ORCHID TO TOUR WEST COAST NEXT MONTH ANNOUNCE FULL LINEUPS: IRON LUNG, AGRICULTURE, REGIONAL JUSTICE CENTER & MORE – TICKETS HERE

After an official reunion last year, hardcore / screamo legends Orchid are set to tour the West Coast next month for their first shows there in over 22 years. Following a string of sold out East Coast dates, The Doom Loop Tour continues west, kicking off in Seattle on February 10 and runs down the coast to Portland, San Francisco and the Los Angeles area. Each night includes a special handpicked lineup including support from Iron Lung, Great Falls, Physique, Bastard Noise, Regional Justice System, Agriculture and more. It’s rumoured that more dates will be announced soon… for more info and tickets go here.

2/10: Seattle, WA – Substation
(w/ Iron Lung, Great Falls)

2/11: Portland – Revolution Hall
(w/ Iron Lung, Great Falls, Physique)

2/13: San Francisco – Great American Music Hall
(w/ Jerome’s Dream, Strangelight)

2/15: Los Angeles, CA – The Belasco
(w/ Jerome’s Dream, Bastard Noise, Regional Justice Center)

2/16 Pomona, CA – The Glass House
(w/ Agriculture, Habak)

+ More TBA…

Sonically, the band was unabashed in their attempting to worth within a then nascent tradition of heavy, shambolic, abruptly gorgeous hardcore-adjacent cacophony who captured the aggression of punk, while shying away (in their playing if not their record / t-shirt collections) from the bully-barking which made up so much of the genre. Of course, as the KLF recommends, in attempting to sound like their social betters, Orchid made something—jaggedly melodic leads and self-lacerating, witty preachifying over blast beats—entirely their own. While they existed, Orchid took on the scene—past, present, and future—with reverence, contempt, and joy. That was Orchid’s approach; taking the dead horse of hardcore and breathing life into it by poking it, prodding it, loving up on it, scrawling situationist slogans on its corpse like they were itchy runes, till the dead horse had no choice but to get up and gallop around the all-ages venue. After Orchid broke up, the individual members kept their boots on the ground in other projects. Instead of the years creating an insurmountable distance, the band remained close friends. With two decades of reunion disavowals slightly undermined by that absence of schism. When asked to rate the improbability of Orchid’s reunion, on a scale of 1-10 Fugazis, Green rejects the metric, seeing Orchid’s reuniting as somewhat less “world imploding” than Fugazi getting back together, while making clear that upcoming touring was made possible by the band members’ common bond. Sure, nostalgia is a corpse to be danced on, but now, with passion being passé still being up for debate, Orchid’s brand of sloganeering—revolutionary love backed by force and caustic rhythms—is a welcome addition to the hell-discourse. Either way, the band—dastardly anti-fash futurists and anti-trad traditionalists that they gleefully and paradoxically are—have returned… ready to revel in the confusion.

Word by Zach Lipez