June 11, 2025 @ The Central Saloon, Seattle, WA
w/ karōshi, laminate, and n3ster

The first time I saw So Pitted wasn’t in a bar or a club. It was at a CrossFit studio in Des Moines during a city-wide power outage, the whole place lit by a single generator and a few stubborn bulbs. Outside, the city was silent; inside, the band erupted in chaos. It felt like the only thing happening in the world, a moment built entirely out of noise and nerve.

I didn’t realize how familiar that feeling would be again, years later in Seattle.

June 11th, 2025, carried that same tension in the air. A shooting blocks away had cleared out only hours earlier, and the surrounding area hummed with that uneasy quiet that follows bad news. By the time I found parking near the Central Saloon, the streets were mostly empty, still holding their breath.

Inside, the night snapped back to life. The Central has kept Seattle loud for more than a century, and it still feels like the heart that keeps beating when everything outside slows down. The walls are lined with ghosts, the bar hums like a tube amp, and even on tense nights the city’s pulse runs through that stage.

n3ster opened with a set that hit quick and clean, noisy and direct, the perfect jolt to reset the room. Laminate followed, sharper and more deliberate, keeping the crowd upright and ready for whatever came next.

Next karōshi stepped up, dressed as their headlining counterparts in a tongue-in-cheek homage that managed to be both funny and reverent. Their excellent release, “spoils, consequence + charity” (seriously, go listen to sunflowers at high volume and tell me you’re not ready to take on the world) was still months away, but the set felt like a perfect preview. Heavy, sharp, and tailor-made for rooms like this.

Then came So Pitted.

As it always does whenever I’m lucky enough to see them, that first show flashed in my mind the moment they started. That familiar generator-powered electricity filled the room — that sense of being surrounded by sound while the rest of the world sat in darkness. Their music was still a tangle of distortion and tension, half doom and half celebration. It’s cathartic and confrontational at once, as if they’re daring you to find melody inside collapse.

By the time they finished, the crowd spilled into a city that suddenly felt off balance. While we’d been shoulder to shoulder inside the Central, an anti-ICE protest had erupted a few blocks away at the federal building. Dumpsters were burning, flags had been pulled from poles, and police fired pepper balls to clear the streets. None of it reached us inside, but the evidence waited just beyond the doors.

When I finally stepped outside, the sirens were fading and the streets were littered with the night’s remains; ash across the pavement, shattered glass near the curbs, traffic cones tipped into the gutter. The air still smelled of burned plastic.

Driving towards the I-5 on-ramp felt like passing through someone else’s dream. The streets were stripped of people but not of noise that still seemed to echo in the air. As I eased past a single smoldering dumpster in the middle of the road, it felt eerie and exhilarating all at once. The streets were still vibrating from the chaos of the day and a show that mirrored it perfectly.

Darkness outside, chaos inside, and beauty hiding somewhere in between.