LOCKED SHUT

Columbia, Missouri, is not a hardcore town

Locked Shut formed in Columbia, Missouri, in 2023, in a city with no real hardcore circuit to join. The band's own account, published on its Good Things Festival page, is blunt about the arithmetic: there isn't much of a built-in scene there, so they booked their own shows and assembled one as they went. The self-description they settle on is metallic hardcore — fast, heavy, straightforward.

The singer arrived with an audience already attached. Alexander Kelly had spent years putting out music as the rapper Oliver Francis before starting the band, which meant the first Locked Shut songs landed in front of listeners with no prior stake in hardcore at all. Around him sit Aaron James Simpson on bass and Bradley Hutchinson on guitar; Luke Fiadino plays guitar and shares the production credit on the album. The various online databases disagree about who has occupied the drum stool and for how long, which is unremarkable for a band three years old that has toured at this rate.

Fifteen minutes of record

The discography is thin by design. DEMO 23 came first, followed by a single, TOOTHACHE. Then THE NEW CHAOS arrived on 23 August 2024: eight tracks running fourteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds end to end. The longest song, STEEL SPINE, is 2:26. CLAYMORES CLASH lasts 1:06. There is a 72-second intro and nothing padding the seven songs after it, because there is no room for padding.

Fiadino and Seger Rauls produced and mixed it; Rauls mastered at Phoenix Studios in Nashville. The Bandcamp listing names no label, and none has appeared since — the record is self-released, and the band's own tags on it run from hardcore through pop punk to thrash metal, which is a fair reading of what the eight songs actually do.

Critical reception has been warm rather than reverent. The album carries a 3.41 out of 5 from 101 ratings on Rate Your Music and a user score of 77 on Album of the Year, with the recurring complaint being that the lyrics tip into corniness and the riffs, while heavy, break no new ground. The more telling signal is commercial: a Discogs comment dated 3 July 2026 asks for a repress, which is what happens when physical demand outruns a band that has no label to press for them.

The year it stopped being a local band

Nothing about 2026 reads like a band waiting on a second album. In early September they ran the UK — Brighton on the 3rd, Glasgow on the 9th, Boom Canalside in Leeds on the 10th, then the New Cross Inn in London on the 11th, an 18:00 start in a room that holds a few hundred at most. Nine days later they were on the other side of the Atlantic and several orders of magnitude up: Louder Than Life in Louisville, Kentucky, which ran 17–20 September, gave them a Saturday slot on the Impact Stage at 6:55pm.

Then back to England for Burn It Down in Torquay, Devon, a four-stage, no-barrier festival covered by Out of Rage on 1 October, where they played the Saturday on a bill with Heriot and Split Chain under headliners Speed. October has been North America: Théâtre Fairmount in Montreal on the 14th, East End United in Toronto on the 15th, Subterranean in Chicago on the 17th. The next date on the sheet is the Black Sheep in Colorado Springs on 27 October, doors 6:30pm, with a run through November behind it — recordBar in Kansas City on the 6th, Neck of the Woods in San Francisco on the 13th, the Launchpad in Albuquerque on the 16th. Songkick currently counts seventeen upcoming shows across five countries.

The set, and the covers

The Leeds show on 10 September is the fullest documented set of the year, and it explains a lot. Eleven songs: Intro, Steel Spine, One of These Days, Toothache, then Blur's Song 2, then a song logged as Zynner that is on no release, then Trouble Maker, Black Sabbath's Paranoid, Jinx, Me vs. a Brick Wall, and finally I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor by Arctic Monkeys. Three covers in eleven songs, in front of a British crowd, from a band whose own catalogue would not fill a quarter of an hour.

That could read as a band short of material. In practice it reads as a band that has worked out what its audience is. Out of Rage, reviewing Torquay, recorded the same shape — Steel Spine first, then Song 2 and Paranoid, closing on the Arctic Monkeys — and concluded that the energy is "invasive, at times even ridiculously fun", to the point that "it doesn't matter what they play, the crowd will go breaking each other's necks regardless". The closing cover was called one of the most memorable moments of the day. The verdict on the set overall was "short and sweet".

The Montreal log from 14 October is partial — four songs captured, Trouble Maker, I'd Do Anything, Jinx and Me vs. a Brick Wall — but confirms that the unreleased material and the covers travel with them rather than being a one-off for the UK.

December in Australia, then Europe

The strongest evidence of where Locked Shut stand now came on 15 September 2026, when Good Things Festival announced its sideshows. Locked Shut were given three: Jive Bar in Adelaide on 1 December, Leadbeater in Melbourne on the 3rd, the Lansdowne Hotel in Sydney on the 8th. All three sold out before the festival's own general tickets went on sale on 18 September. The festival itself runs 4 December at Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne, 5 December at Sydney Showgrounds and 6 December at Brisbane Showgrounds, on a bill topped by Limp Bizkit, Spiritbox, Polaris and Ministry — a band with one short self-released album selling out their own headline rooms around it.

Beyond that the calendar runs into the European festival circuit for 2027: Jera On Air at Ysselsteyn in the Netherlands over 24–26 June, Ieper Hardcore Fest in Belgium over 2–4 July, and Berlin Breakout in early July. Three continents are now booked off the back of fifteen minutes of recorded music, which puts whatever follows THE NEW CHAOS under a weight the first record never had to carry.