The Corridor Is a Ladder
Pain of Truth headline The Regent Theater on November 5 with Killing Time, Missing Link, and Mizery. Tickets go on sale Friday. Five months after that, on April 5, 2027, 1720 hosts Gutalax. Those two bookings are the whole argument here, so here it is up front: the DTLA underground is not where bands get stuck. It is the first rung.
The corridor WKM covers is First Street Pool in Boyle Heights, 1720 and the Moroccan Lounge in DTLA, and lately Teragram. 1720 is a 700 capacity warehouse room in the produce district. The Regent is an 1,100 capacity theater on South Main with a sloped floor and a Ticketmaster feed, which on paper puts it a tier above everything else on that list. Under two miles separate them, and the same promoters are working both. SOS Booking has Pain of Truth at the Regent in November and Set Your Goals there in December. SOS also has 100 Demons at 1720 on October 10.
On May 7, Pain of Truth played 1720 as support for Terror, with End It opening, and it sold out. Six months later they are the headliner in a room with 400 more bodies in it, and the reason is not mysterious. Not Through Blood (2023, DAZE) put them in the conversation, and the self titled record landing September 25 with Will Putney behind the board is the swing at everything above it. What makes the November bill worth writing about is who is opening. Killing Time have been a New York hardcore institution since they were called Raw Deal, and Brightside came out on In-Effect in 1989. A band with a canon record is playing direct support for a band that formed in 2020.
Gutalax is the other half of this. They formed in Křemže in 2009, they play goregrind, and their album titles are exactly what you think they are. Shit Beast (2011), Shit Happens! (2015), and The Shitpendables (2021) do not read like the discography of a band with live albums from Brutal Assault and Bloodstock, but that is what they have. April 5 is the last confirmed date on 1720’s calendar, nearly four months past anything else on it. A room does not hang a Czech goregrind band out there as its furthest booking unless it knows exactly who walks through its door.
I am not going to pretend these are the same size of deal. One is a hardcore band cashing a check it earned in a smaller room down the street. The other is a gross-out act with a genuine festival résumé playing to whoever 1720 can round up on a Monday night in 2027. What they share is a booker who looked at this stretch of DTLA and decided it could carry both. Nobody at the bigger metal sites will connect those two dots, because connecting them means reading a venue calendar instead of a press release. That is the entire job.
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