It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday night, and fuck me, I planned this poorly. I’m outside The Baby G, a 145-cap DIY venue in Toronto, and I’m at least 10 people deep in a line to get in. The attraction: a secret set by reunited screamo icons Orchid, the headlining band at the city’s new weekend-long, multi-venue heavy music festival Prepare the Ground. Rumors about the secret show had spread like wildfire thanks to vague fliers with the band’s skeletal logo plastered around venues all day, and it seemed word spread a little too well. I check social media when I hear muffled claps and guitar distortion from inside, and learn the venue hit capacity an hour ago. At least that cushions the blow.
The scene was unlike any other over the course of the weekend back in early June, but perfectly captured the frenzy of running around the city and trying to catch as much of the lineup as possible. Spread across four stages in the downtown area, Prepare the Ground found itself with a good problem for any fest, so full to the brim in its programming that you were never left wanting—only experiencing pained regret at the necessary sacrifices that came with being unable to split yourself between two venues at any given moment.
It’s a fest format that’s been steadily picking up in recent years, from the now-defunct darker stylings of Oblivion Access to the greater sprawl of its autumnal Austin peer Levitation. Though Toronto’s rich music culture has seen similar multi-venue festivals before, Prepare the Ground’s focus is one of the first in the city to wed that execution with a focus on heavy music. “My favorite festival experiences here were club-based—running around the city with your friends, seeing a bunch of bands, hanging out and networking,” says festival co-founder and director of operations Denholm Whale. “Me and KW [Campol] had been putting on shows together in this specific world, and they were always selling out. There was this really large gap for what we enjoyed in this city, so we wanted to actually make it happen.”
Prepare the Ground came as an extension of this mutual labor of love for Ontario’s heavy music scene, built from the ground up by Whale—an established Toronto promoter who also performs in the industrial band Odonis Odonis—and fellow co-founder/curator KW Campol—guitarist in Hamilton sludge-metal duo Vile Creature. The two met when Whale booked Vile Creature for a Toronto show, and they quickly hit it off. “Sometimes you hang out or work with someone and you immediately feel like you’re on the same page,” Whale says. “We both admire how each other works, and that naturally blossomed into working more together.” With that kind of symbiotic harmony, an undertaking of this size seemed inevitable. “And now KW has forced me to do a music festival,” Whale adds with a laugh.
“‘Heavy’ is a multifaceted, beautiful cacophony of different sounds, and bringing that together services a really wonderful, needed group of people.” — KW Campol
Campol cites Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands as “the epitome of what a music festival could and should be,” and takes that festival’s booking variety as a major influence on Prepare the Ground. “You don’t have to be dedicated to one subgenre all the time,” Campol says. “‘Heavy’ can be a means of cathartic communication. As artsy and weird as that is, I believe in that wholeheartedly. ‘Heavy’ is a multifaceted, beautiful cacophony of different sounds, and bringing that together services a really wonderful, needed group of people.”
That variety is on full display with one of the shrewder programming approaches that the festival takes: loosely grouping artists with similar timbres of “heavy” at the same venue, creating themed lineups in all but name. Want to experience the loudest sounds possible in a small space that only makes the abrasion more deafening? The Garrison’s slate of bands—from industrial heavyweights Uniform to noise brutalists Body Void—had you covered. Want to give your ears a break and feel the ethereal weight of reverb as your heaviness flavor of choice? Lee’s Palace—which held everyone from the dark-folk stylings of Emma Ruth Rundle to the spare acoustic post-metal of 40 Watt Sun—was where you wanted to be. Though a no-brainer in concept, this scheduling move proved to be one of the easiest gimmes for instinctually relaying counterprogramming to fest-goers. When I felt aurally overwhelmed by the ceaseless riptides of distorted shoegaze from Drowse at Lee’s Palace in the late afternoon on Sunday, I used the break after his set as an opportunity to hop over to The Garrison to pump a healthy dose of grindcore madness from Cloud Rat back into me.
But the things that made for the most feverish discussion between attendees were the unpredictable moments. The aforementioned secret sets became something akin to lineup firebombs by the end of the weekend, where plans were upended for bands playing completely different second sets—like Ragana devoting an entire slot to older material and rarities, or progressive black metal band Yellow Eyes making space for their work outside of Immersion Trench Reverie. When asked about what spurred the idea for these secret sets, Campol simply replies, “I love being a little stinker. Being a brat is a large part of who I am as a human.”
The playfulness that came with these sets—often, in the form of cryptic posters around show spaces with merely a venue name, a start time, and an abstract piece of related iconography—allowed Campol to embrace this instinct in full. “I love doing unexpected things. The feeling of someone going, ‘What the fuck?’ is the best feeling in the world.” With the dates for the 2025 edition of Prepare the Ground recently announced—and with disbanded sludge duo Kylesa announced this week to join the previously slotted doom-metal ensemble YOB on the lineup—surprises are clearly in store for next year already, as well.
“Me and KW had been putting on shows together in this specific world, and they were always selling out. There was this really large gap for what we enjoyed in this city, so we wanted to actually make it happen.” — Denholm Whale
Admittedly, some snares ensued, mostly due to my own lack of familiarity with the city and the limited time between sets. Trying to cut certain sets close between multiple transit lines meant I only ended up seeing part of performances from doomgaze titan Planning for Burial and dark-folk songwriter Marissa Nadler. My compulsion to rush across town to the secret Phoenix Theatre set from The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die left me stranded on a bus in rush hour traffic across Queen’s Park as I tried, in vain, to make it back to Lee’s Palace in time for Liturgy. (I was later told that taking this bus instead of a subway line was entirely my mistake, so that one’s on me.) On the flipside, though, the stacked offerings from the festival meant that organic discovery and serendipity ended up making the most lasting impressions for me.
I went in looking forward to plenty of my own personal favorites: Rundle as a haunting end to the first night, adding another notch on the half dozen sets I’ve seen from screamo stalwarts Dreamwell, and, of course, finally seeing Orchid. But the thrill of surprise seared greater than anything else, and left me coursing with adrenaline every time. That came in discovering how perfectly unhinged Uniform were as a duo (playing, without fanfare, most of their 2017 breakthrough Wake in Fright “except for the synthpop song, because that would be fucking stupid,” to quote vocalist Michael Berdan) with Ben Greenberg’s guitar tone slicing through the room like a freshly sharpened blade. Or in giving Ragana’s secret set a shot and being overcome with emotion during the slow avalanches of anguish on “You Take Nothing.” Or, in one of my favorite moments of the entire weekend, hearing mere seconds of the uncompromisingly ear-stabbing noise Body Void was making while sitting in The Garrison’s lounge area—loud enough and at a frequency high enough to surge straight through the walls—and literally bolting back into the performance space to see them in action.
Part of what allowed me to have these moments of unbridled excitement came from feeling like Prepare the Ground was truly a space where I could exist as my own unique kind of heavy music listener. As a queer trans person drawn to metal, noise, and dark folk, I can often feel out of place in certain crowds for these types of shows. But the festival’s inclusive and progressive atmosphere—in its booking and in the acts’ own outspokenness—made every venue feel like a much-needed comfort in a scene that often doesn’t afford it for any number of marginalized folks. The proliferation of acts with trans members on the lineup (from Dreamwell to ethereal shoegaze artist Vyva Melinkolya to Campol’s own Vile Creature) rippled out into the crowds’ own demographics, and a significant percentage of attendees were trans. For a scene where safety and peace of mind can be uncertain, feeling these instinctive cues of belonging was huge, as if getting a subconscious signal that I could let my guard down and be the freak for heavy music I truly am deep down.
“Heavy music, heavy feelings, and catharsis is for everybody—whether you’re a trve-kvlt black metal kid or a very soft goth kid that really appreciates folk music with a dark leaning.” — KW Campol
“Heavy music, heavy feelings, and catharsis is for everybody,” says Campol on the matter. “It doesn’t matter who you are, how you came into heavy music, what type of heavy music you like—whether you’re the most trve-kvlt black metal kid of all-time or a very soft goth kid that really appreciates folk music with a dark leaning. There’s something in it for everyone, and it’s a comfortable, wonderful community. When you get down into it and past the weirder parts, it’s just a community that wants to come together and unite around a common catharsis.”
Which brings it all back to Orchid. The weekend’s main attraction was a stop on the hardcore legends’ reunion tour, and the headlining spot was handily the most feral energy of the fest. No crowds at Prepare the Ground compared to seeing nearly 1,350 people cascading over one another like a roiling sea in the pit, each of them screaming every word of the quintet’s very brief DIY discography (at nearly an hour of allotted time, the set damn near included every song Orchid ever put to tape). In the pit, I fought for my camera’s safety against the sudden slam of bodies against my back, against the fists punched into the sky alongside Jayson Green’s most animalistic screams. At my side, Payson Power of Tomb Mold, having just played the same stage, thrashed harder and screamed louder than anyone else around me. True to Campol’s word, nobody could contain their most primal feelings in the presence of Orchid—including the talent booked for the weekend.
The only thing that could compare? The previous evening’s aforementioned secret set. On the cool Friday evening, a beautiful display of camaraderie and generosity unfolds. People filter out of The Baby G, giving security a moment to let those queuing outside in—first five, then 10. A group of at least seven ahead of us begins cycling members in and out of the venue, so that everyone there can see at least a moment of Orchid’s set, can lay claim to belonging to this moment. After a song or two, enough of those inside depart, and I get signaled to enter. In the cramped, deep blue wash of The Baby G—where I barely make it into the room, at the edge of the crowd—Green screams and grabs the hands of all in the front, as if playing to the same energy as in Orchid’s now-canonized teenage basement shows. I feel myself feed off it as I manage to inch closer until I’m only a few bodies away from him.
The band launches into “Lights Out,” Geoff Garlock’s bass slinking along with their most direct hook: “You are, you are, and you are.” In that moment I can sense it. All of us, regardless of who we are, feel as if we are. That is our common catharsis. FL
