GWAR IS NO JOKE
The Palladium Worcester, MA November 19, 2025
Story and Photography by JD Cohen
GWAR has been around for so long that it’s easy to take them for granted. If you’ve heard of GWAR but haven’t seen them live, you might assume they’re a novelty act—an over-the-top shock-rock spectacle built on rubber monster suits, fake blood, and juvenile mayhem. Their visual extremity has long caused outsiders to dismiss them before engaging with the music or the larger creative context. But GWAR is no joke
They have survived nearly four decades because they are more than a gimmick and more than a band—they are a creative ecosystem. Their fusion of art, satire, craft, storytelling, and sonic evolution has allowed them to outlast countless peers. By constantly reinventing themselves while remaining defiantly true to their absurdist vision, GWAR has become one of the most enduring and original institutions in American rock.
And through all the blood-soaked excess of the live show—the decapitations, the splattering arteries, the towering monsters—what often gets lost is just how musically strong GWAR is. Their sound, rooted in punk and thrash metal, has evolved into something more groove-heavy, riff-driven, and surprisingly melodic. Beneath the chaos, their song catalogue is loaded with hooks.
If GWAR were merely a visual stunt, they would have burned out decades ago. Their longevity depends on the music standing on its own merits—brutal, catchy, ambitious, and unmistakably their own.
GWAR is not simply a band; they are world-builders and myth-makers. Their work—equal parts satire, sculpture, metal, comics, filmmaking, and mayhem—demonstrates what happens when imagination is allowed to run unchecked. Beneath the carnage and camp lies a group of artists committed to the belief that rock can be theater, that performance can be rebellion, and that the grotesque can reveal truths polite culture prefers to avoid.
Formed in mid-1980s Richmond, Virginia, GWAR emerged from an art collective called The Slave Pit. The early group included sculptors, filmmakers, punk musicians, comic artists, puppeteers, and assorted misfits sharing a warehouse and building low-budget sci-fi projects. The earliest GWAR performances—musicians wearing discarded monster costumes from an abandoned film—quickly evolved into something far more ambitious: a hybrid of punk, metal, performance art, and satirical world-building with a well defined mythology.
Unlike most bands, GWAR did not start as musicians who added theatrics. They were artists who added music. Everything they created—costumes, sculptures, films, characters, mythology—feeds into the music, and the music feeds back into their world. GWAR'S evolution from a scrappy Richmond collective to a global shock-rock institution remains one of the strangest and most compelling stories in rock music and American underground culture.
From the beginning, the band functioned more like a chaotic film studio than a traditional rock outfit. Album art, posters, comic books, and videos have reinforced the band's visual aesthetic. Puppetry, gore effects, and creature design has shaped the structure of their live shows and even the albums themselves, often played like serialized episodes in an ever-expanding saga.
The Slave Pit also ensured continuity. New members—artists, sculptors, performers—were trained into the collective, creating an institutional memory and an in-house workshop capable of producing everything from latex armor to animatronic monsters.
When frontman Dave Brockie (Oderus Urungus) died in 2014, many assumed GWAR would end. Brockie was the face and voice of the band for 30 years, a charismatic anchor whose persona was inseparable from GWAR’s mythology. His death left an enormous vacuum.
Within the collective, opinions differed. Some feared continuing without him would feel like denial or even appropriation. Others argued the best way to honor Brockie was to carry forward the universe he helped build. Ultimately, the decision was rooted in GWAR’s founding ethos: no single person had ever been the core of GWAR—not even Oderus.
Michael Bishop, who eventually would take over as GWAR'S frontman later said, “All these people had always been doing GWAR. They didn’t want to lose what they had or the investment they’d made in it throughout their entire lives.” Everything, he recalled, “was about surviving.”
GWAR did not replace Oderus. At the 2014 GWAR-B-Q, they gave Brockie a Viking-style funeral, setting his costume aflame on a boat—symbolically closing the Oderus era. Instead, Bishop returned in a new role as Blöthar the Berserker. This was the most significant structural change: a new frontman, not a replacement.
The post-Brockie era has been marked by notable evolution. The shows are more ensemble-driven. Political satire has intensified, with characters like Pope Francis, Donald Trump, Benjamin Tetanyahu, Vladamir Putin and the “Uber-Morality Squad” meeting gruesome fates onstage. Technical upgrades—better animatronics, more elaborate blood rigs, enhanced costuming—have modernized the spectacle.
GWAR survived their founder by embracing the truth of what they always were: a sprawling art organism maintained by dozens of artists and creators.
These elements were on full display at the Palladium in Worcester, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, November 19, during GWAR’s 40th anniversary tour. The band is celebrating the resurrection of their infamous dinosaur Gor-Gor, tied to their new graphic novel released July 25th through Pit Records and Z2 Comics. The North American run began October 18th in Salt Lake City with support from Helmet, The Dwarves, and Blood Vulture.
Blood Vulture opened the night with a blast of heavy, gothic-tinged riffs and high energy. The Dwarves followed with their trademark manic pop-punk, revisiting Worcester after their standout performance at Punk in the Park. Helmet delivered their signature groove-driven, staccato, drop-tuned sound—reliable and unchanging if somewhat muddied near the stage.
Crowd surfing intensified with each band and hit its peak once GWAR appeared around 10 p.m. From the moment they hit the stage, it was clear they were operating on an entirely different level. The production, volume, theatrical scale, and sheer presence dwarfed everything that came before.
A GWAR show remains a carnival of carnage, anchored by ringmaster figures and vaudeville-style characters who introduce and punctuate the narrative. While the band may no longer possess some of the raw danger of earlier decades, they are still a tight, powerful, precision machine—and the sense of joy and spectacle is undeniable.
It should be noted that some fans reported that the mosh pit felt unusually aggressive at the Palladium in Worcester. One longtime attendee said, “The pit on Wednesday had an unusually aggressive undertone. There was an angry vibe to the crowd.” Whether due to energy levels, tour momentum, the changing nature of mosh pit etiquette or simple timing, the observation stood out.
The night’s storyline centered on the discovery and hatching of a mysterious egg, culminating in the return of the massive T-Rex Gor-Gor. Battles erupted, blood sprayed in every direction, and the crowd surfing surged. Other classic characters emerged as well, including Father Bohab, last seen in the 1992 cult film Phallus in Wonderland.
The tightly executed setlist blended fan favorites—“Fuck This Place,” “Hail, Genocide!,” “Sick of You”—with tracks from their recent EP, including “Crack in the Egg” and “Lot Lizard.” It was a well-orchestrated performance from a band that has fully mastered its hybrid of metal, satire, and theater.
GWAR’s 40th anniversary tour is ultimately a celebration of survival—of an idea strong enough to outlive its founder, of a collective resilient enough to endure, and of an art project so strange and specific that it has become something like an independent institution. They remain musicians, sculptors, filmmakers, satirists, puppeteers, and provocateurs, working in concert to maintain a universe no one else could have invented.
The Worcester show demonstrated that GWAR’s post-Brockie era is not merely a continuation but an evolution. They may have lost some of their early volatility, but they have gained something equally valuable: the confidence of mature creators who know what they are and what they want to express.
For anyone who still dismisses them as a novelty act, the performance offered a decisive rebuttal. Yes, the monsters were there. The blood geysers were there. The decapitations and mock executions were there. So was the musicianship, the precision, the narrative clarity, and the production value. Many arena acts would envy the scale of what GWAR accomplishes nightly.
Forty years in, GWAR remains what they have always been—uncompromising, unclassifiable, unforgettable, and something that must be experienced live to be truly appreciated and understood.
Setlist
The Great Circus Train Disaster
Filthy Flow
Metal Metal Land
Saddam a Go-Go
Crack in the Egg
Bring Back the Bomb
Hail, Genocide!
Fuck This Place
Womb With a View
Lot Lizard
Bad Bad Men
Rock 'n' Roll Never Felt So Good
Tyrant King
America Must Be Destroyed
Encore:
Mother Fucking Liar
Pussy Planet
Sick of You
