:40, Now? at 1:57 and Other Side Of The River at 4:05 — which is under eleven minutes in total, with a closer more than twice the length of anything preceding it. Daze's own Bandcamp listing dates the release 14 November 2025, months after the files first went up.

The HardLore episode, recorded in person in May 2025, covered the band's origins, the RBS tag, the SPLASH ZONE and Brandon's stated preference for hardcore made after 2008 — a pointed line for a band routinely filed under beatdown, a style whose accepted canon sits in the 1990s. No Echo had wondered in 2024 whether a full record would follow. As of November 2026 it has not, and the promo-and-EP pattern has held through the band's busiest year.

Autumn 2026: the support slot that changed the rooms

The development that matters most is a booking rather than a release. On 11 May 2026 Basement announced the Wired USA Tour in support of WIRED, their fifth studio album and their first in eight years, with general ticket sales opening on 14 May. Big Boy were named on almost the entire run, which is the longest stretch of large-venue shows they have played.

The tour opened on 7 October at the Brooklyn Paramount and moved through the Fillmore in Philadelphia on the 9th, Jannus Live in Tampa on the 13th, the Masquerade in Atlanta on the 14th, House of Blues Dallas on the 16th, Stubb's Waller Creek Amphitheater in Austin on the 17th and the Van Buren in Phoenix on the 19th, with Momma and Febuary also on those bills. The Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles on 20 October was the largest night, a five-band package adding High Vis, First Day Back and DIIV. From the UC Theatre in Berkeley on 23 October the package settled into Basement, High Vis, Big Boy and First Day Back: Showbox SoDo in Seattle on the 27th, the Roseland in Portland on the 28th, Rockwell at The Complex in Salt Lake City on the 30th, the Ogden in Denver on 1 November, First Avenue in Minneapolis on the 3rd, Liberty Hall in Lawrence on the 4th, House of Blues Chicago on the 6th and the Royal Oak Music Theatre outside Detroit on the 8th. Songkick's calendar also carries the band through the tour's final two nights, the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on 11 November and Roadrunner in Boston on the 13th. The only early date they sat out was the 9:30 Club in Washington on 10 October.

Big Boy also played Sound and Fury in Los Angeles in August 2026, three years after the festival set that first got them written about nationally. Setlist.fm has logged more than 128 of their shows since 2019, with 364 attendance check-ins filed by 217 users — a modest number that says something accurate about where the band sat before this autumn, and which the Wired run is in the process of making out of date.

What happens in the twenty-five minutes

The most recent setlist filed for them, from Berkeley in late October 2026, runs eleven songs: When I Prayed…, Now?, T&T, Enemy, Identity, Gone, Break, Mystify, 365, Spades and A/X. Four of those come from Love Songs, which means roughly two thirds of a 2026 support set is still drawn from the promos — Spades, Break and Identity have each been played around fifty times and are the fixed points of the thing.

Eleven songs sounds substantial until the running times are checked. Nothing on the EP except the closer passes two minutes, and the promo material is shorter still, so the set is a half-hour at most and frequently less, delivered with almost nothing between songs. On a bill with Basement and High Vis, Big Boy are the hardest and shortest thing on the stage, and the crowd that comes for them tends to be a visible subsection of the room rather than the whole of it.

December, then Europe

After the Basement dates, the diary returns to the size of room the band is used to. Songkick lists Saint Vitus Bar in Brooklyn on 4 December, the Starlet Room at Harlow's in Sacramento on 12 December and the Observatory in Santa Ana on 17 December — a club capacity on the east coast and two California nights to close the year.

February 2027 is the first proper overseas run. Pain Of Truth, the Long Island band whose self-titled debut arrived on 25 September 2026, are headlining a European and UK tour, and Big Boy are supporting the European leg alongside Headbussa: fourteen shows between 2 and 14 February across Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, Switzerland, France and Austria, taking in SO36 in Berlin and the Arena in Vienna. Songkick's partial listing for Big Boy shows Zappa in Antwerp on 2 February, the Locomotiv Club in Bologna on the 11th and Glaz'art in Paris on the 14th, and also places them at XOYO in Birmingham on 19 February and EartH in London on the 20th, where the announced UK support was Impunity. The UK nights are worth confirming at the box office before booking travel.

There is still no album announced. On the evidence of six years and four short releases, that is a choice rather than a delay.