Hirax & Dark Angel

TAMPA, FL | THE ORPHEUM | 09.16.2025

IMPRISONED BY EXCUSES

PThe next time you start bargaining with yourself—I’m tired, my back hurts, I’m too old to mosh, I can’t stage dive I have errands to run tomorrow—remember this: on September 16, 2026, Katon W. De Pena turned 62 and blew out candles by detonating a room. He dove headfirst into the crowd like a true maniac, then had some birthday cake. Because if you work that hard for that long, you earn a little treat.

Hirax isn’t cosplay or nostalgia. Every breath from Katon carries the weight of decades—van miles, cheap motels, the quiet monkish work that keeps a blade razor sharp. He is the romanticized myth of Heavy Metal made flesh. Conducting maniacs from every stage he graces to lose their minds shoulder to shoulder. And if that doesn’t work, he’ll jump in the crowd, get in your face and make sure you feel what he feels.

No one up there is doing this for their health. This is a compulsion. They’re there because some people are built like furnaces—feed them distortion or they die cold. Hirax shows up for the lifers, the skeptics, the kid in the back tasting blood and deciding if this is his personality now. And on that night, watching a sixty-two-year-old man vault into the void with a grin, my excuses dried up. I’m inspired!

If you’re lucky, you grow old; if you’re blessed, you stay dangerous. Hirax is both. So, the next time the couch starts making promises, think of Katon—get in the car. GO! Because he is in the van right now, on the way to your town to bash your skull in. Devotion isn’t pretty, but it’s worth the effort.assion doesn’t die. If you’re persistent, it gets leaner, meaner—something you carry like a scar you thumb when no one’s watching. The Reversal of Man set wasn’t a reunion; it was a resurrection. Not nostalgic, not a half-throttle victory lap. It felt real. You could hear the years spent thinking about this in the first notes: riffs repeated over and over in quiet rooms, lyrics mouthed in the shower, fingers counting time on tables. The work never stopped.