Friday night at ICON did not begin where the bill seemed to be pointing. With DECAYSTATE at the top, Useless Eyes waiting in the middle and four bands sharing a room built for amplified punishment, it would have been easy to expect the evening to announce itself with force. Emerald Skies did the opposite. They started slower than expected, leaving more air inside the songs and giving the opening minutes a sense of restraint that initially felt almost out of place.
Then they started changing the rules on themselves.
Emerald Skies moved through the set without settling on one pace for very long. A heavier groove could open into something more aggressive, then push closer to metal before backing away again. The mechanics changed with the tempo, but the transitions never sounded like four different bands competing for the same instruments. That versatility became the interesting part. The slower beginning was not a limitation. It gave the heavier material somewhere to go.
The band has been turning up regularly on Sioux Falls bills for several years, including Four Winds appearances and shows at Bigs Bar alongside regional and touring rock acts. Drummer John Schultz has also crossed into another corner of the local heavy scene, sitting behind the kit for Temple of Soil’s debut performance. That history fits what happened Friday. Emerald Skies did not play like a band worried about fitting cleanly into one genre just because the rest of the evening leaned heavy.
By the time they reached “Shipwreck,” their closing song and single, the opening restraint made more sense. The set had spent its time widening rather than simply getting louder. “Shipwreck” gave them a logical ending point because the audience had already heard how many different gears the band could reach before getting there.
For an opening band, that is a better trick than trying to flatten everyone immediately.
The floor gets heavier
Useless Eyes erased whatever breathing room remained.
There were some technical difficulties before the set properly settled in, one of several small production problems that surfaced during the night, but once the band got moving there was little hesitation left in the room. They also announced that this would be their final show of 2026, adding a little finality to a performance that already sounded determined to leave bruises.
Their recorded catalog explains part of the attack. Useless Eyes began releasing singles in 2025 with “Ego Mouth,” “Wormtongue” and “Arrogance in Ignorance,” then collected that material alongside “Back To Reality,” “Bare Your Teeth” and “Cheap Talk” on the six-song Smothering Light EP in February. Nothing on the record lasts longer than 3 minutes, 18 seconds. “Cheap Talk” is barely over two. These are not songs built to wander around looking for a point.
That economy becomes nastier live.
Useless Eyes had already shown it at Four Winds in August, where relentless double-kick drums and thick guitar work pushed their hardcore foundation toward death metal. They had also appeared on Sioux Falls hardcore bills with Haywire, Dragged Out To Sea and Circler before this year’s Four Winds appearance. Friday at ICON picked up from there.
The sound was heavy enough to carry all the way to the back of the venue, which meant Ben Glanzer and me did not have to move toward the chaos. The chaos came toward us.
Behind us, the pit started taking shape.
There is a particular moment at a heavy show when the room stops behaving like an audience and begins behaving like part of the arrangement. Bodies start giving one another more space for reasons that have nothing to do with courtesy. People glance behind themselves. A circle opens. Someone who had been standing perfectly still thirty seconds earlier suddenly appears to have made a series of important personal decisions.
Useless Eyes reached that point quickly.
The heaviness was not impressive merely because it was loud. Plenty of bands can create volume. What worked was how unforgiving the entire thing remained once the tempo increased. Drums kept driving underneath the guitars instead of disappearing inside them, and the songs were short enough that the band never had to manufacture momentum after losing it.
With this being their final show of the year, there was no sense of conserving anything for next weekend.
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Strange New Faces changes the expression on the room
Then Strange New Faces came out and made everybody look happier.
Not calmer. Happier.
People were jumping. People were smiling. The band kept talking to the crowd instead of treating the space in front of the stage as a dark mass that existed only to absorb sound. After Useless Eyes had turned the floor physical, Strange New Faces made it social.
Their recorded history is still compact enough to watch almost in real time. “Ready To Leave” arrived in 2025, followed by “All My Friends,” “Drugs” and the four-song Band-Aid EP. “Levitate” followed in March 2026. Brandon Bruce is credited on vocals and Christopher Shine on drums for “Ready To Leave,” with Bruce, Shine, Justin Glenn Jungemann, Benjamin McGuiness and Caleb Freihaut sharing songwriting credits. In less than a year, the band had assembled enough material to establish a recognizable rock identity without sounding overly interested in staying inside one narrow lane.
Friday made the attraction easier to understand.
Strange New Faces did not try to beat Useless Eyes at heaviness. That would have been the least interesting decision available to them. Instead, they changed what the crowd was being asked to do. The physical release of the previous set became participation. People moved because they wanted to be involved rather than because a breakdown had opened a hole behind them.
Their crowd interaction was one of the strongest parts of the night. Nothing about it felt detached or overly rehearsed. They seemed genuinely interested in whether the people in front of them were having as much fun as they were.
By the end of the set, people around me were reacting less like a crowd watching a band they had happened to catch and more like people who had already decided they wanted to see them again. I had crossed that line too. I came into the night taking notes on Strange New Faces and left as a fan.
They also understood their position on the bill. A third band can kill an evening if the set feels like another opener arriving too late, especially when everyone knows the headliner is waiting. Strange New Faces did the opposite. They pulled people closer, raised the room without exhausting it and handed DECAYSTATE a crowd that was already awake.
That is not a glamorous job. They were extremely good at it.
DECAYSTATE steps into the light
By the time DECAYSTATE came out, the front of the room was more crowded than it had been all night.
That was the first visible difference. People moved toward the stage rather than waiting to see what the closer would do. Then DECAYSTATE started playing and the response came in waves. Each song ended with another burst of cheers, strong enough that the momentum between songs belonged almost as much to the audience as the band.
What makes that response particularly interesting is how new DECAYSTATE still is on record.
Only weeks before the ICON show, the group introduced itself with “Hollow”, which it described as its first official transmission. The band identified the lineup as Nick on vocals, Paul on guitar and vocals and Alex on drums, with the track written, recorded and produced by DECAYSTATE itself.
“Hollow” also arrived with more thematic weight than the standard hello-we-are-a-new-band single. The song deals with corrupted faith, spiritual manipulation and the moment a trusted authority figure begins to look different once questions are finally allowed into the room. A contemporary review focused on the tension between betrayal, anger and the freedom that can come from rejecting that kind of control.
Friday’s performance did not need an explanation attached to every song, but that background gives some useful context to the severity of DECAYSTATE’s presentation. This did not feel like a new project still trying on identities in public. The attack was intense from the beginning and stayed there.
The light show became one of the strongest production elements of the night. It gave the closing set a visual identity the earlier bands had not leaned on as heavily and made the headlining slot feel distinct before DECAYSTATE had finished establishing itself musically. Combined with the increasingly dense crowd near the stage, the effect was simple: the room felt fuller, darker and more focused on one point than it had during any previous set.
And people kept responding.
Song ended. Cheers. Another song. Another reaction. The pattern never really broke.
There is always some danger in reading too much into crowd size during a four-band local show. Friends arrive late. People leave early. Different bands bring different pockets of supporters. But when the largest concentration of the night forms closest to the stage for the final act and remains there, the evidence is standing in front of you.
DECAYSTATE had them.
The only thing consistently working against the evening was technical. Small problems appeared throughout the show, enough that pretending everything operated perfectly would be dishonest. Useless Eyes dealt with some of the most obvious disruption, but there were little issues elsewhere too.
ICON handled the spaces between bands considerably better.
Changeovers generally took only about five to ten minutes, a fast enough turnaround that the room never had time to completely reset itself. Gear moved, sound checks happened and the next band arrived before conversations swallowed whatever the previous set had built. For four bands with different sonic demands, that efficiency helped keep the night intact.
The venue itself has become familiar territory for this corner of Sioux Falls music. ICON sits inside the historic John Deere Factory Building downtown and had already hosted Useless Eyes and Strange New Faces during Four Winds in August, while Emerald Skies also appeared on that festival’s 2026 lineup. Three weeks later, those names were back under the same roof on a much more concentrated bill, this time without dozens of competing stages pulling the audience somewhere else.
Here, they had one room to work with. They used it differently.
Afterglow
The night had started with Emerald Skies refusing to rush anything. That felt unexpected when they began. By the end of the show, it felt like the right introduction.
A bill like this would have been less interesting if four bands spent four hours proving they could all hit the same way. Emerald Skies gave the room space and then showed how quickly they could change its weight. Useless Eyes stripped that space away. Strange New Faces figured out how to make people smile without letting the momentum collapse. DECAYSTATE concentrated the whole thing toward the front of the stage until every finished song brought another roar back at them.
My time back in Sioux Falls has been short enough that I am still having nights where a local lineup can catch me completely off guard. I hope that lasts.
Because somewhere between the pit opening behind us during Useless Eyes and Strange New Faces turning me into a fan, the night stopped feeling like four bands I needed to write about and started feeling like four bands I needed to remember.
Then DECAYSTATE came out, pulled the biggest crowd of the night toward the stage and gave everybody one last reason to stay there.
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Alex Huwer, drummer for DECAYSTATE and Useless Eyes, played drums for Temple of Soil at Four Winds Music and Arts Festival. John did not. Otherwise killer article. I felt like I was there