Metalcore icons Coalesce return from hiatus older and wiser but just as vicious

When I first got into hardcore music in the early 2000s, I heard bogeyman-style tales about metalcore giants Coalesce and their chaotic live shows. Those stories were easier to believe after I stumbled across the Missouri band’s 1998 second full-length, Functioning on Impatience (Second Nature). The album opens with the unaccompanied vocals of front man Shawn Ingram, whose bellowing sounds like some kind of massive machine more than it does a human voice—and as he hurls invective at a crowd of invisible enemies, guitarist Jes Steineger and bassist Nathan Ellis kick in with lurching riffs. 

Coalesce’s music feels like a bitter black mass whose apocalyptic textures are countered only by the band’s dark humor. Most late-90s metalcore outfits weren’t releasing entire records devoted to deeply uncool dinosaur rock (as Coalesce did on their 1999 Led Zeppelin covers EP, There Is Nothing New Under the Sun) or giving their songs bitingly funny titles like “Cowards.com” and “Where the Hell Is Rick Thorne These Days?”—a practice that spawned a metalcore trope that was in turn appropriated by mall emo bands. 

Despite their caustic wit, Coalesce could also be fractious, and they experienced several bitter dissolutions and fruitful reconciliations between their formation in 1994 and 2010, when they put the band on pause to focus on their personal lives. They played a couple shows over the next couple years, and in October 2024 they reunited after a 12-year hiatus to headline a stage at esteemed hardcore and emo event Furnace Fest in Birmingham, Alabama, and embark on a U.S. tour. It seems that as they’ve aged, they’ve grown closer. Though Ingram’s March interview with music podcast Riff Worship opened with a discussion on the care of rare action figures, when the topic turned to their Furnace Fest appearance, he mentioned that the members of Coalesce all spend Christmas together. This fall the band reissued their four full-lengths on vinyl (via Relapse Records) and announced that they’re writing their first new album since 2009’s Ox. These days, their lineup includes drummer Jeff Gensterblum (Small Brown Bike), and recent concert footage shows that after a decade-plus away they’re still as explosive as ever—though perhaps a little less likely to chuck a floor tom into the crowd during their set.

Coalesce Meth. open. Fri 12/6, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $25, 17+