Ingrown

A toenail, a town and three people

Ingrown formed in Boise in January 2015 and have settled as a trio: Ross Hansen on vocals and guitar, Gavin McWilliams on bass, Charlie Ritch on drums. The name came from nothing grander than a joke — Hansen has said an ingrown nail can get bad enough that someone dedicates a band to it.

The first release that travelled beyond Idaho was the Meathead EP in 2017. The rhythm section churned afterwards; Hansen told No Echo the band went through two more bassists in the years after Meathead while touring as hard as they could manage. What did not change was the home base. He described the Boise scene to the same site as badass and free, and framed the whole exercise as getting best friends together and taking the joy and freedom that comes from playing hardcore for each other. The Shredder in Boise is still the venue they have played most often, with nine logged shows.

Hardcore runs in the family. Hansen's father Erik played in State of Confusion, a Boise band whose 1988 song "Asylum" his son would eventually record. A second inheritance is harder to predict from the music: traditional Irish playing, which Hansen has called rebellious and dark in attitude while sounding sweeter than anything else, and which keeps surfacing on Ingrown records in places no one would expect.

Gun, Closed Casket and the climb out

The debut album, Gun, arrived in August 2021 through Alternatives and ran fourteen minutes. Andy Nelson recorded it, and Hansen said recording with him was the most fun he could have had in a studio. The record opened doors that Idaho geography had kept shut: tours followed with Trapped Under Ice and Regional Justice Center, and the band's own gigography shows a nine-date West Coast Gun Run in 2021 and an eighteen-date US run in March 2022.

In October 2023 they signed to Closed Casket Activities and released "Cold Steel" the same month. "Enemy" followed in October 2024, trailed as an early piece of a record due the following spring.

By then the touring had become close to continuous. Setlist.fm logs 86 Ingrown performances in 2025, including a seventeen-date European and UK run — more shows in one year than the band managed in their first four combined.

Eighteen minutes called Idaho

Idaho came out on 7 March 2025 through Closed Casket Activities: eleven songs in roughly eighteen minutes, recorded and mixed by Andy Nelson at Bricktop Studios in Chicago, mastered by Nick Townsend in Los Angeles, with artwork by Ridge Rhine and photography by Nathan Congleton. The running order is "Bullet", "Watch Your Back", "Ingrown", "Cold Steel", "Enemy", "Your Fault", "Dead", "Unite", "Asylum (S.O.C)", "Hellbound" and "Idaho". Nelson's other credits include Jesus Piece, Pain of Truth and his own band Weekend Nachos, which gives a fair indication of the register.

The songs deal with survival, self-reliance and refusing outside pressure, and Hansen tied that directly to where the band lives: living in Idaho has shaped them, he said, and there is only family and community to fall back on. The video for "Bullet", directed by Nate Congleton and Patrick Ard, was shot on the road during a tour with Sunami.

Two choices on the record say more about Ingrown than any description of the riffs. One is "Asylum (S.O.C)", the State of Confusion song written by Hansen's father in 1988. The other is the ending: after seventeen minutes of grinding hardcore the album closes into a medley of Irish jigs played on acoustic guitar, banjo and mandolin. The band's own shorthand for their audience — people who like Obituary, No Comment, 25 Ta Life and Waylon Jennings — stops being a gag once that outro starts.

Reaction divided. Buyers writing on the band's Bandcamp page singled out the groove, the range of tempos and a bass guitar that is actually audible, and called the finish refreshing. Elsewhere the verdict was cooler: that the slam-indebted passages are over too quickly to lodge, leaving a record caught between two modes. Nobody argued with the speed.

Autumn 2026: what has actually happened

The year began with announcements rather than records. On 2 February 2026 Ingrown appeared on the Just Another Gig festival lineup alongside Biohazard and Show Me The Body, and on 25 February they announced spring US dates with Mask, Witness Chamber and Clique.

On 8 May 2026 came a July run supporting PeelingFlesh: 15 July at the Granada Theater in Lawrence, Kansas, then Evansville, Inkcarceration at Mansfield on 17 July, St Louis, Springfield, Tulsa, Amarillo, Gallup and Bakersfield. Ingrown played every date except PeelingFlesh's Vans Warped Tour stop in Long Beach on 26 July, which they were not on. The run finished with 191 Toole in Tucson on 28 July.

Their biggest European exposure came on 28 June 2026, when they played the third stage at Outbreak in Manchester from 2.30pm to 3pm — the festival's fifteenth edition, held across 26 to 28 June at Bowlers Exhibition Centre and headlined by The Front Bottoms, Alexisonfire and Basement. Two further announcements followed: on 23 June an Australian tour supporting Fleshwater in November with Secret World, and on 25 August a set of Blood For Blood autumn shows alongside Death Before Dishonor and Béton Armé. That bill reached the Gothic Theatre in Englewood, Colorado on 1 October 2026.

Setlist.fm now holds 324 Ingrown setlists going back to 2016, 60 of them from 2026. Two dates are on sale: 29 October 2026 at Shrine Social Club in Boise, under the UK band High Vis, and 8 November 2026 at 170 Russell in Melbourne with Fleshwater and Secret World. Setlist.fm also lists The Triffid in Brisbane on 5 November and Liberty Hall in Sydney on 7 November as part of the same Australian run.

The shape of a set

Ingrown shows are short by arithmetic rather than choice: with no song on Idaho running much past two minutes, ten songs fit comfortably inside half an hour. The 2026 pattern on setlist.fm runs "Enemy", "Bullet", "Shell", "Fool", "Watch Your Back", "Cold Steel", "Grunt", "Waste" and "Hard Time", with no encore logged. Across their whole history the most-played songs are "Waste" (51), "Shell" (50), "Fool" (49), "Hard Time" (47) and "Grunt" (46), with "Gun" and "Snake Stomp" on 37 each — a set that leans on Gun-era material as much as on the newer record.

The staging is a function of being three people: Hansen fronts from behind a guitar, so there is no separate vocalist working the barrier. Their 2026 bills put them in the same position repeatedly — the fast, blunt element on somebody else's tour, whether that is PeelingFlesh's slam, Blood For Blood's Boston hardcore, High Vis's melodic UK rock or Fleshwater's heavier end of shoegaze. The Outbreak slot was thirty minutes on the smallest of three stages, which is roughly the length Ingrown have built their material for anyway.