RVA Shows You Must See This Week: January 21 – January 27
FEATURED SHOW
Thursday, January 22, 7 PM
Prisoner, Anti-Sapien, Disrotter, Paradiso @ Bandito’s – $15 (order tickets HERE)
The ongoing evolution of heavy music, both within Richmond and beyond, has been very interesting to watch over the past several years, and a show like this kind of throws this into relief. For example, this show combines bands with their roots definitively in the punk and hardcore scenes with other bands that are definitely rooted in metal, and yet others who have a foot on each side of the line. All of them sound pretty similar to one another, and anyone who enjoys one of the bands on this bill is likely to enjoy all of them. Yet depending on which scene you’re from, you might come to this show to see a particular band on the bill and have zero knowledge of the other three. Funny how that works, huh? I gotta say, though — I’m not mad at it. If anything, I think it will fuel a lot of creativity on the heavier end of things here in Richmond for years to come. And I’m always glad to see that.
Prisoner is the band on this bill with its origins most firmly in the realm of punk and hardcore. Having started out as a D-beat adjacent biker-punk quartet with a dark, gnarly sound on their early releases, they returned after a long woodshedding period in which a variety of lineup changes took place with a sound much closer to that of Through Silver In Blood-era Neurosis combined with Psalm 69-era Ministry, with their Motorhead-style thrash roots still showing through in the way their songs were put together. By contrast, Richmonders Disrotter, who celebrate the release of their second EP, Perish Forth, on this fine evening, come firmly from the world of death metal, mixing guttural vocals and harsh lyrics about death, disaster, and supernatural evil with chugging low-end guitars, inspired technical leads and solos, and pounding, brutal drums. These bands have a very different background, but when you listen to one right after the other, you’re far more likely to notice commonalities than contrasts.
As for the touring band on this bill, New Yorkers Anti-Sapien, their music demonstrates a foot in each style. While there are undeniable death metal elements to their sound — especially the Schuldiner-style solos, the guttural vocals, and the slam-style breakdowns, there’s also a clear dose of hardcore punk mixed in as well, which shows through in the grindcore-influenced speed riffs and the rapid snare tattoo during the band’s faster moments. Their latest EP, At The Mercy Of the Merciless, is an absolute blast of top-speed low-end heavyosity, and I think we should all expect every bit as much of that when they take the Bandito’s stage on Thursday night. The bill is completed by local death-thrashers Paradiso, who keep their death-metallic roar harsh and old-school. They’ll fit right in on a bill where the difference between hardcore and metal seems less and less important with each passing band. What genre is this? Who cares? Get in there and bang your fuckin’ head.
Wednesday, January 21, 7 PM
Radio B @ Plan 9 Music – Free!
Editor’s Note:
Doug here, butting into Drew’s column once again to let you know about our first Plan 9 showcase of 2026 happening this Wednesday with Radio B. Lyricist, performer, advocate, organizer, icon. That’s a good way to sum up the role Radio B fits in town, but another one way would be to just call him “the soul of Richmond hip-hop.” Between his own releases over the last twenty years and his several platforms and series (RVA Rap Elite, Southpaw Battle Coalition, Flag On The Moon), his fingerprints are felt on every hip-hop release of note in central Virginia. Last January, he released his latest record, The Internet Is Fake, another monumental entry in his rich catalog that addresses the loss of focus and authenticity in the digital era. At Plan 9, he’ll be performing tracks from this record alongside DJ Hip-Hop Henry and a slew of special guests. You don’t want to miss this one.
Wednesday, January 21, 6:30 PM
Glare, All Under Heaven, Day Aches @ Richmond Music Hall at Capital Ale House – $21.25 (order tickets HERE)
The shoegaze revival has been in full swing in the American indie scene for over a decade now, and it shows no sign of slowing down. Always a good thing to those of us who grew up loving the genre as teenagers and still can’t get enough of it today. This is an especially auspicious time for people with similar tastes to mine, in fact, because instead of having to seek out obscure albums by older bands that didn’t get enough attention at the time, we get an absolute bonanza of top quality shoegaze bands coming out of Texas in particular. The standard-bearers for this movement, along with fellow Texans Narrow Head, are Glare, whose 2025 album Sunset Funeral took an already formidable band to another level completely. Their expert combination of quiet, ethereal vocals and guitar melodies with a strong, muscular rhythm section and song structures that avoid bogging down in dreamy muck in favor of hitting hard and keeping the tempos moving forward. You’ll be swimming in a delicious haze as you listen to Glare’s set at Capital Ale House, but you’ll also be rocking the fuck out.
Jerseyites All Under Heaven are on tour with Glare, and form together to make a duo of great sounds that sound great together. There’s a bit more of a conventional indie-rock skeleton to the works All Under Heaven create, but in the end, their shoegaze influences are also being worn on their sleeve, so it’s not hard to hear exactly why these two bands ended up touring together, nor to imagine how much fans of one will enjoy the other. Washington DC’s Day Aches will act as local support of sorts, and have a sound that pairs well with the other bands on this bill. Airy vocals, loud guitars, driving drums… it’s all here. If that’s the kind of thing you just can’t get enough of (and believe me, plenty of us out here feel that way), you’ll definitely want to spend your evening at Richmond Music Hall tonight.
Thursday, January 22, 7 PM
Colleen Green, Cassie Ramone, Human Worm @ The Camel – $10 in advance, $12 day of show (order tickets HERE)
This tour will be a delightful surprise for anyone with fond memories of the femme-centric wave of indie rock that took over that entire genre in the early 2010s. Back then, Colleen Green was truly on her own, programming backing tracks over which she sang and played guitar, creating catchy, winsome lo-fi pop on albums like Milo Goes To Compton and Sock It To Me, before finally recruiting a backing band and releasing the album that got her the most attention — 2015’s I Want To Grow Up. That record’s jangly guitars, lovely choruses, and bouncy indie-pop grooves made Colleen Green a bit of a sensation in certain indie circles, and that kept her moving forward until 2021’s Cool, a slightly more polished album full of grooves that were every bit as great as her early material. That said, it’s been nearly half a decade since that album was released, and you could be forgiven for thinking Colleen Green got a decent job during the enforced hiatus of the COVID pandemic and didn’t have any interest in making new records. Well, I don’t know if she’ll have anything new out anytime soon, but she has made clear that this back-to-roots tour with Cassie Ramone will feature new material, so all the Colleen Green fans out there have reasons to be cheerful — and to come out for this tour when it shows up at the Camel.
Cassie Ramone had just as many fans back in those heady days of the early 10s, though hers were as the frontwoman of the sensational early 10s New York indie band Vivian Girls, who took their name from the work of outsider artist Henry Darger, their swagger from the Velvet Underground, and their sound from both classic surf rock twang and early 90s Riot Grrrl bands like Bratmobile and Tiger Trap. Ramone went solo around a decade ago, and more recent work she’s created under her own name, such as 2024’s Sweetheart, leans in an almost girl-group direction, at some times calling forth memories of the Shangri-La’s and at others of sad gothic pop ballads. While these two artists don’t necessarily sound that similar, they are definitely linked by a shared cultural understanding and a background in the underground indie community of that bygone era. Therefore, hearing the two of them perform back to back should mean just as much to their fans as it means to the two of them to tour together. And of course, the Richmond folks who love what these two artists have to offer will likely get a huge kick out of the more electronic-postpunk but still relatively similar Human Worm, who’ll get this one started out. Indie girls of a Certain Age, this one’s for you.
Friday, January 23, 9 PM
Division Of Mind, Eliminators, Lose Sight, No Paradise @ The Camel – $15 (order tickets HERE)
Hardcore is a pretty amazing musical genre, and not just because pretty much anything can get grafted onto its edges if it’s created within the community and has the right mindset. A lot of hardcore bands that exist today are still doing something very close to the sound that bands were playing in that genre over 40 years ago, which is the kind of thing that should have fallen so far down a hole of diminishing returns that we’d have lost sight of it decades ago. Somehow that’s not the case, and if anything, standard-issue hardcore — fast, angry, tough, moshable — feels particularly vital at this point in history. Maybe that’s because (not to put too fine a point on it) the whole world is falling apart, but there are definitely a lot of reasons to be angry and want to hear music that’ll inspire you to march in the street and throw a brick at [redacted, but you know who]. This show will bring you a whole bunch of bands who are more than ready to fire you up and get you bouncing off the walls in preparation for all the rage that’s coming your way in the days, weeks, and months ahead.
Division Of Mind are the best-known group on this bill, but the San Francisco-based touring band, Eliminators, probably deserve more focus, as this is the latest project of Ace Stallings, former vocalist of Break Away, still vocalist of Mutually Assured Destruction, and longtime major supporter of Richmond’s hardcore scene. This new group of his is coming at you with zero bullshit, full of aggressive roared vocals, speedy riffage, and tons of killer hardcore tunes that fly by quickly but hit hard as hell. Be prepared — they’re gonna knock you on your ass. The Division Of Mind boys are of course also there to do a very similar thing, perhaps from a more purely downbeat and negative position, with a darker and more guttural sound. But the approach is largely the same, and the songs are just as incredible. Relatively new Richmond straight edge hardcore band Lose Sight, who have some classic Boston tendencies that should thrill fans of Slapshot and Mental, will be on the bill, as will No Paradise, a super-raw and old-school Richmond hardcore band with real DYS/Untouchables energy. Come out and blow off some steam on the dance floor for this one.
Saturday, January 24, 8 PM
Bucko, Doreen, Soup Dreams @ The Camel – $13.22 (order tickets HERE)
It’s hardly a radical opinion in the Richmond music scene these days, but I do think it’s worth mentioning — I really like Bucko. I don’t hear this up-and-coming sextet doing anything all that radically different from previous musical history; they play twangy rocked-out alt-country tunes and invest them with the kind of crunch you’ll only get from hanging out in spaces where punk and metal are part of the DNA. Nothing about that is majorly groundbreaking or outside what we’ve seen before. But what I appreciate about these kids is that they’re taking this building blocks and using them to construct a musical path forward out of the rather tedious morass of dad-rock that has dominated indie since around about the time Mac DeMarco became the new hotness. I for one am sick to my back teeth of all that, and it’s great to see that a young band can come along, look around at the current musical landscape, and tweak it just enough to make all the boring aspects of it really interesting again.
You might have no idea what I’m talking about if you haven’t seen Bucko play yet, or haven’t listened to the self-titled LP they released back in 2024. If so, that’s all right — consider this write-up your official latepass. Print it out, cut it into a coupon, and bring it to The Camel this Saturday night. If you do that, I promise everyone else paying enough attention to have jumped on the Bucko bandwagon a while back will go easy on you. (Mostly.) Philadelphia band Soup Dreams will also be playing this one, and they strangely manage to cohere quite well with the sound of Bucko, even though I wouldn’t say this introspective, melodic indie group have even an ounce of country in their sound. I guess the thin line between “not country” and “country” runs directly between Soup Dreams and Bucko. Fair enough! Local musician/band Doreen opens this one up, and I know absolutely nothing about her/their music, so show up on time and decide for yourself! Whatever the result, it’ll at least be better than standing outside in the snow.
Sunday, January 25, 7 PM
Dials Dials Dials, Added Color, Velvet Ruin @ The Camel – $12 in advance, $15 day of show (order tickets HERE)
It’s really interesting to see what young people still alive to the possibility of music can get up to when no one comes along to tell them, “Hey, you can’t do that!” Exhibit A in favor of this argument is Dials Dials Dials, a project led by — and often featuring no one other than — Milo McAdams, who may be more familiar to Richmond music heads as the drummer from teenage bass/drum noise-rock duo Wrong Worshippers. In that band, he and his bandmate crank out Big Business-style low-end riff rockers. But in Dials Dials Dials, Milo truly gets to indulge his strangest impulses — which usually involve creating and looping breakbeats, then mixing triggers, electronic sounds, and other unpredictable layers of noise into the overall creation he comes up with. A lot of it is improvised, and sometimes — as on recent Dials Dials Dials live EP Shifting Distorted Fish — it involves collaborators who also pitch in to add to the brilliant, gorgeous madness that ensues. That EP, which features sax player Donovan Claybrooks, was actually recorded live at Bandito’s, so for all we know, we’ll get something equally brilliant and memorable from their set at The Camel on Sunday night. Then again, we could end up with something completely different. Either way, it’ll be a blast to witness and take part in.
Touring combo Added Color are also on this bill, and this New York-based band are coming from a pretty different place musically, it must be said. Their dark, moody material features electronic touches that sit cheek-by-jowl with metallic sound bursts, featuring distorted guitars and pounding drums. Fans of heavy gothic industrial sounds of the 1990s will probably find a lot to like here, and I can see this band’s lushly dark tunes appealing to fans of The Cure and Sisters Of Mercy as well. On that level, they fit quite well with Velvet Ruin, the local group who will round out this bill with a more old-school, punked out take on gothic rock. Rather than mixing in synth textures or industrial beats, these hard-charging locals pull from older influences that helped distinguish the early goth bands from the postpunk of its contemporaries. Think Gun Club, TSOL, even early Patti Smith. It’s all here, and it’s a delight to listen to. This entire night will be, really. Make sure you’re in attendance.
Monday, January 26, 7 PM
The Missing Peace, Cheem, Slow Degrade @ The Camel – $17.51 (order tickets HERE)
Memo to all you young folks in the scene today: Whatever is coming out right now that you think is totally weaksauce and cringe, someone 20 years from now is going to love. Most likely, a whole lot of people will love it, and in two decades there’ll be all these bands springing up that are influenced by it. And what’s going to be the weirdest part is when you realize you like all the new bands that are clearly influenced by the bands you dismissed out of hand years ago. Does it mean you were wrong back then? I don’t really have an answer, but I can tell you that as I hear the influence of bands like The Deftones and Evanescence creep into younger bands’ work, I regularly find myself liking what they come up with. I definitely feel that way about DC band The Missing Peace, whose most recent release, The Void, mixes those elements from the more goth end of nu-metal with heavy shoegaze interludes and scathing guitar distortion. At times it resembles the best work on Boston shoegazers Nothing, but at other times gothic nu-metal influences are most prominent. If you’re like me, some parts of that sentence seem way better than other parts — but the fact is that every part of The Missing Peace is awesome to hear, and will definitely get you amped as hell. So you should definitely come prepared.
New England’s Cheem are also on this bill, and while this band brings a much different collection of influences to the table, they once again manage to wrong-foot me with aspects of popular music that I dismissed out of hand 25 years ago — DJ scratching, virtuosic R&B-influenced vocals, and flashy funk beats that mix live drumming with programmed beats. Cheem combines all of these elements with plenty of melodic, prog-emo sounds of the more recent past to turn it all into a candy-colored concoction I just want to snack on all day. Imagine Coheed and Cambria making a record with Panic at the Disco and Justin Timberlake and you’re on the right track. And yes, believe it or not, it rules. The bill’s complete with the addition of Slow Degrade, another post-Deftones-ish shoegaze/nu-metal hybrid with some seriously powerful atmospheric riffs. It’ll blow your mind with how unexpectedly good it all is. Unless of course you’re in your early 20s, in which case you knew all along.
Tuesday, January 27, 7 PM
Americans Abroad, Madison Turner, Musko Buffet, Text Brian By Friday @ The Camel – $12 (order tickets HERE)
Let’s wrap up this week’s worth of music with some fun bands who all bring in influence from folk, punk, and Americana traditions, all in different amounts. The combination makes a ton of sense, and should please anyone who finds something to enjoy about any one of these artists. Personally, the one I know best is Madison Turner, an old friend who I used to occasionally play bass for (sadly too busy to do anything like that these days). It’s been great to see her musical career get totally revitalized thanks to Say-10 Records, who talked her into releasing her first new LP in 7 or so years in 2025. Curtsy When You Land is without a doubt the best work Madison’s ever done, bringing together her background in genres like ska and alt-rock with her classic folk-punk approach to generate a bunch of super-catchy tunes that sound particularly amazing when she plays them live with her band. If you’re not one of the many people who’ve figured out how brilliant this local singer-songwriter is over the past year or so, well, it’s not too late! Come down to the Camel this Tuesday night and learn for yourself.
As for Americans Abroad, who at least appear to be our headliners, I wasn’t as familiar with them — though I have heard the name. Their previous releases seem to largely be the work of one person, Sam Norton, who strums an acoustic guitar and sings politically-charged laments about modern capitalist culture. In more recent months, though, Americans Abroad has picked up what looks to be a steady backing band, which dishes out their tunes in a rocked-out fashion that shows off the punk elements that were always there, just under the surface. Richmonders Musko Buffet are new to me, but have an EP from 2024 called Pilot Light that displays a sure-handed execution of the classic midwest emo template, full of forlorn yearning and catchy midtempo choruses. I’m definitely intrigued to hear more. As for the oddly named Text Brian By Friday, they’ll start this evening off with some chunky, catchy alt-rock tunes that should put everyone in a good mood. Really, if you like the sort of thing these artists and bands do, you’ll be on cloud nine throughout this one. It doesn’t get much better than this.
Email me if you’ve got any tips for me about upcoming shows (that take place after the week this column covers -– this week’s column has obviously already been written): rvamustseeshows@gmail.com
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