1720 Doesn’t Gatekeep
Two shows landed on 1720’s calendar this week, both flagged “Just Announced,” and together they say more about Downtown LA’s heaviest little room than either does alone. On Sunday, September 13, Non Servium makes a rare US stop in the warehouse district. They’re the Brutal Oi! institution out of Móstoles, Spain. Four weeks later, on Saturday, October 10, 100 Demons bring two decades of Connecticut beatdown to the same floor. One room. One fall. Two bands almost nobody on this coast is writing about.
1720 sits in the DTLA warehouse zone, part of the same underground corridor as First Street Pool in Boyle Heights and the Moroccan Lounge a few blocks over. These are the rooms where the heavy stuff actually happens in this city. The big metal outlets scroll right past these bookings because there’s no press release attached and no arena math to run. That’s exactly why they matter. Watch what a venue books when nobody’s grading it, and you learn what a scene actually wants.
100 Demons are the metal anchor here, and the timing is the whole point. The Waterbury, Connecticut band took their name from a book of Horiyoshi III tattoo art. They built their reputation on In the Eyes of the Lord (2000) and the self-titled 2004 record on Deathwish, a beatdown touchstone that aged into cult status. Then they went quiet for over twenty years. This June they broke that silence with Embrace the Black Light on Closed Casket Activities, their first full-length in two decades, with Sean Martin back in the lineup. VICE put it bluntly: the beatdown boys are back. The October 10 date isn’t a nostalgia lap. It’s a band touring a record that has no business being this good this late.
Non Servium are the other half of the story, and I’m not going to pretend they’re a metal band. They’re not. They’ve spent since 1997 building one of Europe’s biggest street-punk followings on what they call Brutal Oi!, antifascist and working-class to the bone, from Orgullo Obrero in 1999 through last year’s Criatura. They packed Madrid’s Movistar Arena in October. You won’t find them on Metal Archives, and that’s fine. What matters is that a band that fills an arena at home is playing a warehouse room in DTLA, and that 1720 booked them at all. The corridor doesn’t check your subgenre at the door.
That’s the real headline. Not either band on its own, but a room that books a beatdown reunion two decades in the making and a rare US Brutal Oi stop in the same six weeks, then trusts the people who show up to sort it out. The big publications will cover neither. We’re covering both. Pay attention to 1720 this fall. It’s telling you exactly what LA heavy music is when no one’s watching.