Tickets available here: The Callous Daoboys | Norwich Box Office | UEA Ticket Bookings
A fearlessly free-spirited collective from Atlanta, Georgia, The Callous Daoboys revels in high-strung extremity, careening from furious metallic anarchy to unabashed rock 'n roll and back again. The band Kerrang! hails as “gloriously chaotic” is like a Molotov cocktail combining crazy mayhem and nü-metal with life-affirming glee, as each song deliriously swerves across stylistic lines. The Callous Daoboys conjure rebellious fury as if they’re summoning the dead. Sure, every band claims to blend heavy riffs with catchy melodies as if that’s somehow fresh by itself, but this crew delivers that with a wrecking ball of unrestrained frenzy and total mayhem. The band’s three full-length albums and various EPs loudly testify to their fearless creativity and clever craftsmanship.
The Callous Daoboys are frontman Carson Pace, possessed like a young Mike Patton; fretboard-abusing guitarists Maddie Caffrey and Daniel Hodsdon; frantic bassist Jackie Buckalew; destructive drummer Matthew Hague; and spirited violinist Amber Christman. Celebrated by SPIN, Fader, Revolver, Brooklyn Vegan, and New Noise (who praised the band as “innovative, unflinching,” and “brazen”), The Callous Daoboys have turned heads on raucous tours with TesseracT, Protest The Hero, and SeeYouSpaceCowboy, and at prestigious international metal festivals. Celebrity Therapist (2022) more than delivered on the promise of the band’s early rumblings, and I Don’t Want to See You in Heaven (2025) ups the ante on every conceivable level. “The reaction to Celebrity Therapist was incredible,” says Pace. “I can’t believe people get it and are on board. It’s far weirder than our first album and the new one. It’s just this strange little record. We gained a lot of fans who had no reference point for what we did, which was the goal.”
The thirteen songs on I Don’t Want to See You in Heaven form an exhibition in “The Museum of Failure,” envisioned by Pace as a hypothetical destination created hundreds of years in the future. The Museum of Failure serves as a monument to humankind’s “laughable attempts at greatness.” It’s not a concept album, however. Each track delves into different emotional states and anxieties. Musically, every side of the band is also explored, with dizzyingly venomous results. Songs like “Distracted by the Mona Lisa,” “Lemon,” “The Demon of Unreality Limping Like a Dog,” and “Two-Headed Trout” run the gamut between frenzied metalcore assault and rock n’ roll abandon. The album was produced by Dom Maduri (Silly Goose, GEL, Bummer Hill).
“We came up with him in the Atlanta scene. He’s one of my very good friends,” says Pace. Carson moved in for roughly a month while the rest of the band commuted back and forth to Maduri’s Toast & Jam Studio. “It was intense, man. It really made me hone in,” he says. “Dom was the best guy for the job. I’m so proud of how it turned out, and so impressed with him as a producer and mixer.” The group Kill Your Stereo called “insane, intricate, and impressive,” first introduced themselves to the underground with two EPs in 2017, followed by 2019’s Die On Mars. Metal Injection insisted the group’s riotously explosive debut “is gonna make you punch everyone ever in the face” (and absolutely meant it as a compliment).
Celebrity Therapist accumulated even more accolades. Invisible Oranges put it nicely, saluting the eclectic band’s savagery. “Rapid-fire tempo and time changes, leftfield genre swaps, and sardonic lyrics rendered through an absurd spread of vocal styles into [music] as compelling as it is challenging to process. Peer into the chaos to find The Callous Daoboys in full command of the intentional and precise cacophony they’ve created.”
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