Four Bands, Two Countries: The Hub's August 18 Trad-Metal Bill
- Randall Wilburn
- 3 days ago
- 13 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Space Vacation, Tower Hill, Adamantis and Hands of Goro brought four different interpretations of old-school heavy metal to an unlikely Peninsula stronghold on Tuesday, August 18. That night ,in downtown Redwood City, the distance between the Bay Area, the Canadian Prairies and Boston suddenly became very small...
On August 18, 2026, four bands—Space Vacation, Tower Hill, Adamantis and Hands of Goro—packed into The Hub RWC for a night that demonstrated just how healthy the underground traditional-metal world has become. Local veterans Space Vacation opened, Canadian traditional metallers Tower Hill followed, Boston power-metal band Adamantis took the third slot, and San Francisco trio Hands of Goro closed the evening.
It was an unusually international bill for a relatively small room in Redwood City—and exactly the kind of night that illustrates why venues like The Hub matter.
The Hub: Heavy Metal on the Peninsula
For decades, heavy music has survived as much through adaptable neighborhood rooms as through dedicated rock clubs. The Hub provides precisely that kind of environment: a relatively intimate venue where touring underground bands can share a stage with Bay Area acts without the machinery—or distance—of a major San Francisco concert hall.
The August 18 show made particularly good use of that intimacy. There was little separation between bands and audience, giving the evening the feeling of an underground metal gathering rather than a conventional concert production.
Poseurs Only Presents: Building the Show Behind the Show
The concert was promoted by Poseurs Only Presents, the booking operation associated with Elijah Post, drummer for Hayward thrash band Frolic. Post occupies an interesting position in the current Bay Area metal underground: he isn't simply a musician playing shows—he has also become part of the infrastructure that helps make those shows happen.
Frolic itself is firmly rooted in the modern Bay Area thrash scene. Formed in Hayward in 2014, the band has built its reputation through the traditional underground route of local shows, touring and support slots with established names. Since Post joined on drums in 2020, Frolic has shared stages with bands including Death Angel, Possessed, Forbidden, Suicidal Tendencies, Biohazard, Warbringer and Goatwhore.
That gives Post a perspective on booking that is different from that of an outside concert promoter. He understands the small-room metal show from behind the drum kit: the importance of compatible bills, workable venues, touring logistics and putting local bands in front of the right audience.
Poseurs Only Presents appears to be an extension of that involvement in the scene. Public event listings identify Poseurs Only Presents as the organizer of metal shows at The Hub RWC, including another four-band underground bill scheduled there for September 5, 2026 featuring Vesseles, Post Heaven, Eaten By Insects and Darandaz. That establishes that the August concert was not simply an isolated use of The Hub; Poseurs Only has been actively bringing heavy music into the Redwood City venue.
For The Hub, that relationship is significant. Redwood City sits between the much more visible metal centers of San Francisco/Oakland to the north and San Jose to the south. Regular underground bookings can give Peninsula fans a place to see touring metal without automatically making the trip into either of those larger scenes.
[ Check out the new Frolic album, Legacies of Cybernetica ]
Space Vacation: The Bay Area Veterans Launch the Night
Opening the show was Space Vacation, a San Francisco heavy-metal band that has spent well over a decade celebrating the sounds that first made metal fun: soaring vocals, twin guitars, memorable choruses and riffs designed as much for raised fists as headbanging.
The group's own history traces its beginnings to the late 2000s, positioning Space Vacation among the earlier American bands associated with the revival of traditional heavy metal that eventually became widely known as the New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal, or NWOTHM. Their stated influences include Judas Priest, Motörhead, Van Halen, AC/DC and Guns N' Roses, but Space Vacation have never sounded like simple historical re-enactors. Melody is central to what they do.
The current lineup listed by the band consists of Scott Shapiro on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Kiyoshi Morgan on guitar, Stephen Goodwin on bass and Carter Kennedy on drums. That lineup carries an impressive Bay Area pedigree: Morgan previously played in Vicious Rumors, Goodwin plays in SF's satanic metal band From Hell , while Kennedy was a member of San Francisco doom/psychedelic heavy-rock band Orchid.
Space Vacation's catalog now stretches across five full-length albums, from its self-titled debut through 2022's White Hot Reflection, released through Pure Steel Records.
In 2026, Space Vacation participated in the Wacken Metal Battle California circuit and continuing regional performances. That experience made Space Vacation an ideal opener, being an obvious Bay Area crowd drawer.
More importantly, putting a veteran local band first rather than treating the opening slot as disposable immediately established what the night was about: four bands sharing variations on essentially the same heavy-metal language.
Kiyoshi Morgan ripping on guitar SScott Sharpiro and Stephen Goodwin Scott Shapiro and Carter Kennedy Carter Kennedy multi-tasking Scott Shapiro on lead vocals and rhythm guitar Space Vacation rip opens the night
Space Vacation Setlist on Tuesday night:
Live by the Sword
Devil to Pay
Reign in Hell
Rolling Thunder
Iceberg
Keith’s Sister
Tower Hill: Swords Raised From the Canadian Prairies
Then came Tower Hill, bringing traditional heavy metal south from Edmonton, Alberta.
Tower Hill began in 2020 as a project created by vocalist R.F. Traynor, eventually growing into a full band. Their influences leave little ambiguity about their intentions: Running Wild, Riot, Stormwitch, Helloween and Judas Priest are among the names the band openly cites.
Their 2023 debut album, Deathstalker, taking its name from the 1983 sword-and-sorcery film, an appropriately low-budget fantasy world of warriors, magic and steel that fits remarkably well with the band's musical personality. It was released by Greece's No Remorse Records and was recorded and engineered by Jeremy Puffer and R.F. Traynor at B.T. Studios, with vocals recorded by Diego Fernandez at Oracle Studios. Fernandez also mixed the record, while Olof Wikstrand of Enforcer mastered it at Hvergelmer Studios. Its sword-and-sorcery imagery is not incidental: the band's visual identity, lyrics and music enthusiastically embrace the fantasy worlds that have been attached to heavy metal since the genre's formative decades. The album artwork was created by Andreas Marschall, whose extensive metal résumé includes work associated with Running Wild, Blind Guardian, HammerFall and Kreator.
The album lineup consists of Traynor on vocals, Chris Nunz and Jeremy Puffer on guitars, Cam Dakus on bass and Mitch Stykalo on drums .
More importantly, just a day before the Redwood City show, the Canadians announced that their second Tower Hill album is was finished, due spring 2027 and to be release through Nameless Grave Records. Traynor revealed in April 2026 that the next record will incorporate considerably more Canadian subject matter. Planned songs include one dealing with the wendigo, another inspired by touring across Canada and another centered on Louis Riel, the Métis leader whose conflicts with Canada's federal government culminated in the North-West Resistance of 1885. And, because this remains Tower Hill, Traynor also promised a song about a guy with a magical sword.
At The Hub, punctuated by R.F. Traynor's Rob Halford worthy high pitched screams, Tower Hill represented perhaps the purest expression of traditional metal on the bill: leather-and-steel music built around riffs, melody and unapologetic enthusiasm for the genre's mythology.
And an interesting aside, Adamantis founding drummer Evgeny Gromovoy pulled double duty at The Hub, stepping behind the kit for Tower Hill as well as performing with Adamantis. Tower Hill’s regular drummer, Mitchell Stykalo, did not perform with the Canadian band that evening. Tower Hill had this to say about Mitch's absence, "Mitch tore his achilles tendon a few weeks before the tour and was unable to join us because he is still recovering from surgery. Evgeny was able to learn our set in a few weeks and pulled double duty for all of our West Coast shows. He's a machine!"
For Fermented Metal, however, one Tower Hill song is particularly difficult to overlook...
During the closing song, Claw is the Law, R.F. Traynor downed and crushed what looked like a "White Claw' during the song, the crowd went nuts.
“The Claw Is the Law” turns drinking with friends into an unabashed heavy-metal anthem. Its imagery revolves around cracking cans, hitting the city and drinking through the night—a reminder that Tower Hill's universe isn't confined to ancient battlefields and magical swords. Sometimes the adventure is simply going out with your friends, putting on metal and drinking too much beer.
Tower Hill's presence at The Hub on Tuesday night also reinforced how international this supposedly “underground” scene has become. A Canadian band signed to a Greek label could travel through California and find an audience in a Redwood City bar that already understood exactly what it was doing.
That is community operating at the underground level.
Chris Nunz Jeremy Puffer Tower Hill brings the fight to Redwood City
Adamantis: Epic Power Metal From Boston
Next, Adamantis, the second half of the Cascadian Conquest '26 tour stormed the stage.
Formed in the Boston area in 2016, Adamantis emerged with the Thundermark EP in 2018 before releasing its first full-length, Far Flung Realm, in 2020. The band describes its music as anthemic melodic metal, while outside descriptions generally place it in the American power-metal tradition with a strong European power-metal influence.
By the time Adamantis reached Redwood City, however, the band had another major record behind it.
Reforged arrived on March 7, 2025, taking the band's fascination with fantasy, history and heroic storytelling even further. Its eight tracks include “Ride for Ruin,” “Steelclad,” “Reforged,” “The Sailor on the Seas of Fate,” “Time of Contempt,” “Gates of Miklagard” and “The Fall of Asterius.” Jeff Loomis, of progressive metal band Nevermore and Swedish metal band Arch Enemy, appears as a guest guitarist on “Ride for Ruin.”
Adamantis is already looking beyond Reforged. The band has begun working on its third full-length album, with new guitarist Connor McCray contributing to the next chapter alongside Vance Simmons. While no title, release date or first single has yet been announced, the sessions will mark the first Adamantis album created with the band's newest guitar lineup. Speaking of band members:
Adamantis’ current lineup as of August 2026 is:
Jeff Stark — vocals (2020–present)
Vance Simmons — guitar (2022–present)
Connor McCray — guitar (2025–present)
Alex Scofield — bass (2022–present)
Evgeny Gromovoy — drums (2016–present; founding member)
That subject matter makes Adamantis especially interesting within the broader traditional-metal revival. Their songs pull from Tolkien, Michael Moorcock, mythology and historical imagery, but their musical ambition moves beyond nostalgia. Longer compositions, melodic leads and power-metal grandeur give the material a cinematic scale.
Even the band's name carries the weight of its music: Adamantis derives from the Greek adamas, meaning “unbreakable”—an appropriately durable banner for a band built around epic battles, ancient legends and heavy-metal perseverance.
The band took the stage and ripped into “Ride for Ruin,” the Tolkien-inspired song about the Riders of Rohan. Jeff Stark’s vocals and stage presence immediately brought to mind a documentary I had recently watched, Scream for Me Sarajevo; he carried that same era of Dickinson energy and vocal intensity. Bassist Alex Scofield commanded a white, headless five-string bass alongside the twin-guitar attack of Vance Simmons and Connor McCray. Later, a shirtless Evgeny Gromovoy could be seen wielding a sword from behind the drums. Both R.F. Traynor and Elijah Post were up front, joining in the headbanging, and at one point a small “Viking Row” even broke out. The great thing about the entire performance was that the band carried themselves as if they were headlining Wacken itself.
Jeff Stark and Alex Scofield Connor McCray and Jeff Stark Danny Shipman from Reality Check TV watches Adamantis Connor McCray and Vance Simmons Jeff Starks belts it out Evgeny Gromovoy wields the metal blade
In the confines of The Hub, that kind of music inevitably becomes something different. Songs conceived around kingdoms, battles and distant mythical worlds suddenly have to fit inside a small brick-walled room in suburban Northern California.
And that contrast is part of the charm.
Adamantis and Tower Hill were traveling together on the Cascadian Conquest '26 tour, making Redwood City the Bay Area stop on a route that connected two bands separated by thousands of miles but united by a shared traditional-metal vocabulary.
Hands of Goro: Bay Area Pedigree With a Classic Edge
Closing the night was Hands of Goro, and stylistically they provided the perfect counterweight to everything that came before.
San Francisco has never been particularly interested in playing heavy metal by the rules. Hands of Goro fits comfortably into that tradition. The Bay Area power trio combines old-school heavy metal, NWOBHM-inspired guitar work, punk energy, classic hard rock and a healthy amount of humor, wrapping the whole thing around an unlikely conceptual centerpiece: Goro, the four-armed Shokan warrior from the Mortal Kombat universe.
Hands of Goro are a power trio featuring Tom Draper on guitar and backing vocals, Adrian Maestas on bass and lead vocals, and Avinash Mittur on drums. Their self-titled debut was released on March 1, 2024, carrying eight tracks including “Prince of Shokan,” “Demonizer,” “Uncanny,” “21st Century Plague,” “You Have No Face,” “Waste of Blood,” “End to End” and “Archduke of Fear.”
The band's résumé extends deep into the Bay Area and international underground. Its members have connections to acts including Slough Feg, Nite, Spirit Adrift and Angel Witch, giving Hands of Goro a lineage that stretches across several different branches of traditional and underground metal.
During the show, the band mentioned that new music was in the works—and that some of it would be played that very night. Live, Hands of Goro’s sound recalls the transitional period just before NWOBHM hit full stride in the early 1980s: raw, amp-driven distortion, gritty guitar tones, and the kind of direct heaviness associated with bands like UFO, Motörhead, and early Iron Maiden. There’s very little polish to it, and that’s part of the appeal. It’s loud, immediate, and unapologetically in-your-face heavy metal.
Hands of Goro’s set at The Hub leaned heavily into material that appears to be part of the band’s next chapter. The nine-song set opened with an intro version of “When the Fire Hits Your Eye” before moving through “Shokan Bolt,” “Pain Giver,” “Don’t Let the Beast Out of His Cave,” and the three-part “The Peaks of Gozan.” The second half was especially notable, with the band marking “When the Fire Hits Your Eye,” “Vanquished to Earthrealm,” and the three-part “A Warrior’s Death” as live debuts. They closed with “Backbreaker,” giving the Redwood City crowd an unusually early preview of several songs that had not previously been performed live. The set reinforced what the band had mentioned from the stage that night: new Hands of Goro music was not just on the way—it was already being road-tested in front of an audience.
Adrian Maestas on bass Avinash Mittur on drums Hands of Goro kickin' it out Tom Draper on guitar
But Hands of Goro aren't merely another retro-metal band.
Their music carries the DNA of classic heavy metal while allowing punk, hard rock and a rougher Bay Area edge to bleed through. The band's own Bandcamp tags include traditional metal, heavy metal, hard rock and the rather less academic description “scumbag rock.”
That combination made them an effective closer.
After the melodic traditional metal of Space Vacation, Tower Hill's sword-raised attack and Adamantis' epic power metal, Hands of Goro brought the evening back to something rawer and more immediate.
Their name itself comes with exactly the sort of irreverent heavy-metal mythology the music deserves: Goro, the four-armed warrior from Mortal Kombat. Even the band's album credits conclude with the declaration that “Goro will dominate over Earthrealm.”
Subtle it isn't.
Heavy metal rarely needs to be.
Hectic Dave and SanFran666co: Finding the Show Before the Show
One reason Fermented Metal ended up at The Hub on Tuesday night was SanFran666co.com, the Bay Area metal-show site run under the Hectic banner by Hectic Dave.
Launched in February 2025, SanFran666co has quickly become a useful clearinghouse for underground heavy-metal shows around San Francisco and the East Bay. Its listings are deliberately curated rather than scraped from an automated concert feed—the site describes them as “Handpicked by Hectic”—and while its primary focus is San Francisco and the East Bay, bands can submit shows from across Northern California.
That distinction matters. Anyone who follows underground metal knows that some of the most interesting shows are also the easiest to miss. Smaller promoters, touring bands and neighborhood venues do not always surface prominently on mainstream concert-discovery platforms. SanFran666co fills that gap by treating local metal activity as something worth documenting in its own right, whether the show is at the DNA Lounge, Eli's Mile High Club, Neck of the Woods—or a smaller Peninsula room like The Hub in Redwood City. The site currently includes The Hub among its Bay Area listings, reinforcing the venue's growing place in the regional underground circuit.
For this particular Fermented Metal outing, that function was very real: SanFran666co was how I first discovered that Space Vacation, Tower Hill, Adamantis and Hands of Goro were playing The Hub on August 18. What could easily have remained a low-profile Tuesday-night show became exactly the sort of event worth seeking out—a strong bill, an intimate room and several bands operating at different points within the traditional-metal underground.
Hectic's involvement in the Bay Area scene also extends beyond concert listings. SanFran666co is tied to Hectic Records, which operates alongside Bleeding Priest Records and specializes in releasing Bay Area metal on vinyl. In 2026 the labels partnered with Bay Area thrash band Frolic for the release of its second album, Legacies of Cybernetica, further connecting the site to the musicians and independent infrastructure it covers. The SanFran666co site itself is published under Hectic Records and identifies the operation as being made in San Francisco.
That combination—show calendar, scene reporting and record-label support—makes SanFran666co more than a simple events page. It functions as a kind of underground metal bulletin board for the Bay Area, helping bands, venues and fans find one another.
And in this case, it worked exactly as intended.
Without Hectic Dave and SanFran666co, Fermented Metal might never have walked through the doors of The Hub that Tuesday night.
Four Bands, One Metal Community
What made the August 18 show interesting wasn't simply that four good heavy-metal bands played Redwood City.
It was where they came from and why they fit together.
Space Vacation represented a veteran Bay Area interpretation of classic metal. Tower Hill arrived from the Canadian Prairies carrying the flag for a younger generation of unapologetic traditional heavy metal. Adamantis brought Boston-bred epic power metal and fantasy storytelling. Hands of Goro closed the circle with a more raw San Francisco sound created by musicians whose histories run deep throughout the underground.
Different cities. Different generations. Different interpretations.
The same basic language.
That is one of the enduring strengths of heavy metal. Scenes can seem geographically isolated until a touring van pulls into town. Then Edmonton meets Boston, Boston meets San Francisco, and a Tuesday night at a small venue becomes part of a much larger network.
And for Fermented Metal, there was another familiar element to the evening: the bar and the band were occupying the same social space.
The Hub isn't an arena, and that is precisely the point. There was no enormous backstage compound separating musicians from the people watching them. It was a neighborhood drinking establishment temporarily transformed by amps, guitars, leather, patches and people who cared enough about underground heavy metal to show up on a Tuesday night (and maybe end of a the local "In-N-Out Burger" at the end of the night...).
Those rooms are where scenes are maintained.
Big festivals demonstrate how large metal has become. Small shows demonstrate why it survives.
On August 18 in Redwood City, four bands from California, Alberta and Massachusetts offered a pretty convincing demonstration.
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