Thrown Into Exile

Won a slot, lost a band

Thrown Into Exile came together in Los Angeles in 2011 and got their first real opening within a year. In 2012 they won a contest called Road to Mayhem, which put them on a Rockstar Mayhem Festival bill alongside Slipknot, Motörhead, Anthrax and Slayer. A self-titled EP followed in April 2013, produced by Mike Spreitzer of DevilDriver, and the band returned to Mayhem that summer as an official touring act under headliners Rob Zombie and Five Finger Death Punch. For a group two years old, the exposure ran well ahead of the catalogue.

It did not hold. In November 2013 four of the founding members left, citing musical differences, and guitarist Mario Rubio was left as the only original. Henry Derek arrived on vocals in December 2014, and the decade that followed was a sequence of rebuilds around Rubio, who has held the lead guitar chair continuously since 2011. Every other position in the current line-up has been filled since 2022.

Two albums and an EP about loss

The records came slowly. Safe Inside appeared in 2016 and II: Illusion of Control in 2020, with non-album singles 'The Wronged' in 2017 and 'The Mourning' in 2020 filling the gap between them. None of it arrived through a label — the band worked unsigned, booking their own support slots and sharing Los Angeles stages with At the Gates and Orbit Culture.

Passageways, the 2024 EP, is the release the band point to. Rubio has called it their most mature offering to date and described it as melodic death and thrash with a groove underneath, written around grief and loss and the work of getting through both: 'It's the proper way to allow yourself to process this.' He traces his own playing back to finding Pantera's Cowboys from Hell in middle school, and reads the present moment as a death metal revival, citing Blood Incantation, Gatecreeper and Orbit Culture as evidence the audience for this music has grown back. A further single, 'Eternal Nothingness', followed the EP.

BLKIIBLK, and a change of register

January 2026 brought the first label deal of the band's existence, with BLKIIBLK. Four months later the singer changed again: Evan Seidlitz stepped down after three years, the band attributing the split to touring commitments and conflicting priorities rather than a falling-out — 'there is nothing but love and respect between us.'

Joshua Santos was introduced on 21 May 2026 with 'Behind the Veil', which premiered on SiriusXM's Liquid Metal before going out online with a video directed by Vicente Cordero, whose other credits include Hollywood Undead and Cradle of Filth. The band framed Santos as a shift in direction rather than a like-for-like replacement, saying he 'brings a whole new dynamic to Thrown Into Exile that showcases a more extreme side to us that has not really been done in the band's history'. The track pushes towards blackened melodic death metal, with riffing that draws on European melodic death as much as the American scene the band came out of.

It was announced as 'only a taste of what's to come from our new album'. As of mid-October 2026 that album has no public title and no release date. The line-up behind Santos is Rubio on lead guitar, Javier Quinto on bass since 2022, Austin Monzon on rhythm guitar since 2023 and Hank Lin on drums since 2025.

A year spent on other bands' bills

The touring year has been built almost entirely on packages headlined by someone else. May 2026 went on a North American run with Dethklok, including the Hollywood Palladium on 22 May.

Europe followed in the summer. Black Label Society's spring/summer European tour was announced on 13 January 2026 with support rotating between Venom Inc., Metal Church, Sacred Reich, Thundermother and Thrown Into Exile; the Los Angeles band took Berlin's Huxleys Neue Welt on 30 July, Schlachthof Wiesbaden on 1 August, Razzmatazz in Barcelona on 4 August, the Turbinenhalle in Oberhausen on 11 August and the Parkbühne in Leipzig on 14 August. Separately, they had been added on 11 October 2025 to the bill for Bloodstock's twenty-fifth edition, held at Catton Park in Derbyshire from 6 to 9 August 2026.

Wrath Across North America

The autumn booking is the largest of the band's career. Wrath Across North America, announced on 19 May 2026, pairs Arch Enemy and The Black Dahlia Murder as co-headliners with Septicflesh, Crypta and Thrown Into Exile as special guests, running from 5 October at Riverside Municipal Auditorium in California to 16 November at the Showbox in Seattle. Arch Enemy guitarist Michael Amott described the package as built 'for those who live and breathe PURE FUCKING METAL'. The tour doubles as the North American debut of Lauren Hart, formerly of Once Human, as Arch Enemy's singer.

Thrown Into Exile open the five-band bill, ahead of Crypta, Septicflesh, The Black Dahlia Murder and Arch Enemy. Coverage of the opening night in Riverside, published on 7 October, gave them a brief notice — a hometown-area set of crushing riffs and aggressive vocals that engaged the room straight away — while most of the write-up went to Arch Enemy's new singer and to Septicflesh playing as a three-piece after guitarist Christos Antoniou fractured his ribs.

The October itinerary runs through Salt Lake City on the 8th, Denver on the 9th, Dallas on the 11th, Houston on the 12th, San Antonio on the 13th, Orlando on the 15th, Fort Lauderdale on the 16th, St Petersburg on the 18th, Atlanta on the 20th, Charlotte on the 21st, Raleigh on the 22nd and The Fillmore Silver Spring on the 25th.

Five songs, no room to waste

The set is short and fixed. At the Hollywood Palladium on 22 May the band played 'Send Me Below', 'Nihilist', 'Behind the Veil', 'You've Fallen so Far' and 'Declination'; in Barcelona on the Black Label Society run the same five went out behind a taped intro. Five songs is the standard allowance for the first band on a bill this size, and the order is engineered rather than improvised: two established tracks, the new single at the midpoint, then the song they have played more than any other, then the closer.

The staging is not theirs. Opening slots on packages of this scale mean the lights and backdrops belong to the bands above, and doors on several of the October dates were at 5pm, which puts the first act on while the room is still filling. 'You've Fallen so Far' is the most-logged song of the band's career on setlist.fm, appearing eighteen times, and the site records 311 attendances from 278 users in total — a modest tracking footprint, and a fair reflection of fifteen years spent as the first name on the poster.