“Great to be in Brooklyn,” Bobby Blitz, the frontman of the New Jersey band Overkill, told the crowd near the end of a recent set at Saint Vitus, adding an expletive for extra relish. He then raised one fist high and, adopting the screechy, amped-up register he uses in the group’s raging thrash-metal anthems, proclaimed, “Metal is alive and well on this beautiful October Saturday night!”
That much was clear at the sold-out show at the recently relocated Bushwick, Brooklyn, metal mecca, which opened its new location in early September. Before the gig, fans sporting black shirts with the logos of bands such as Death Angel, Testament and Mercyful Fate took their places on the floor. Projections of oversize upside-down crosses book-ended the stage, as the veteran metal DJ Alex Kayne spun classics from Slayer, Venom (whose co-founder Conrad Lant, known as Cronos, had died just days earlier) and other underground staples.
The opening act, Tower, heightened the mood with hard-driving originals straight out of the “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” era, led by the bravura belt of the frontwoman Sarabeth Linden, who prowled the stage in a leather leotard accented with chain mail and spiked bracelets.
Then the headliners took the stage to absolute bedlam: Cups of beer soared through the air, a huge mosh pit engulfed the floor; crowd surfers hoisted themselves up; and Blitz unleashed his signature scream-laugh on “Rotten to the Core,” a track from Overkill’s 1985 debut, “Feel the Fire.”
There was seemingly zero demographic overlap in the crowd two nights later, when Krallice — a New York band specializing in epic-scale, compositionally advanced black metal — turned the club from a beer-soaked bacchanal into an avant-garde listening salon. The Overkill audience had been neatly split between grizzled Gen X-ers and fresh-faced Gen Z headbangers, united by a common throwback uniform of long hair, denim battle vests adorned with band patches, and the occasional headband or bullet belt. The Krallice crowd, in contrast, was largely millennial and younger, less male-dominated, and more neatly groomed. (A frequent sight that night: chunky eyeglasses that signaled “graphic designer” rather than stereotypical hesher.) A neat trick of Vitus, new and old, is that both of these vibes seem totally at home.
For anyone who had passed a loud, sweaty night thrashing in the confines of Saint Vitus’s old location at the sleepy northern tip of Greenpoint, it all felt like a glorious return, albeit in a more high-end setting. The original hosted hundreds of metal and punk shows between its opening in 2011 and 2024, when it was shut down by the Department of Buildings over an occupancy issue.
“It was a vibe back then,” Maria Marcel, a regular at the old location, said outside after the Overkill show. “But the new one, it’s absolutely gorgeous.” The Bushwick incarnation roughly doubles the 250-person capacity of the old Saint Vitus and plants it in a stretch bustling with bars and restaurants. Despite the upgrade, she said, there was still no barrier between crowd and stage: “It’s like an old-school type of experience with them just so up close and personal.”
Mark Pursino, who played the old Vitus with his band Electrocutioner, said that when walking from the new club’s entryway into the main space, through a doorway wreathed in red neon, “It’s like I’m entering the metal.”
“That’s what I like about Vitus,” he added. “They know how to curate it for the people of the dark side.”
The “they” in question are co-owners George Souleidis, Arty Shepherd and David Castillo, all musicians in their own right, who aimed for an artist- and fan-friendly environment. As Shepherd put it in an email, “I have been a touring musician since the early ’90s and wanted to bring all the great experiences I had had (and avoid the bad ones) to our little, gritty spot in Brooklyn.”
One noteworthy recipient of Saint Vitus’s hospitality: Anthrax, the Queens-born band who played two nights at the original Vitus in 2016, rare club shows for one of the Big Four of thrash metal. Scott Ian, the band’s co-founding guitarist, said in a phone interview that he watched in the intervening years as the club slowly attained “that legendary venue status,” acknowledged worldwide: “I see Vitus shirts at European festivals; I see Vitus shirts on kids in Japan.”
He followed news of the club’s September reopening online, and once he realized that the timing coincided with Anthrax tour dates in the area and the release of the band’s 12th studio LP, “Cursum Perficio,” he asked his manager to try to book them at the new location. After some maneuvering, the club opened a week earlier than planned to welcome the band on the venue’s first night. Ian praised the stage, the lighting and the sound but reserved his greatest enthusiasm for the new upstairs dressing room, complete with roof deck, which replaces the bare-bones basement that served as a green room in the old Vitus.
“Totally furnished, super comfortable, beautiful, nice,” he gushed. “Then you go up to the roof and you get this beautiful view of the city. Like, just mind-blowing.”
Appropriately, an autographed copy of “Fistful of Metal,” Anthrax’s 1984 debut, sits prominently above the bar, in a well-stocked metal shrine ported over from the old space, which also includes goblets, skulls, bat and devil statuettes; a hat featuring the logo of L’Amour (a Brooklyn club that anchored the local metal scene in the ’80s and ’90s); and a set list from a 2019 Vitus show by British post-punk legends Killing Joke, all flanking a statue of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus adorned with black roses.
Linden, who played the old Vitus with Tower and even worked the door in the early days, said in a phone interview that she had “felt a lot of grief” over the club’s 2024 closure: “I really didn’t go to a lot of shows after that and realized, wow, Saint Vitus was this hub for not just the music, but also community.”
“It’s not as dingy as it used to be,” Linden added of the new location, “but it’s still a space for community.”
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