Kowloon Walled City

alternative rock · rock · post-punk

Kowloon Walled City is a noise rock band from Oakland, California, working in a heavy, deliberately unadorned style that also draws on sludge metal and post-hardcore. The lineup is Scott Evans on guitar and vocals, Jon Howell on guitar, Ian Miller on bass and Dan Sneddon on drums. Evans is also the band's engineer, recording its albums himself at Sharkbite Studios and his own Antisleep Audio in Oakland, with Carl Saff handling mastering, an arrangement that has given the catalogue a consistent dry, close-miked sound across nearly two decades. The band's records are Turk Street in 2008, Gambling on the Richter Scale in 2009, Container Ships in 2012 on Brutal Panda Records, Grievances in 2015 on Neurot Recordings and the seven-track Piecework in October 2021, issued jointly by Neurot Recordings and Gilead Media after a six-year gap. The catalogue also includes a split seven-inch with Batillus, a three-way split with Shallow North Dakota and KEN Mode, and the earlier Lose/Lose/Lose release. Song titles and artwork have repeatedly turned on work and dispossession: Turk Street takes its name from a San Francisco Tenderloin street, and Grievances is packaged with Lewis Hine's Library of Congress child-labour photographs. The band has toured with Neurosis, Yob, Metz, Jaye Jayle and Sumac, and its 2026 schedule includes two weeks in Europe and the United Kingdom around the Roadburn festival, a first visit to many of those cities, plus Ghost Canyon Fest in Denver and a midwest and northeast run taking in rooms such as MilkBoy in Philadelphia.

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