Since the beginning of time(ish), mankind has attempted to find the perfect balance of rap and rock. Run DMC were some of the pioneers when it came to the concept of combining the genres, but they were doing it way before they invited Aerosmith to join them (hell, both 'Rock Box' and 'King of Rock' have the word 'rock' in their titles).
Through the 80's and 90's, it looked like we were starting to perfect the mix. Beastie Boys started out as a hardcore band and has those fingerprints all over their early work. Kerry King of Slayer played on a handful of Licensed to Ill tracks. Public Enemy teamed up with Anthrax, the kind of heavy escalation that more than paved the way for Ice-T to do the same with Body Count. The movement peaked in 1993 with the release of the Judgement Night soundtrack.
From there, things went mainstream. Rage Against the Machine carried the torch in the mid- to late 90's. Korn, who were dabbling in hip-hop samples themselves, joined Ice Cube on the extremely successful Family Values tour in 1998. Linkin Park and Papa Roach pushed the boundaries of the sound, leaning into rap-style lyrics over heavy guitars.
But like every popular trend that enters pop culture, imitators and knockoffs soon flooded the market, ranging from pretty bad to aggressively terrible. Yes, the 2000s gave us the SUPERB mashup of Jay-Z and Linkin Park's Collision Course LP, but it also gave us 'Butterfly' by Crazy Town. And Limp Bizkit. And Kid Rock pre-country. Then we started calling it "nu-metal." Hed PE and Powerman 5000 were about the time when we decided as a society to maybe just put a lid on this rap/rock thing for the time being.
Like all great ideas, we could only stifle the desire to combine rap and rock for so long. And by letting things grow organically, we saw some promising signs. Rico Nasty brings a specific metal/punk energy to modern rap. Death Grips and clipping are also doing trailblazing work in bringing both genres' modern sounds together. The rise of Travis Barker and Machine Gun Kelly shows that there's even an appetite for rap and pop punk to cross over, as bizarre as that might have sounded just a decade ago. Even the crowds at modern rap shows can rival the moshing and crowdsurfing of even the hardest of hardcore shows.
It's at that very intersection of modern rap and hardcore where we find "Hive Mind," the collaboration between Knocked Loose and Denzel Curry.
This song delivers a sonic punch in the face, as all Knocked Loose songs do, but it kicks up to an entirely unthinkable level at the 1:50 mark when Denzel Curry jumps in like a machine gun and tears the roof off. THIS is the best way to mix rap and rock in 2026. It only makes sense to bring this sermon to the masses on the Hive Mind Tour with support from Superheaven and Boundaries.
Even when it comes to rock, this tour made sure to cover a range of different tastes. When you have a crowd made up of people with such potentially different interests, it's important to start with something familiar, which is where the hardcore stylings of Boundaries kicked things off. Once the pit was nice and warm, Superheaven played through a pretty steady rain to make sure everyone had a chance to catch their breath. Leaning more into the grungey/shoegazey sound of the 90s than the hardcore or rap from the other acts on the bill, having that bit of a palate cleanser and a chance to gather yourself and prepare your body for the chaos to come was a much appreciated respite.
Maybe we just needed someone who knew how to bring together the best parts of both genres to really get this rap/rock revival kicking in the mid-2020s. After Denzel Curry's set at the Salt Shed this week, it's hard to deny that he may be the very person to lead the way. If you needed any proof that Curry understands both sides of the rap/rock equation, his setlist was basically a thesis statement: Sixteen songs, a pile of them with rock and punk DNA right there in the title ('BLACK FLAG FREESTYLE' leading the charge), and a crowd ready to slam bodies into each other on one half of the pit and drop it low and twerk on the other (possibly the most impressive genre combo of the evening). There's a version of this tour where Curry is kept at arm's length and politely tolerated to get to the upcoming main course. That is not the version we got, as people were slam dancing and raging from the very first notes of "SKED." "HIT THE FLOOR" got exactly the reaction you'd expect from 5,000 rain-soaked mothers that heard the title as an order rather than a suggestion. The aforementioned "BLACK FLAG FREESTYLE" and "CLOUT COBAIN | CLOUT CO13A1N" have definite punk influences. By the time Curry performed "SUMO | ZUMO" and "STILL IN THE PAINT," the pit was running on its own momentum like one of those bizarre ant death spirals.
Then came the closer: a mashup of Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" and "Bulls on Parade." Remember how I mentioned Rage carrying the torch through the 90's (I hope so because it was less than 1,000 words ago)? Well, here it was, carried by a guy who was just learning to walk when Evil Empire came out. It's one thing to pay homage to the classic songs; however, Curry was somehow not only able to combine the two in a satisfying way but also made the performance all his own using his own specific cadence rather than attempting a Zach de la Rocha impression.
Almost three years ago, I reviewed Knocked Loose when they came to Chicago in support of Motionless in White. In that time, the band had somehow stepped up their already impressive and insane game with a grueling tour schedule that had them headlining their own shows and moonlighting as the opener for some little-known up-and-coming thrash metal band called Metallica. All that time on the road has made them sound heavier, urgent, and more relentless than ever.
Let's be honest: they didn't need to do anything fancy to justify the price of admission. They could have walked out, played eighteen songs, and gone home, and we would have all gone home happy and aching. Instead, the band that has spent the last few years proving that hardcore can sell out rooms this size put together a set that understood exactly what kind of night it was. The stage was flanked by creepy leafless trees with a massive glowing cross towering over the entire performance like we were all witnesses to some apocalyptic midnight mass in the woods.
Their opening run of "Deep in the Willow," "Everything Is Quiet Now," and "Don't Reach for Me" sets the tone immediately, and I use tone in the same way you'd say a dump truck sets a tone when it backs into your living room. Lead singer Bryan Garris' voice has evolved from the high-pitched 'ARF ARF' the band was known for in years past into an actual weapon he can wield onstage, obliterating anyone standing anywhere near a monitor. From there it was a bruising, relentless trip through the catalog, with "Billy No Mates," "Where Light Divides the Holler," and "Blinding Faith" keeping the floor in constant motion. As the rain let up and eventually stopped entirely, the pit took that as a sign to get even more feral, with the band matching and exceeding that intensity from the stage the entire way.
And then, near the end, 'Hive Mind' arrived like a goddamn warhead detonating. A song that sounds like a collision on record is somehow even more of one live, with two entirely different performance styles locked into the same engine.
The rest of the night was a victory lap, but a deceptive one. "Suffocate" and "Counting Worms" closed out the main set the way a hardcore show is supposed to end, except it wasn't over. Earlier in the night, the band had played "Everything Is Quiet Now" only up to the breakdown before cutting it off, leaving the room hanging. It turns out they were saving the rest of it like the last bite of a particularly exquisite dessert. After "Counting Worms," the band kicked back into the '...Quiet Now' breakdown with the requisite wall of death in tow. I've seen a lot of calculated stage theatrics over the years, and very few of them match the sheer sadism of making a crowd wait an hour and a half to hit the breakdown of a hardcore song.
For decades, "rap and rock together" was shorthand for a very specific kind of cringe. It meant wallet chains. It meant somebody's ill-advised red baseball cap (hey, some things never change!). It meant a genre that took the best ideas of two different cultures and mostly made them worse. And for a lot of us (hi, it's me; I was in college for all of it), it was easy to assume the whole thing was a failed experiment we'd all agree to never to discuss again.
What makes the Hive Mind Tour work isn't the novelty of the pairing like we got from rap/rock through most of the 2000s. It was that everybody on stage clearly understood both sides of it. Denzel Curry didn't wander into hardcore as a gimmick; he's been circling it with a respect that shows up in his song titles and general energy. Knocked Loose didn't need a rapper as a novelty for their tour. They just recognized that the right guest makes the heavy hit harder regardless of genre. And when a rapper closes his set with Rage Against the Machine in a monsoon that was about 90 away from a wall of death, the circle that started with 'Rock Box' finally feels closed.
So the next time someone tells you that rap and rock don't mix, you have my permission to throw your entire body into them as hard as you think is appropriate. Let them know you picked that one up at the rap/rock show. Just don't forget to pick them back up. You always pick someone in the pit up if they fall down, no matter what genre.
The Hive Mind tour continues through the first week of November. Dates and tickets can be found here.
