In Shivan We Trust: A Teenage Metal Mass in a Jersey Auditorium

Bordentown High School shouldn’t be the setting for a religious awakening. But here we are. Fluorescent lights humming above a polished auditorium stage, red curtains drawn back like a velvet portal to hell. Rows of rigid seating packed with the unsuspecting faithful—parents, teens, teachers, punk kids with chipped black nail polish and metalheads in Carcass shirts. It’s a high school auditorium, but tonight it felt like the center of the earth cracking open.

Shivan took that stage like they were summoning something ancient and pissed off. And from the first scream to the final note, the room was theirs. No hesitation. No warm-up. Just pure, detonated chaos. This wasn’t a concert. It was a full-blown conversion.

And it started with Conor.

Conor: guitar, lead vocals, unholy ringleader of this whole machine. Sixteen and already moving like a frontman born under the sign of Halford and Hetfield. He stepped to the mic and screamed “ARE YOU READY?” and the crowd lost their goddamn minds. It wasn’t polite cheering. It was obedience. Worship. He commanded, they answered. He raised his arms like a prophet and told everyone to get out of their seats—and everyone rose. No awkward shuffle, no hesitation. Like they’d been waiting years for someone to give them permission to go feral.

“I wanna see headbanging!” he shouted, and I swear to God I saw Boomers—people with mortgages and titanium knees—snapping their necks so hard they had to be helped to the floor. These were not ironic nods. These were acts of spiritual surrender. No one was safe from it. This wasn’t a generation gap. It was a fucking earthquake, and every age fell into it.

And while Conor was shouting the walls down, he was also shredding. A Flying V slung low like a war axe, fingers flying so fast they blurred. He wasn’t playing solos—he was tearing dimensions open. Tearing the brass strings apart with this surgical chaos, unleashing riffs that sounded like sirens for the end times. That guitar wasn’t an instrument. It was a weapon. And he wielded it like he’d been born into battle.

Behind him, the band was a furnace. Tight as a noose and twice as deadly.

The drummer—Jake. I’ve never heard a double kick do what this guy did. It was like listening to a Finnish demon roll its R’s for thirty seconds straight. Punctuation through percussion. Every bar a string of periods, exclamation marks, ellipses—bludgeoning the beat like it owed him money. He never looked up. Just stared into the void, arms and legs moving like a man possessed.

Then came the bassist, Dean. And I don’t say this lightly—Christ was on stage tonight and turned water into molten fucking metal. Cool beyond comprehension. Total presence. His bass didn’t sit in the mix. It moved it. Everything he played dripped with swagger and destruction, anchoring the chaos with this earthshaking low end that felt like it was rewiring your spine from the feet up. You could feel it. Like tectonic plates shifting under the floor.

Lead guitar? CJ. A sub. Stand-in. Temporary body, permanent fire. This guy came out swinging like he’d been part of the band since the womb. Sprinting across the stage, pinning down the rhythm like he was nailing it into the floor with steel fists. Didn’t miss a beat. Looked like he’d die before he dropped a note. That’s commitment. That’s fucking punk.

They finished their first song and the place had already come unglued. I’ve never seen a crowd like this in a high school. Like actual mayhem was imminent. People screaming, sweaty, eyes glazed like they’d seen something too bright to understand. And when Conor grinned into the mic and said “How we doing, Bordentown?” it was like tossing a match into gasoline.

“Today’s my birthday!” he shouted. And the crowd erupted into a full, chaotic, half-sung “Happy Birthday” chant, like it was tradition. Like the pope himself had just blessed the stage and we were all in on the secret.

Then came “I Am the One.” Fast as hell. Vicious. Barely contained. Conor stretches his hand toward the crowd, smirking like a devil just before the flames. “Does everybody know how to headbang?” he growls, and they answer without speaking. The room becomes a sea of flying hair and flailing limbs, a collective seizure of joy. The riffs come like bullets. The beat never lets up. It’s not music anymore—it’s movement. Command. Ecstasy.

At one point, I saw a girl stumble backward into her seat. Not drunk. Not passed out. Just overwhelmed. Her brain had clearly just ricocheted around her skull one too many times. That’s the level we’re at. Sonic trauma in the best way possible. Music so powerful it knocks you into next week and leaves your soul to catch up later.

And all of this—every scream, every stomp, every broken brain cell—is coming from kids. That’s the part that wrecks me. This isn’t some jaded band with a tour manager and a rider full of gluten-free whiskey. This is a teenage band in a public school auditorium. And the crowd? They’re acting like they just saw Sabbath on their first tour. Like God Himself came down with a distortion pedal and said “Here. Raise hell.”

And Shivan did.

I’ve seen bands try to fake this kind of power. I’ve seen seasoned pros fall short of what these guys pulled off in fifteen minutes flat. Because this wasn’t about polish or pyro or press. This was about presence. Raw, undeniable truth. The kind of show you don’t recover from. The kind that changes your bar for what live music should be.

When the final note hit, no one moved. No chatter. No rustling of jackets. Just the shortest beat of thick, vibrating silence. Reverent. Shaken. Wrecked.

Somewhere behind me, I heard someone whisper it. Not a joke. Not a chant. A prayer.

“In Shivan we trust.”

Amen.