Agalloch Reunite for a Rare Brooklyn Steel Night
There are reunions, and then there are resurrections. When Agalloch quietly disbanded in May 2016 after two decades, a specific corner of American heavy music went into mourning — the kind that produces vinyl-repress price gouging and reverent forum threads. Tonight that corner gets its church back. The reunited Portland band brings its cold, cinematic, folk-haunted black metal to the 1,800-capacity Brooklyn Steel, with Profanatica and Brooklyn's own Yellow Eyes rounding out one of the heavier bills the room will host all year.
Some background for the merely curious. Agalloch formed in Portland, Oregon in 1995 around frontman John Haughm, and spent the next twenty years building a sound that didn't fit any single label's shelf. Call it atmospheric black metal, call it folk metal, call it post-rock that wandered into a snowstorm — the band braided neofolk, doom, black metal, and post-rock into something that felt less like a genre exercise and more like weather. Their subject matter ran to nature, winter, melancholy, and pagan memory. Their records don't so much play as accumulate, like frost.
The album that made them a cult institution is The Mantle (2002), their second, and still the entry point most people are handed. Where their debut Pale Folklore (1999) established the palette, The Mantle refined it into something patient and devastating — long, acoustic-laced pieces that earned Agalloch a devotion far beyond the black-metal underground, pulling in listeners who'd never touch a corpse-painted band otherwise. Ashes Against the Grain (2006), Marrow of the Spirit (2010), and The Serpent & the Sphere (2014) followed, each expanding the band's reach and influence over a whole generation of American atmospheric and "post-black" metal that owes Agalloch an unpayable debt.
Then, in 2016, it ended. Haughm went on to form Pillorian; the rest of the band — guitarist Don Anderson, bassist Jason William Walton — launched Khôrada. For years, "Agalloch reunion" belonged in the same fantasy file as most beloved-band reunions: nice to imagine, never going to happen. Except it did. The band returned in 2023 with the original core intact and drummer Hunter Ginn behind the kit, and their shows since have been event-tier — the sort of thing devotees fly to.
Haughm has never been one for empty spectacle. On the making of Marrow of the Spirit, he once explained the band's whole ethos in a sentence: "We wanted an album that sounded more alive and real. Our last album was a bit too mechanized, too polished." That's the Agalloch promise in miniature — live, real, and unpolished on purpose. It's exactly what makes tonight worth leaving the house for. This is not music optimized for a festival phone screen; it's music built to fill a large dark room and make 1,800 people go very quiet.
The support is no throat-clearing, either. Profanatica bring a rawer, older strain of American black metal, and Yellow Eyes are the local flex — a Brooklyn band who've become one of the more respected names in stateside atmospheric black metal in their own right. A hometown act on this bill is a reminder that Brooklyn isn't just importing this music; it's making it.
Why it matters: reunion shows can be nostalgia cash-grabs, but Agalloch's catalog was always too strange and too internal to coast on. A rare set from a band this influential, at a room the size of Brooklyn Steel, with a genuinely killer undercard, is the kind of night the borough's metal community will still be talking about next winter — which is, fittingly, the only season Agalloch has ever truly believed in.
Sources: Brooklyn Steel (setlist.fm); Agalloch (Wikipedia)