Minority Threat begins to find a new way forward ahead of Blockout Bash

There was a stretch of time coming out of the early pandemic when Jordan Byrd thought Minority Threat might call it a day, leaving in its wake a pair of incendiary hardcore EPs whose songs address issues of systemic racism, cultural appropriation, and the brutality Black citizens have experienced at the hands of police.

“I had started school during the pandemic, so I was already in the throes of switching up my focus,” said Byrd, who joined guitarist Darrell Chess for a late July interview ahead of the split Columbus/Cleveland hardcore band’s headlining set at Dirty Dungarees on Saturday, Aug. 1. (The performance arrives as part of the daylong Old North festival Blockout Bash; a full slate of venues and performers can be viewed by scrolling to the bottom.)

This natural drift was further fueled by the amicable departure of founding bassist Winston Hightower, with Byrd acknowledging a long-held belief that when someone exits a band, the project ceases to be. “I’ve always been kind of stubborn about that for some reason,” he said. “But this time … it was like, why not? Let’s just keep going.”

Byrd’s pivot was made easier by the addition of bassist Miles Cobbs, who also serves as the singer and guitarist for the Cleveland power pop band Heart & Lung, and who approaches the bass with a similar musicality as Hightower, whose bouncing, rubbery basslines added an underlying swagger to the crew’s pulverizing sound.

The decision to carry forward is also reflective of a resilience that frequently surfaces in the quartet’s music – “I will not break!” Byrd yowls on “Joy,” a 90-second ripper that serves as the emotional centerpiece of Minority Threat’s self-titled 2018 EP – and which the singer traced in part to struggles with anxiety and depression that he said led him “to find ways to keep living when you don’t particularly want to.”

“A lot of the resilience comes from just having shit thrown at you,” Byrd continued, “and then being like, okay, if I’m going to continue being here, I need to find the flower that’s in that shit.”

In steeling himself against these inner-demons, Byrd said he also developed thicker skin that helped to dull the impacts of the racism that presented itself naturally coming up as a Black person in America, with the singer sharing how he can still recall with photographic detail the first time a classmate called him the N-word in grade school.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that Byrd can entirely brush aside these occurrences, and Minority Threat’s music routinely serves as a place where he can both give voice to his anger and, increasingly, find ways to move beyond it.

“I try to give myself some space to be mad about all the things that are happening around me, but then I’m like, okay, how are we going to get to a place where these things don’t happen anymore?” said Byrd, who pointed to a certain type of naysayer as a constant source of consternation. “I’m really tired of having to explain to certain people why racism matters, or how it affects people, or why I think everyone should have health care and housing. And those are the people that make me feel insane, because these are normal things. We should want to take care of each other. We should want everyone to have a fulfilling life. And seeing people not want that, even for themselves, it blows my mind. And that’s why I try to give myself room to air out these grievances … while also trying to find a path forward that can hopefully help other people move forward. We can’t just sit and be angry. At some point we have to do something.”

These ideas have taken shape in the new songs Minority Threat has written towards a new, still-in-progress album, with tracks heavily rooted in the idea of building and growing community, a pull Byrd attributed in part to a desire to shake those echoes of pandemic isolation that for too long held grip on him. The songs are also among the most musically diverse the band has written, with Chess describing his assemblage of riffs as a “love letter to all the shit I listened to growing up,” which he said ranged from death metal and sludge to more straight up hardcore, citing the likes of Glassjaw, Crowbar, and Coalesce as formative.

“It definitely does feel all over the place, but not in a bad way,” Byrd said. “But you can hear the influences coming from a lot of different places. And then we also wanted to challenge ourselves and make something that we found interesting, and that would make us have to think about how we approach [the music].”

A similar mindset has taken hold in terms of Byrd’s approach to lyric writing, which he described as less reactionary than it might have seemed on the band’s earlier releases.

“It’s easy to look around and be like, everything is horrible. What even is the point?” he said. “But then I have to be like, okay, that’s not true, and that’s just how they want me to feel. And so, what are the small ways we can find to be active? I don’t personally consider myself an activist; there are people out there doing real work on the ground. But I’m trying more to be self-reflective and to ask, what are the ways I can contribute? What are the skills I can offer that can hopefully start to build some community and work toward these other things that we’re going to need for the future? All of that American exceptionalism, that American individualism isn’t going to help us. There’s no one helping us. At some point we need to try and help ourselves.”

2026 Blockout Bash schedule of venues and performers

Ace of Cups

Ages 18+ (Pass or $25)

8:00 PM Pale Grey Lore
8:45 PM Eternally Psyched
9:30 PM Good Reverend
10:15 PM Unholy Swarm
11:00 PM Idioms
11:45 PM The Receiver

Dirty Dungarees

All ages (Free)

6:00 PM Wyrmpit
6:45 PM Forever Strange
7:30 PM LoveTrauma
8:15 PM passionplay
9:00 PM Maranatha
9:45 PM Minority Threat

Ledo’s Tavern

Ages 21+ (Free)

3:30 PM Delorean Tapedeck
4:15 PM The Cunning Tongues
5:00 PM Friends with Elephants
5:45 PM The Fronks
6:45 PM Beach Kitty
7:30 PM Me & Lil’ Brother
8:45 PM Stage 5 Clinger
9:30 PM Paper Airplane
10:15 PM Japanese B-Sides
11:30 PM Andy Shaw Band

Old North Arcade

All ages Free

3:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Citizen Dorian X, D’arcy & DJ Dig Dug, DJ Ali Cat

Proof by The Alibi

Ages 21+ (Free)

5:00 PM Troy Kunkler
6:15 PM Nylon Nocturne
7:30 PM Bee Humana
8:15 PM Andrew Hoehnen
9:15 PM Devi

Records Per Minute

All ages (Free)

4:00 PM NBF Mike
4:45 PM Risk Kishk
5:30 PM Ryan Horn
6:00 PM break
7:00 PM Todd May
7:45 PM Moe Reen

Spacebar