San Diego Riots for Knocked Loose, Billy Howerdel Sells His A Perfect Circle Soul, and California's NWOTHM Faithful Get Their Dues
Petco Park has hosted no-hitters, walk-off homers, and a World Series parade or two, but Halloween Eve gave San Diego's ballpark something it had never seen: a hardcore pit opening up behind home plate. Kentucky's Knocked Loose brought Florida rapper Denzel Curry out for a joint stadium run, and the resulting photo sets from the stop have been circulating all week, full of stage dives, crowd surges, and a genuinely unhinged amount of energy for a weeknight show in a 40,000-seat venue. It's the kind of booking that would have seemed absurd a decade ago — hardcore and hip-hop sharing a bill at a Major League Baseball stadium — but it's also exactly the kind of genre-blurring chaos that's defined 2025's biggest tours. San Diego's been quietly one of the most important stops on any hardcore or metalcore run for years now, and a Halloween weekend riot at Petco Park only cements that reputation further.
Billy Howerdel Is Selling Off His Own History
Meanwhile, up the coast in Los Angeles, A Perfect Circle guitarist and founder Billy Howerdel is doing something that feels almost unthinkable for a working musician: cleaning out the vault. Howerdel has partnered with ANALOGr for an auction featuring more than 120 pieces of gear, memorabilia, and rare collectibles pulled from across his career and the band's history — including guitars used during the recording of Thirteenth Step and instruments from A Perfect Circle's very first tour. This isn't a roadside estate sale of tour merch; this is the actual hardware that shaped one of California's defining alt-metal records, now available to whichever fan or collector is willing to pay for a piece of it.
There's something fitting about a Los Angeles band's history being auctioned off piece by piece in public, open to anyone with a bid number rather than locked away in a private collection. A Perfect Circle formed in the Southern California orbit that also produced Tool, and Howerdel's fingerprints are all over the moodier, more atmospheric corner of the state's metal lineage. For collectors and tone-chasers alike, this auction is as close as most of us will ever get to actually holding the instruments that built Thirteenth Step. It's also a reminder of how much unofficial archival material sits in musicians' garages and storage units across California — gear with real recorded history that rarely sees daylight until a moment like this.
Stryper Gets the Dad-Rock Treatment, and NWOTHM Finally Gets Its Flowers
Over at MetalSucks, the recurring Disgrunted Dad Reviews column turned its attention to Orange County's own Stryper and their record Throne of Thorns, framing the whole thing as — in the writer's words — "a religious experience." It's a funny bit, but it's also a useful excuse to talk about something the California scene doesn't get enough credit for: this state basically invented an entire lane of heavy metal that's still thriving forty-plus years later. Stryper came out of the Southern California glam-and-leather scene of the early '80s and turned it into something genuinely strange — yellow-and-black spandex, Bibles thrown into crowds, and riffs that held their own against anything else coming out of the Sunset Strip at the time. They're still one of the most recognizable names to come out of that era, and Throne of Thorns is proof the band has no interest in coasting on nostalgia.
That matters right now because the New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal revival has made bands like Stryper relevant to a whole new generation of listeners who are discovering 80s metal bands through streaming playlists rather than cassette tapes. California's NWOTHM underground is deep and criminally under-covered — bands like Armored Saint have been flying that flag since the Reagan administration, and newer acts like TriggerEffect and Spectra are carrying the tradition forward with their own takes on classic heavy metal songwriting. Even a band literally named Halloween fits snugly into that lineage, proof that California's appetite for riff-first, no-apologies heavy metal never really went away — it just went underground for a while. If you're building a list of the best metal bands this state has ever produced, you cannot leave the NWOTHM scene off of it, and you definitely can't leave Stryper off a list of the best heavy metal songs to come out of Orange County.
Marilyn Manson, Chapter Two, and the Industrial Metal Hangover
The same MetalSucks column also took aim at Marilyn Manson's One Assassination Under God — Chapter 2, and the review did not pull punches, to put it mildly. Manson remains one of the most polarizing figures to come out of California's industrial and alternative metal scene, a guy whose career has been as much about controversy as it has been about music for the better part of three decades. Whatever your opinion on the man, his early catalog is inseparable from the story of California shock rock and industrial metal, and it's impossible to talk about the lineage that runs through Christian Death's deathrock theatrics or Faith No More's genre-smashing alt-metal without acknowledging how much Manson borrowed, remixed, and repackaged for mass consumption in the '90s. Dad-rock reviews aside, the fact that people are still arguing about a new Manson chapter in 2025 says something about how sticky his cultural footprint remains, for better or worse.
Halloween Covers Keep Coming, and So Does the Spooky Season Hangover
Rounding out the holiday-weekend coverage, two separate Slipknot cover performances made the rounds this week — one from Paleface Swiss, another from Nene Royal tackling "Psychosocial" — both proof that Slipknot remains the default costume-and-cover-song template for Halloween in heavy music circles, year after year. It's a reminder that tribute culture isn't a lesser form of metal fandom; it's often the on-ramp. Kids who discover metal through a Halloween cover video end up three years later in a pit at a local show, and eventually in a band of their own. California's all-ages and DIY circuits depend on exactly that pipeline, whether it's a bedroom cover of a nu-metal classic or a teenager picking up a guitar after watching Rob Zombie's new "Sir Lord Acid Wolfman" video drop right on schedule for the holiday weekend.
What This Means for the Ground Floor
None of this — not the Petco Park riot, not Howerdel's auction, not the dueling dad-rock reviews — happens in a vacuum from the local club scene. California's metal infrastructure, from San Diego's all-ages hardcore rooms to the backline shops that probably sold some of the gear now sitting in Howerdel's auction catalog, is what makes stories like these possible in the first place. The state remains one of the most important proving grounds in the country for new metal bands in 2026, and with major tours increasingly routing through California venues of every size, there's never been a better time to pay attention to what's happening locally rather than just waiting for the next arena package to roll through.
If you're trying to figure out which bands are actually touring in 2026 versus which ones are just teasing announcements, or you want to catch the next wave of California heavy metal before it blows up nationally, keep an eye on our upcoming shows listings — we're tracking everything from basement hardcore matinees to the bigger package tours making their way through the state. And if your band is grinding away in a practice space somewhere between Bakersfield and the border waiting for a shot at coverage, don't wait around — submit your band and let us know what you're working on. The next Petco Park moment starts somewhere smaller, and we want to be there for it.