1720 Is Quietly Having a Summer
1720 has two bookings this summer that are worth your attention. Devourment plays the warehouse on June 20th and 21st — two nights, which tells you something about the demand for Dallas slam death metal in LA. Then in August, Whiplash closes out the summer on the 28th, fresh off their first new album in seventeen years. No one else is writing about either of these shows.
1720 sits in the warehouse district east of downtown, a 700-capacity room that books the kind of underground and extreme metal the bigger LA venues won’t touch. It’s part of a small cluster of rooms — the Moroccan Lounge in the Arts District, First Street Pool in Boyle Heights — that make up the LA underground metal corridor. Mainstream metal press doesn’t cover this geography. That’s the gap WKM exists to fill.
Devourment formed in Dallas in 1995, and their 1999 debut Molesting the Decapitated is one of the records that essentially invented slam death metal as a genre. The breakdowns, the gutturals, the absolute refusal to be anything other than exactly what it is — that record set the template. They’re currently on Relapse Records, and their most recent full-length, Obscene Majesty (2019), is the kind of album that reminds you the band hasn’t softened. A two-night run at 1720 is not standard touring behavior for a band of their caliber — pay attention to that detail.
Whiplash has been a thrash metal institution since 1984. Power and Pain came out on Roadrunner in 1986 — the same year Joe Cangelosi briefly left to fill in on Slayer’s tour — and it still holds up as one of the more underrated documents of East Coast thrash. The band spent most of the 2010s dormant, but they came back this year with Thrashquake (2026), their first new record in seventeen years, released off the back of a European run supporting Napalm Death. That context matters. They’re not coasting on legacy — they’re touring behind new material in a room that fits them perfectly.
If you’re paying attention to what gets booked in that warehouse, you already know. And if you’re not, these two shows are where you start.