The city drowned itself before the first note. Rain ate the streets and gnawed the highway into rivulets where cars floated like lost souls. Pantera’s “Respect” bled from a passing SUV, a warning and a sacrament. Virginia walked with me up the steps from the parking garage, face unreadable, eyes like floodlights in the downpour.
Inside The Anthem, that scintillating crown jewel of DC’s music venues and wonderful respite from the rain, middle-aged couples tugged at their youth like stubborn zippers. A few dads brought children as offerings to Papa Roach. The pinot noir at the bar tasted like communion wine left too long on the altar.
Daddy Roach did not grant me VIP lounge access, nor the decency of a photo pass, on Sept. 16. Still, I was relieved to have Virginia at my side thanks to my plus one.
Underoath: Heralds in Neon
Underoath emerged five shadows lit by the Anthem’s fabulous stage lighting rig. Their drummer pounded in martial tongues. The synth screeched like Ezekiel’s horns. For a moment, The Anthem was not a venue but a cathedral with fluorescent wings. Their frontman strutted around in an Austin 3:16 t-shirt.
“This is a new song,” the singer intoned. “This one’s called ‘Hallelujah.’”
The crowd obeyed without thinking, birthing a circle pit as if compelled by the motion of the divine. Virginia nodded. The circle becomes an ouroboros, she whispered. I could see it then: the pit devouring itself, a serpent of chaos without end.
A fan appeared at my elbow with sweat already drying into salt. Ten shows in twelve weeks, he claimed. A pilgrim chasing ghosts he missed as a kid. He grinned, hollow-eyed, a man possessed.
Watch Underoath perform “Hallelujah” live on YouTube:
Rise Against: The Revolutionary Liturgy
Rise Against entered like priests of an unnamed sect. Their guitars carried less punk, more sermon. The frontman’s voice was a homily disguised as a hook.
The set unfurled like a catechism: “Re-Education (Through Labor),” “Under the Knife,” “Help Is on the Way.” Each song was another bead on the rosary. When they slipped into “Swing Life Away,” the room swayed as if drunk on its own nostalgia, couples clutching like it was prom night and the lights might never come up. “Satellite” lifted them higher, and “Savior” closed like a psalm everyone already knew by heart.
“What are they? Are they still punk?” I asked a Gen Z boy glistening with youth and the sweat of a thousand men.
“Post-hardcore,” he said, as if delivering a riddle.
Watch the official music video for “Savior” by Rise Against on YouTube:
During the set my phone buzzed with texts from a friend who abandoned Rise Against once they left the basement-punk trenches.
“I haven’t seen them since ’04. Gen Z thinks they’re emo now. They’re not. They signed to a major label and got palatable, watered down. Freshman me was *mad*. But hey, it’s their music.” He explained “post-hardcore” like a scholar, tracing its roots from arpeggiated hardcore to screamo to Underoath, until the term collapsed in on itself. Almost meaningless, yet clung to like scripture.
I stared at the stage, guitars blaring, crowd shouting. “They’re closer to Underoath and Papa Roach than I expected,” I replied. Virginia tilted her head at the word “expected” as if it were a trap.
The frontman’s sermon swelled. He spoke of equal fields, of no racism, no homophobia, no sexism in revolution. Virginia leaned close, her breath like incense. Revolutions are written in blood but also in distortion, she whispered.
The crowd smiled as if baptized. Reverb decayed into bones. Rise Against absconded into the darkness.
Papa Roach: The Cockroach Oracle
Slipknot thunder shook the interstitial, and then she appeared: a woman in a cockroach costume, antennae quivering like divining rods. She declared Rise Against “roach worthy.” She was not human. She was an insect priestess.
At the bar two young women recorded their drinks for Instagram. “Who are you here to see?” I asked.
“Papa Roach, I love them,” one confessed. “My dad showed them to me.”
“The future is watching,” cackled Virginia.
Testimonies poured from the congregation. A shirtless immigrant confessed that Papa Roach had saved him. Two friends bound their lives to “Blood Brothers” on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. A Gen X man in a crimson button-down recited devotion. Each voice built the hive.
Papa Roach stormed in as stewards of the Nu Metal Time Machine, opening with “Even If It Kills Me.” They segued into “Blood Brothers” of Tony Hawk 2 fame, then “Dead Cell,” “…To Be Loved”, “Kill The Noise.” Rap-rock bravado dangled like a vestigial tail, rotten but still twitching. The beast had regenerated.
“Getting Away with Murder” unfurled stock footage of Wall Street’s collapse, a mass unmasking of capitalism’s fetid carcass. Fireworks detonated indoors as if we were already underground with nothing left to fear. Wait, I thought those were illegal? Didn’t Great White burn down a night club in Rhode Island?!
Watch the official music video for “Getting Away with Murder” by Papa Roach on YouTube:
Papa Roach first demonstrated their Nu Metal Time Machine by blending their song “Forever” with Linkin Park’s “In The End.”
A drum and bass solo cracked the floor open. One guitarist was perched on a riser brandishing synthesizers and adjunct percussion instruments like sword and censer both. Artistes, Virginia whispered, and her tone was not mocking but reverent.
Then came the rite itself. Screens flickered showing clips with Late Night with Conan, The Tonight Show. It was scripture from the past, grainy reels as thaumaturgical portals. The crowd screamed not songs but years. 2000, 2003, 2005.
The final hymns arrived. The Nu Metal Time Machine invoked Korn, Deftones, Limp Bizkit, and System Of A Down, and then ended with “Last Resort” which cracked open mid-chorus to bleed into “We Will Rock You,” then snapped back into the suicide anthem every soul already knew by heart. The crowd screamed it, and the walls of The Anthem crumbled.
We slipped away before the crush, retreating through the Wharf garage’s concrete arteries. Behind us the hive still chanted.
Coda: The Roach as Guide
Papa Roach were once larval, mocked, disposable. So-called trashy Nu Metal, but on this night they revealed themselves as keepers of time, archivists of a grotesque canon. Not only nu metal but the emotional detritus of a generation embalmed in riffs and swagger.
Virginia said nothing. I felt her finger trace a circle in the air. Ouroboros again. Virginia drew the circle wider, and I understood. The cockroach survives, and in its survival so do we.
