Rambo — bassist, Dallas lifer, veteran of Stick Pin and Robinson Hall — swears the spark came during what might have been a Misfits show. He can’t quite remember, but the impulse stuck. He picked up the phone and dialed.
On the other end was Justin Pickard. Known more for his rockabilly grit than punk sneer, Pickard has played everywhere from Adair’s Saloon to the Meyerson Symphony Center. If Rambo was the man with the plan, Pickard was the spark plug that got the hot rod's engine running. He bought in immediately, and the two began sketching the outlines of something loud, fast and unbothered by genre rules.
They needed muscle. Brandon Keebler, a drummer with years in Dead Beat Poetry, brought the kind of steady hands you want when the whole job depends on timing. Lead guitarist Heath Brackett, a barber by trade and a metalhead by nature, rounded out the group. Keebler and Brackett both have flexed their musicality through Dallas clubs in more bands than they could list.
The crew was complete. The plan was simple. They would play rock and roll however they wanted. Throw that into a blender with a little bit of filth and fury, and you have punk rock.
Every band needs a name, and this one arrived in a way that made too much sense. The scene is imagined as follows:
“We need a band name,” Pickard said to Rambo.
Rambo grabbed the closest book in reach — Rob Lowe’s autobiography — and shrugged. “I’ll flip to a random word. That’ll be it. Screw it.”
Pickard didn’t miss a beat. “Screw it.”
They opened the book, pointed, and landed on a single word: gotten.
“So we’re The Gotten,” Rambo said.
“Yes,” Pickard answered.
The name stuck. They’re The Gotten. Their singles so far have laid out the blueprint. “Becoming,” engineered, along with all the other tracks by Keebler, drives like a semi with no brakes — heavy, jagged, more menace than melody. “Quiet Time” leaned hard into Motörhead grit, Brackett’s fingerprints all over it. Pickard, watching the guitarist let it rip, offered only an aside: “He’s from Arkansas. He’s a barber.” As if that explained everything. “Love and Suicide” smolders where the others charge, in on itself, tension wrapped tight in layers of guitar. Landing almost as if Social Distortion was fronted by Danzig. Each single seems less like songs and more like dispatches, sketches of four players bashing their influences into shape.
If the singles were the blueprint of a heist, the live set was when the alarms were tripped, the sirens started blaring. At Double Wide during a night of punk rock with The Gotten, Noogy and The Darned (a tribute to The Damned) last Friday, The Gotten leaned straight into chaos — barbed, unpolished and loud in the right ways. The night flowed with their brand of raw energy, climaxing on a song written by the drummer, “Beach Party Murder Mystery.” A song built upon the title, sang almost to the point of a mantra; a surf-punk detour that sent beach balls bouncing across the crowd — Dead Milkmen by way of Deep Ellum.
Keebler’s drumming snapped the band forward with a locksmith’s precision, every snare hit tumbling down the set further. Pickard and Rambo shared grins between songs like co-conspirators already past the point of no return. And Brackett was the wild card — soloing with a metalhead’s fire, barber shears traded for a guitar that cut just as close.
It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t supposed to be. That was the point.
For a band born half out of boredom and half out of impulse, The Gotten already feel strangely inevitable. Four players from four corners — punk, rockabilly, metal and beyond — wired together not by polish but by spark.
It’s not about reinvention, and it’s not nostalgia either. It’s a reminder that loud, raw, unglamorous rock and roll still rattles the walls when you let it.
Sure, the name may have been lifted at random from Rob Lowe’s autobiography, but it fits. The Gotten. A little absurd, a little accidental, but it sticks in your head the moment you say it.
The Gotten: get it, or get got.
