Fleshwater and Chat Pile at The Fonda. October 11, 2025. Doors at 7:00, show at 8:00. Knowing full well that on-time arrival was going to translate to late arrival, I dipped directly from work for The Fonda without going home to change into something more camouflaged for the occasion. Whenever I arrive at the function, I’m always immediately clocking what everyone lined up down the block is wearing. Among the standard all black outfits and LA’s current favorite branded workwear I notice a series of band tees – Turnstile, Bauhaus, and Pig Destroyer logos and graphics featured on the chests and shoulders of the queue forming along the Walk of Fame. Before the algorithm, your best bet for ‘suggested artists’ would be the merch of the other people at the show. The aforementioned time crunch between the end of my day job and the door call at 7:00 PM now has me in a cardigan, long floral skirt and heels in the foyer of the venue – now both feeling awkwardly overdressed and freezing cold under the blasting AC vents, an effort to combat the anticipated body heat from an active packed house.
Words by Aria Silva-Espinosa
Photos by Evan Moses
The interior of The Fonda is wallpapered with scenes from Hieronymus Bosch paintings with anthropomorphic demons and playful beasts looming over the main ballroom which is a tryptic dancefloor with two slightly raised platforms to the side and a broad seated balcony overhead. I take my time wandering through the venue, trying to generate blood flow and I watch as the merch line slowly climbs up the stairs and across the balcony. The anxiety of going to the show alone is waning now as the house music fades. I take a mental snapshot of the last guy in the merch line so I can time his passage through the queue – my guess is that he will likely miss the full first set.
I decided to take my chances with the Balmora mosh pit to watch from the center floor area. After only playing together for about 3 years, Balmora is already established and respected in the scene. Their sound is what happens when hardcore purists get together and experiment with melodic death metal – a sound reminiscent of the early 2000’s metalcore wave that saw so much popularity online with the Myspace era. Drawing influence from bands like Atreyu and Prayer For Cleansing, Balmora’s double bass breakdowns and emphatic vocals stir the crowd to form pits in front of the stage. It’s always comforting to see a healthy mosh pit at a show in the post-covid era. I think a part of me was worried that hardcore dancing and proper moshing would become a lost art form as we seem to be in the dark ages of concert etiquette. Happy to report that my fears have been assuaged for the time being.
New England hardcore is a proud microcosm of an already niche genre and the legacy is carried forward to new audiences and generations by bands like Balmora that stay true to the core thematic elements and values of its predecessors in the scene. It’s a distinct genre blend and unique sound that has remained relatively unchanged over the past few decades. Just because Balmora’s sound isn’t exactly new to me doesn’t mean the performance isn’t fully holding my attention. It doesn’t make me feel old to be hiding in the back of the venue watching a set you could easily convince me I’d seen before.
It’s actually refreshingly nostalgic, warm and familiar to a younger version of myself. The sentiments are the same, the world is just a little different now. As the sociopolitical and economic atmosphere of today closely mirrors that of the early 2000’s, so too do the cultural planes converge. The next few years will be marked with a resurgence of hard alternative genres of music. Balmora delivers hardcore the way it was intended to be received. It’s a hard, revving engine to start the evening off.
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At this point, I check in on my guy in the merch line and although he’s missed Balmora’s set, he’s finally just a few spots away from inevitably finding out that they don’t have the shirt he wanted in his size – wouldn’t it be ironic if it was for the band he missed while waiting in the merch line? At this point in the evening, the venue is about 60% full and admittedly I’m not entirely sure where the purple Fonda wristband I’ve been given permits me to go, so I head for the balcony and hug the banister so I can have a clear view of the pit and stage down the aisle stairs.
The best way I can describe Chat Pile is as a physical manifestation of my own (and what I can only assume of others) internal monologue on your absolute worst day. I’m fully aware that this doesn’t sound appealing and honestly, it’s not. And that’s 100% the point, I’m convinced that’s the intention behind the art. Opening with their song Why was about as poignantly intentional as it gets for an LA crowd as the lyrics ask the questions: “Why do people have to live outside?//In the brutal heat or when it’s below freezing when there are buildings around us with heat on and no one inside. // In tents and under bridges, living with nothing & horribly suffering.”
The delivery style seems so manic and erratic but is totally coherent, the message is almost quoting verbatim my exact thought process this evening as I walked through Hollywood on my way to this very venue. Literally anyone who is from or frequents any major city in America has essentially had this exact same thought process, perhaps with increasing frequency. I’m sure the streets of the band’s native Oklahoma City bear striking resemblance to the parts of LA that immediately come to mind when listening to these lyrics. The sentiment is both timely and timeless, unfortunately. The same manic desperation and bewilderment with which I ask myself the same question is mirrored back in Chat Pile’s performance.
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As the sludge-metal genre dictates (if that’s where Chat Pile fits), Chat Pile’s music is centered around the same themes of addiction, depression and overall malaise as other heavy genre bands but there’s a unique depravity to the testimony that makes it expressly engaging. Vocalist Raygun Busch started the set barefoot and now less than two songs in, he’s now shirtless as well – a gesture that wouldn’t otherwise seem as unhinged as it does in the context of the music.
In contrast to the serious subject matter at hand, Busch shared scattered movie trivia throughout his set, even initially dedicating the show to the late Michelle Trachenberg of Harriet The Spy fame. Chat Pile was inherently the most politically outspoken band on the bill this evening, in keeping with the confrontational nature of their music. I’m never going to ignore a soapbox rant that I’m 100% in agreement with and in fact it’s nice to not be delivering said rant myself for once and “Angry White Guy Yelling” is always going to be one of my all-time favorite music genres.
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The venue is now entirely devoid of airflow and I’m now wishing I hadn’t taken the climate control for granted before the masses arrived. Fleshwater’s stage is set with stationary white swans suspended from invisible wires and a massive windmill that rises from the center of the stage, the swan imagery a nod to the album artwork for this latest release “2000: In Search Of The Endless Sky”. Only when the lights come up and the set begins do the blades begin to rotate ever so slowly as if along with the seething, bittersweet opening number. The obvious yet respectfully interpreted Deftones influence is immediately apparent with Fleshwater’s music. True to their name, the sound has both the soft warmth of flesh and the dynamic fluidity of water. Bold, emotive vocals over grungy metallic instrumentals – their style on this recent album leans much further in the shoegaze direction than anything Fleshwater has previously released.
It didn’t surprise me to learn retroactively that Fleshwater had opened for The Mars Volta and Deftones on their 2025 North America tour which concluded in April of this year. This undoubtedly contributed to their rising popularity but it isn’t as if Fleshwater is an overnight success. The band’s 2019 acquisition of vocalist Marisa Shirar started to generate streams in the millions on Spotify alone.
The lack of supplemental information on Fleshwater available online is actually wild. Consequence had featured the single Jetpack off this newest album as their “Heavy Song of the Week” in early August of this year but aside from that gentle nod, Freshwater isn’t seeing the appreciation not only deserved but that I expected. Yes, I went to the Reddit page and read the comments which is a place where people shit all over everything you’ve ever liked. The comments were largely unoriginal, some supportive and reverent but it seemed like the original poster and several commenters just “fundamentally don’t get it” in their own words. But what is there to “get”? The original poster did mention touring with Deftones in the post asking others to “explain Fleshwater” to him, clearly OP is familiar with said genre predecessor. The most obvious answer as to why Fleshwater is being poorly received online solely when pitted against Deftones is because there is a female vocalist while failing to recognize and respect the full spectrum of influence being integrated into their songwriting. Nobody’s trying to dethrone your king, guys. Chino Moreno is safe for now!
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There’s a breadth of literature, testimony and evidence to say that the heavier music has lent itself to some sexist ideologies in the past, the residual effects of which are still apparent. It’s a strange dichotomy being presented to women like Marisa Shirar, who have a right to occupy space in this traditionally masculine genre – is she not good enough to deserve the recognition of those you respect or is she so good that she presents a threat to those you respect? It’s impossible to compare when those in comparison don’t compete and personally I love to see women excel in male-dominated fields.
To further dispel criticism, I think the unimpressed parties are completely glossing over the clear and pervasive shoegaze element to a lot of Fleshwater’s music. Bands like Slowdive and Cocteau Twins had female vocals over heavy rock instrumentals and those are arguably THE bands that come to mind immediately when shoegaze is the topic of discussion. Especially on this newest album, “Endless Sky”, experimentation and exploration into other subgenres and styles adds a newly realized facet to Fleshwater’s discography and makes for an absolute banger live show. It’s actually tragic that nobody’s stepping up to champion this new era of Fleshwater the way I want to, even before bearing witness to the live show. Absolutely no way some gross Redditor should be holding real estate on the first page of Google results when searching Fleshwater, we absolutely cannot let them win.
Words by Aria Silva-Espinosa
Photos by Evan Moses
