Liteweight Champion Rides Shotgun With the Reaper Through Fire and Fantasy on Geronimo Hardstyle
Columbus Rock Band, Liteweight Champion pairs shoegaze guitars with power-pop hooks and a stubborn will to live.
COLUMBUS, OH (October 9, 2026) - The world is ending and everything is on fire. Somewhere on the freeway, you are doing one hundred and ten miles per hour with the Reaper in the passenger seat, both of you wearing matching sunglasses. It is a strange place to find peace, and it is exactly where this record wants to take you.
That freeway runs straight through Geronimo Hardstyle, the new album from Columbus rock band Liteweight Champion, out Friday, October 9, 2026. The first album from a fully formed Liteweight Champion, its twelve tracks pile loud, grungy guitars over a rhythm section that never loses time, with pop vocal melodies cutting clean through the noise.
Heavy, melodic guitar music is back at the center of the rock conversation. A new generation discovering Deftones has pulled distortion and atmosphere into the mainstream again, and bands like Nothing, Narrow Head, and Fleshwater have shown that crushing volume and real melody can share the same mix. Liteweight Champion approaches that sound from a second direction entirely: the songcraft of The Beatles. With Geronimo Hardstyle, the band brings a power-pop sensibility to the movement, writing hooks you can hum underneath the wall of sound.
"The songs are ferocious, the melodies are lush."
- Liteweight Champion
The band's preoccupations run wider than most rock records allow: tarot, aliens, unsolved murder mysteries, long nights lost in Elden Ring, and the overdue act of going outside to touch grass. Those obsessions are not set dressing. They are how these songs work through mental health, faith outside the usual institutions, and the question of what any of us are living for.
The sound of Geronimo Hardstyle lives in contrast. Guitars stack into a heavy, saturated wall while bass and drums stay locked underneath, keeping the chaos tethered to the ground. Over the top, the vocal melodies sit bright and forward in the mix, closer to sixties pop than to the buried murmur shoegaze is known for. Some passages turn grungy and frantic; others open into something sunny and weightless, like light breaking through smoke.
Escape is the album's engine, but it is not the destination. Geronimo Hardstyle opens with “Bloody Hell,” a song about slipping beneath the waves and dissociating for one night. From there it travels through alien starships on “Send One Down (While You’re Away),” a big red button pressed anyway on “The Great Beyond,” and the high-fantasy bloodlust of “Scorched Earth Serenity,” where the narrator refuses to give up their sovereignty. Early on, “Dead or Alive” offers a quiet turning point: the sudden realization that you are alive and might as well chase the dream. By the time “LIFE” arrives, the fantasy has done its work. The world is still burning, but the record has chosen to stay in it.
"We created a world to escape into and the songs are the soundtrack inside this world."
- Liteweight Champion
Back on the freeway, the fire is still burning and the speedometer still reads one hundred and ten. Somewhere between the first track and the last, though, the ride stops feeling like an escape and starts feeling like a reason to keep going.
Credits
Produced & Engineered by: Sean Gleeson
Mastered by: Glenn Davis
Cover Art & Design: Bella Latell
Photography: Karlsberg Creative
Back Cover Photo: Chris Heidel
About Liteweight Champion
Liteweight Champion is the Columbus, Ohio rock project of Sean Gleeson. After the last record from his previous project, Campbell, channeled pandemic-era fury at institutional abandonment, Gleeson turned inward. He recorded Liteweight Champion's self-titled debut with Colin Giacalone, releasing it on November 14, 2024, with a release show at Ace of Cups. Matter News heard nods to everything from My Bloody Valentine to Hawthorne Heights in the record, while Powerpopaholic and Punkeando covered the singles "It Is Always" and "Everyone is Wrong Most of the Time."
Since then, Liteweight Champion has grown into a four-piece, with Gleeson and Giacalone joined by Sam Gilton and Casey Costello. The band has played Columbus stages including the Columbus Arts Festival main stage, Bank St. Bash, Cafe Bourbon St., and Sweeney's Walnut St. Tavern.
Pairing a wall of guitar with bright power-pop vocal melodies, the band's sound lands somewhere between The Beatles and Deftones: grungy and chaotic one moment, sunny and weightless the next. Their songs draw on high fantasy, tarot, aliens, unsolved mysteries, and video games to wrestle with life, death, and mental health, and to make a case for loving life anyway.
Geronimo Hardstyle, the band's second album and first as a fully formed lineup, arrives October 9, 2026.
