An epic night of metal awaits as The Mega-Monsters Tour rolls through town. Gojira and Mastodon are co-headlining with special guest Lorna Shore at The Ledge Amphitheater in Waite Park on August 27, 2023. These two giants of the metal scene are joining forces once again as they hit the road in support of their latest creations, Fortitude and Hushed and Grim respectively. Lorna Shore’s Pain Remains has garnered lots of attention since the first song was released and they will be an intense opener. These three together are an incredible bill and its a tour that shouldn’t be missed.
Tickets are available for purchase here starting at $39. Doors are at 6pm with music starting at 7pm.
Gojira bend extremes to their whim, emerging as an entrancing enigma equally driven by intuition and intensity. Balancing metallic proficiency, primal grooves, and otherworldly melodies, the French quartet continue to facilitate heavy music’s progression into the future by burning down all boundaries. As such, they’ve unassumingly risen to the forefront of the genre as quiet trailblazers. Thus far, they’ve earned three GRAMMY® Award nominations and even claimed a coveted spot on Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time” with 2005’s landmark From Mars To Sirius. Their catalog spans groundbreaking records such as L’Enfant Sauvage [2012] and Magma [2016]. However, the band leveled up again with Fortitude in 2021. Upon release, it arrived at #1 on the Billboard Top Album Sales Chart and #1 on the Top Current Album Sales Chart as the week’s best-selling album in terms of pure sales. Simultaneously, it catapulted to #12 on the Billboard 200, marking a career high. “Amazonia” also garnered a GRAMMY® Award nod in the category of “Best Metal Performance.” Fortitude closed out 2021 on year-end lists from Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Consequence, and Paste and would be hailed as the “#1 Best Album of the Year” by Revolver and Metal Hammer. Along the way, they’ve headlined legendary venues such as Red Rocks Amphitheater and more. The group capped off 2022 by contributing the standalone single “Our Time Is Now” to EA’s NHL 2023. With restless creativity and infinite vision, Gojira always inspire thought, awaken passion, and incite catharsis as heavy music’s most unconventional, yet undeniable force.
GRAMMY® Award-winning band Mastodon have quietly evolved into one of the most influential, inimitable, and iconic rock bands of the modern era. Since emerging in 2000, the Atlanta quartet have defied both sonic and thematic boundaries with an uncategorizable, undeniable, and uncompromising vision unlike anything else in music. This vision manifested over the course of canonical albums such as Leviathan, which landed on Rolling Stone’s coveted The 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time. Following the seminal Crack The Skye [named one of the best albums of 2009 by Time Magazine], they earned three consecutive Top 10 debuts on the Billboard Top 200 with The Hunter [2011], Once More ‘Round the Sun [2014], and Emperor of Sand [2017]. Out of six career nominations, they received a GRAMMY® Award in the category of “Best Metal Performance” for “Sultan’s Curse.” They are the rare creative force whose music can be felt everywhere from Game of Thrones, Adult Swim, The History Channel, and DC Comics films to international music festivals such as Coachella and Bonnaroo. They notably supported the Hirschberg Foundation For Pancreatic Cancer Research with a rendition of “Stairway To Heaven” in honor of late manager Nick John. The group reached another critical high watermark via their ninth full-length, Hushed and Grim. Featuring the GRAMMY® Award-nominated “Pushing The Tides,” it marked the band’s third straight #1 bow on the Billboard Hard Rock Albums Chart. It concluded 2021 on over a dozen year-end lists with Rolling Stone raving, “we get everything from some of the band’s hookiest rockers to date to some of their most awe-inspiring epics.” Evolving as they usher rock into new realms, they forever remain the same unpredictable trailblazing beast—Mastodon.
The New Jersey quintet, LORNA SHORE, has returned and upped their sonic ante with new album, Pain Remains. “It feels like a rebirth of everything for us – the energy, the band, the morale,” says drummer Austin Archey. When the band decamped to Michigan’s Random Awesome Studios with producer Josh Schroeder in the Fall of 2021, LORNA SHORE was on a creative and personal high that carried them through five weeks of hard work and intense creativity. “This was the hardest record that we’ve ever had to write,” says guitarist Adam De Micco. “The title came out when I was writing the album,” recalls Adam. “I had a lot going on personally. A lot of loss – and that came out in the songwriting.” Nothing makes that more apparent than the three-part album-shuttering opus, “Pain Remains” that stretches over 20 minutes, bludgeoning the listener with a sense of scale and raw emotion with Will venting over a tidal of cascading riffs, animalistic growls and swelling synths. “I always wanted to write a really sad death metal song, a deathcore love song,” says vocalist Will Ramos. “When I first heard the music, it had so much emotion – have you ever fallen in love in a dream and woken up and realized that none of it was real? It’s about chasing that emotion.”
Pain Remains is the sound of a band breaking out of any sort of categorization and stepping into their own as a great extreme metal band. From the opening choral chants and orchestration (composed by guitarist Andrew O’Connor) of “Welcome Back, O’ Sleeping Dreamer” straight into labyrinth of musical twists, turns, technicalities and raw emotion at the core of tracks like “Sun//Eater” or “Soulless Existence”, LORNA SHORE has woven together a sprawling document of ambition, soul and ability that few can match. Clocking in at just over an hour, Pain Remains is as far-reaching in scope as any modern extreme metal album. It thinks big, pushing beyond preconception or musical boundaries. “That’s been the idea and the vision for the band for years,” states Adam. “We’ve never wanted to be limited or meet someone’s expectations of what we’re supposed to be.”
With Pain Remains, LORNA SHORE has truly arrived.
