HEADSEND tears up the Drake Underground

No introductions

Headsend walked onto the stage at the Drake Underground on 17 August and started playing. No hello, no band name, nothing.

Rasmus King alternated licks with hard, blunt chords. His brother Kyuss dropped the bass straight into the ground. Bon Soric drove the whole thing forward. Between songs there were cheers, and a couple of brief thank yous, and almost nothing else. Leaving the crowd no room to breathe before the next track hit.

Who they are, for anyone who missed it

Three people from Byron Bay. Rasmus on vocals and guitar, Kyuss on bass, Bon on drums. While currently making noise in the music scene, you might know the brothers, Rasmus and Kyuss, from their background as professional surfers.

The origin story is better than most. Rasmus was ill, picked up a guitar out of boredom, and started jamming with Kyuss. The two of them got tired of having no drums and began asking around. What they got instead were phone calls from their grandmother about the unbearable noise coming from the house next door. That was Bon. With the trio finally complete, they played their first gigs at a local record shop.

What happened next was fast. More than forty shows across Australia in a year, a sold-out national support run with Wunderhorse, and arena and stadium slots opening for Tool and AC/DC, all before they had released a single EP. Then a deal with EMI in March, the EP a few weeks later, and a place on Rolling Stone Australia's Future of Music list in May, where the question asked about them was whether Gen Z finally has its own Silverchair.

This Toronto date was the only Canadian stop on their first headline run through North America and Europe.

Mad Iris first

The room was warmed up by a local band, which is the right way round for a touring act's only night in the city. Mad Iris is a Toronto quartet who have been playing across Canada since 2023, pulling noise rock, punk, shoegaze and grunge into the same set, with Sonic Youth and early Jesus and Mary Chain audible in the guitars. Their self-titled debut album came out in May.

Live, the thing that holds it together is the two voices. Bassist Ela Hinatsu and guitarist Kaiya Rosie share the lead, often inside the same song, which keeps a wall of guitar from turning into one flat noise. It was intense, haunting and unrestrained, and it did the job an opener is there to do.

What it sounds like

Angel Glands, the debut EP, was recorded live in the studio by Nick DiDia, who has spent his career on records by Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine and Stone Temple Pilots. That one fact explains more about the live show than any adjective: what you hear in the room is close to what is on the record, because the record was made the same way.

So the set moved the way the EP does. Rolling Stone Australia has called "Stove" bruising and "And Angel" brooding, and heard Queens of the Stone Age all over "Do Do", which Rasmus describes as their two-chord disco track.

"Free" was in there too, and that one is barely a month old. It came out on 17 July, recorded live in Byron Bay with DiDia again, and it trails a second EP rather than looking back at the first. The band have been road-testing it on this run, so a Toronto basement got a song most of the room could not have known yet.

Live, it came out as explosive stretches sitting next to stripped-back verses, melodic riffs, raw vocals. Song after song, the audience moved closer. The crowd thrashed when the band thrashed and stopped dead when the band decided to stop.

Then the string went

Rasmus broke a string. The energy did not die, it just hung there. Kyuss and Bon filled the gap and the room watched them do it, while Rasmus worked on the guitar and then on a spare.

Kyuss smiled across at him, calm about it. Bon came over to help get the tuning right for the last stretch.

You learn more about a band in those two minutes than in the forty before them.

The last stretch

The final songs came out distorted and echoing, gritty vocals over deep bass and heavy crashes, the kind of volume you feel in your body before it reaches your ears.

For a band that had spent the set saying almost nothing, there was plenty to say afterwards. People hung around to meet them, and they stayed and talked. Whatever they were holding back on stage was not shyness, and it was not distance. It was just that the songs were doing the talking until the songs were finished.

A broken string did not stop it. Manchester next, at The Lodge on 28 August, and then a first UK and European headline run through London, Leeds, Glasgow, Dublin and Paris. If you are reading this on the mainland: Paradiso in Amsterdam on 12 September, Badehaus in Berlin the night after.

Words and photographs: Zach Aureliano, in Toronto.