Tucson metal band Gat-Rot makes long-awaited return

After a four-year hiatus — two of them brought on by the pandemic — the Tucson hardcore band Gat-Rot will play its first live show since 2018 at Club Congress on Saturday, Nov. 5.

The band’s original lineup — Charlie Touseull, Clay Reed, Gabe Garcia, Rueben Valdez and Oscar Acedo — will be on hand to play their early songs as well as two new ones — “Dark Days Ahead” and “Light A Fire” — that they will release on a 7-inch record at the concert.

The band in late October filmed a video for “Light A Fire” and will sing it live for the first time at Saturday’s Congress show.

“We’re going to get to sing the song in front of a live audience at Congress,” an enthusiastic Touseull said last week during a break from his job as librarian at Pima County’s Joyner-Green Valley Library, his day job for the last six years. “We’re really excited.”

Touseull, one of the band’s lead singers, formed Gat-Rot with Reed and Garcia in 1995 after the trio’s punk rock band Upheaval broke up.

“That was a real fun time. We didn’t jam for awhile and we just decided to start playing again and we all hung out and started a new group,” he said.

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They brought on Valdez and Acedo and another member, whose last name started with an “O,” and took a letter from each last name to form “Gat-Rot,” Touseull said. When the “O” left the band, the name stuck.

Gat-Rot regularly played its growing catalogue of original songs intermingled with a handful of covers until 2008, when adult life took over their rock lives and they decided to stop being a full-time band.

“We’ve never said we’re broken up. All of our lives are really complicated,” Touseull said. “All of us have had marriages and divorces and babies ... and that has prevented us from doing a lot of stuff. We’ve been a band for a long time but one thing that has always been a motivating factor is we have never put the band in front of family.”

The 7-inch record is the first recording in a number of years for Gat-Rot, which has released a pair of cassettes and three CDs. Touseull said the two new songs explore the state of American politics and what the band describes as the decay of democracy and the influx of fascism. “Light A Fire” opens with a call to action: “There may be dark days ahead, but light a fire and find a way. ... We are a chorus of voices to drown out your lies.”

“We wanted to make a statement about that,” he said.

Gat-Rot will share the stage at Club Congress, 311 E. Congress St., with fellow Arizona hardcore metal bands American Standards, Bloodtrail and Mastodonna. Doors open at 7 p.m Saturday for the 21-and-older show. Tickets are $9.27 through hotelcongress.com.