After more than 30 years, influential St. Louis band Dazzling Killmen have reformed. The band will bring their heavy experimental music back home for a show at Red Flag on November 22.
Dazzling Killmen was born of an idea from Nick Sakes in 1989. After years of seeing shows around St. Louis and organizing some hardcore shows of his own, Sakes saw his window for starting a band rapidly closing as he entered his mid 20s.
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“I remember going to shows and seeing the same three or four pop-punk bands that would always get picked to open for iconic, huge bands like The Jesus Lizard,” Sakes says. “And I thought, Hey, I could do that! I bet if I put something together, we could do that.”
Sakes linked up with his friend Darin Gray, who was playing bass in a band called Culture Shock, and helped teach Sakes guitar. Gray also brought in drummer Blake Fleming, who he has played with in jazz combos at Lewis & Clark Community College. The three-piece played their first show together in 1990, later adding guitarist Tim Garrigan into the mix to round out the lineup.
Dazzling Killmen then kicked off their five-year tenure, playing around St. Louis and hitting the road on tour. Sakes says that he looked to local contemporaries such as Uncle Tupelo and Culture Shock as the models for how to be in a band and book shows. Dazzling Killmen’s sound is a blend of heavy hardcore with complex rhythms and song structure. While the descriptors “proggy,” “jazz-inflected,” and “noise rock” come to mind when describing the band, it often eludes easy classification.
“We don’t really sound jazzy,” Fleming says with a laugh. “It’s just because we play our instruments a little better, beyond punk-rock level, people were always like, ‘You guys are like jazz!’”
This difficult-to-classify sound meant they didn’t always fit into the local scenes, which were geared more toward poppier punk and the burgeoning alt-country sound, but the band still found success. Their albums gained praise, and the band played with the likes of Fugazi, Neurosis, and The Jesus Lizard, among others.
In their original five-year run, Dazzling Killmen released two EPs and two full-length albums, put out by the St. Louis label Skin Graft Records. The albums included Dig Out the Switch in 1992, recorded by Steve Albini and produced by Jeff Tweedy, and Face of Collapse in 1994, also recorded by Albini, which Alternative Press declared “The number one heaviest album of the decade.” Dazzling Killmen officially broke up in the fall of 1995, shortly before a planned tour of Japan with Jim O’Rourke. They played their final show in 1994 at The Other World in St. Louis.
In the wake of the breakup, Dazzling Killmen still loomed large for many bands and musicians who came after, and they amassed a cult following that has only grown over the intervening three decades. It was this cult following that led to their reformation. Sakes says it was an ask from Mike Taylor of the band Pg. 99, who also organizes the Dark Days Bright Nights festival in Richmond, Virginia, who got the ball rolling on reforming Dazzling Killmen.
“Mike Taylor always championed us,” Sakes says. “We were his favorite band. He emailed me, kinda out of the blue, and he said, ‘Man, we’re putting this fest together. What would it take for you to actually do this?’”
Sakes was initially hesitant, as all of the members were now spread across the world with their own lives. Gathering everyone and taking the time off to rehearse and get tight again seemed like a daunting task. But when Taylor asked again the following year for the 2025 edition of the festival, Sakes and Fleming started thinking it might be worth trying to play together again. While they initially tried to get the full lineup back together, both Gray and Garrigan wanted to leave their time in Dazzling Killmen in the past, but gave Sakes and Fleming their blessing to carry on the band’s legacy. Ben Greenberg of the band Uniform and Evan Jagels have stepped in to take over Garrigan and Gray’s parts, respectively.
Like any band getting back together after this long, Sakes and Fleming had some sense of the hype they needed to contend with, but as they rehearsed and eventually got back on stage with a short East Coast tour in summer 2025, it was clear that the magic was still there.
“It all became very real, getting out of the rehearsal space and onto a stage,” Fleming says. “The amazing thing was that we really seemed to exceed people’s expectations. After our first show back, we were really loving it and feeling great doing it, too.”
After that East Coast tour, Dazzling Killmen are now bringing their reformed iteration back to Red Flag in St. Louis as part of a small fall tour of the Midwest. The bill for the show includes Collinsville math-rock band Ring, Cicada, as well as their punk contemporary Ultraman, who are still going strong today.
“Tim Jamison [from Ultraman] helped us with so many cool out-of-town shows and was just our champion and helped guide us,” Sakes says. “And their new album kicks ass, too. They’re still Ultraman, and that’s going to be fun as hell.”
Sakes notes that the Red Flag show will see the band playing their album Face of Collapse, along with other odds and ends from their catalog. The goal is to put on a homecoming show that connects and entertains.
“We really hope that people get their money’s worth and really get their heads blown off, in a real positive manner,” Fleming says.
While their show in St. Louis is their last for the year, it is by no means the end of this iteration of Dazzling Killmen. After the overwhelmingly positive response they saw to their first shows back this summer, Sakes and Fleming are excited about the prospect of touring more, perhaps on the West Coast and in Europe, alongside some potential festivals in 2026. After all this time, they’re just as excited to keep playing together again.
“We’re excited to keep going with it,” Fleming says. “There are so many people who didn’t get to see us the first time around, and luckily for us our audience seems to have grown. We have a lot of reasons to keep going forward with it and we’ve really enjoyed doing this as a group together again.”
