Integrity’s first American show in almost two years was centered around their mid-period releases, including Walpurgisnacht, and the focus on the release and its brothers couldn’t have been more fitting: As the band storm onto the stage, opening with “Vocal Test,” Baltimore’s Soundstage Theatre broke out into a huge circle pit/chant, with the audience screaming along in unison to frontman Dwid Hellion’s wordless howls. It really was like a late night invocation- call it a sort of expression beyond words that the audience shared with the band. Not to be too heady about the whole thing, but a sort of dark energy truly was conjured as Hellion stacked his rumbling roar onto of the Motorheadish riffs of the song.

Integrity’s last US performance was in a modified version of their Systems Overload lineup, and while that performance was undoubtedly one for the books, the 2015 performance was an animal of a different sort. The Systems Overload show featured both of the Melnick brothers and the band leaned towards their technical, metal influences. But here, the band was decidedly more “punk” in their playing. Tempos were pushed up, songs were more jagged and explosive, and the band snap from tune to tune, gaining momentum as they blasted from tracks like “Blessed Majesty” to “Rise” and “In Contrast of Sin” to “To Die For.”

Hellion himself sounded fantastic. His glass-and-tar voice is one of the few vocals that could compete with the bands rampaging, tank-tread attack, and as the band crossed its twenty-three-pus song set, he really dug into the source of these composition. Many of the tunes were over twenty years old, but by the way Hellion spit out the refrain of “Systems Overload” or the thrash attack of “Taste my Sin,” Hellion delivered with such a fire it felt like the songs were generated right there, in some spontaneous dark illumintion.

Of course, Hellion’s impish humor, which seems to be under appreciated, slipped through the band’s menacing façade. A389’s Domenic Romeo handled guitar for the band (and did a thrilling, masterful, yet distinct take on these tunes). But, during one of the more complex passages of a son, Hellion looked over at Romeo and said, “No pressure, Dom, no pressure! Then, while Romeo was furrowing his brow, trying to pull of the finger athletics required for the song, Hellion marched over to within two inches of Romeo and stared at him like a drill sergeant while Romeo tried to stay on target.

A highlight of the night was “Walpurgisnacht” itself. The song underscores what makes Integrity such a captivating, but mysterious band. The song started out with a muscular, driving riff before Hellion smashed through with his furious bark. Then, at the live show, the band made sure to give the song its proper station and played the entire outro, a spooky, classical sounding muted outro. Few bands can be this loud and this quiet, and sound equally menacing at both times. As this live show made clear, Integrity is a special band not because they are the loudest or the heaviest (though they frequently are), but because they take hard music and do weird, unusual things with it. A band like this shows not only how vast the soundscape of aggressive music is, but also, shows just how much is left to explore (and also how many bands are content to stay in a small, confined box). Integrity walked outside of that box with their very first 7-inch, and as they morph through their various incarnations, they get deeper and deeper into the plains of the bizarre.