The Devil Wears Prada | Fit for a King | Counterparts | Avoid 2/2/24 – Welcome to Indra

Tour: Metal Core Dropouts 2nd Semester

Venue: The Ritz Raleigh, NC

Holy Cow! In the 10 yrs I’ve been covering bands at The Ritz in Raleigh, I have never seen it this packed, hot and engaged. The fans were just overflowing with enthusiasm over their favorite bands.

Mike Hranica Lead vocalist for The Devil Wears Prada

Just one Mosh Pit? No way. Two or three were going throughout the night in addition to an avalanche of crowd surfers surging into, and sometimes thrown into the pit by the fans, fully engaging with the venue’s security, which handled the surfers gingerly and with tender loving care. My hat’s off to them!

All in good fun mind you. It’s a spectacle to behold when a couple thousand people are completely emotionally immersed in the music.

Thanks to the opening act Avoid, a five-piece hard rock/punk band absolutely whipping up the mayhem for the evening. What a great opener, but the crowd was so whipped up by the time the next in the line up, Counterpoint hit the stage, security had to push all the music photographers out of the pit because so many crowd surfers were flying in. A real bummer because we only had a few minutes to photograph this much loved hardcore band. Fortunately we had permission to photograph from the house after the pit debacle, so I managed to get a few more shots.

Next was Fit for a King which blew everything up a couple notches. Just a blistering Metal performance blowing the skin off the front row. One of my sub-categories in my collection of images is audience engagement, and I’ve never seen anything like this. Is the Triangle a hard rock town full of Metal heads? Evidence is beginning to prove this true. Encouraging, I must say in the wash of so much tepid, vanilla pop diluting the airwaves of late.

And finally The Devil Wears Prada hit the stage piercing a level of Metalcore unknown to humankind. The fans went nuts. Just an absolutely tremendous performance! Oh my goodness ladies and gentleman, this is a not-to-miss tour. You need to see it to believe it.

AVOID

Counterparts -The photographers were chased out of the pit for this one as the fans were crowd surfing into the pit overwhelming security. So I couldn’t get all the shots I needed.