Code Orange was the biggest band in Pittsburgh — until they weren’t.
In 2023, the Grammy-nominated hardcore band made an alt-rocky record, The Above, that they hoped would launch them out of the hardcore underground and into the heavy mainstream. That didn’t happen. Instead, The Above bombed commercially, the band fell apart internally, and their 2024 touring plans were scrapped entirely, landing Code Orange on an ongoing indefinite hiatus. The project that singer-songwriter Jami Morgan had been all-in on since he was a teenager was no longer viable, and the fallout was emotionally crushing for Code Orange’s boisterous bandleader.
“What I don’t like about myself is how sensitive I am and how much things affect me,” Morgan tells Pittsburgh City Paper during a frank conversation at his house in Squirrel Hill. “And what I do like about myself is that I can push through it and not give up.”
His persistence has been tested over the last year. In the aftermath of his band’s dissolution, Morgan and Code Orange synthesist/programmer Eric “Shade” Balderose decided to start from square one and launch a brand-new, totally different project called NOWHERE2RUN. This is not a rock band, but a dark, cinematic hybrid of dance, industrial, and rap music — what Morgan would loosely classify as “techno noir.”
NOWHERE2RUN’s first performance was supposed to go down at Pittsburgh’s Spirit venue on Halloween 2024, but the boys couldn’t catch a break. Thirty seconds into their first live appearance post-Code, their equipment glitched out and the set abruptly ended. Morgan remembers the entire crowd walking miserably out of the venue — “like a movie.”
“I seriously felt so fucking low,” Morgan recalls. “My band’s broken up, I don’t have a job, I’m fuckin’ 30 years old, I can’t even play a show at the fucking local venue anymore.”
The Halloween disaster was intended to be a preview for Bloodrave, a new dance event that Morgan and Balderose were set to debut at Spirit in December of 2024. After their ill-fated NOWHERE2RUN premiere, the guys were ready to cancel the Bloodrave outright. However, that very same Halloween night, Morgan was woken up at 5 a.m. with news that his wife’s dad was dealing with a medical emergency. Luckily, the health scare was resolved, but his loved one’s brush with mortality jolted Morgan out of his depressed slump and refueled his bloodlust.
“I was like, ‘grow up,’” he recalls, thinking about how juvenile his creative woes were compared to a medical crisis. “We’re doing this fuckin’ Bloodrave. Fuck it.”
Since then, Morgan and Balderose’s vampiric hunger hasn’t been sated. Bloodrave 1 was a rousing success, and throughout 2025, they’ve taken the event — a goth-tinged, metal-inspired, hard techno dance night where no blood, real or fake, is actually spilled — on the road across the U.S., playing for hundreds in Nashville, Brooklyn, and Las Vegas. The biggest, baddest Bloodrave yet will go down in Pittsburgh this Halloween at Spirit, where NOWHERE2RUN will redeem themselves from last year’s tragedy with a banger lineup and the most elaborate world-building they can pull off.
“It’s gonna be the sickest one by far,” Morgan gushes. “It’s gonna be fucking insane.”
The Bloodrave spectacular will double as a release show for NOWHERE2RUN’s debut EP, What Did You Do?, a 20-minute tour through Morgan and Balderose’s metallurgic latticework of menacing techno and snarling industrial rap. The EP arrives on Halloween via their own NOWHERE Recordings, an imprint of the metal powerhouses Rise Records and Pale Chord Music that Morgan and Balderose have been building out in tandem with their other endeavors: throwing Bloodraves, writing music, and scoring movies. Their debut film soundtrack, for an indie horror-thriller called Violence, debuted at this month’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.
All of these ventures are technically separate from one another, but they all fall under Morgan’s cinematic conceptual vision for NOWHERE2RUN. “One of our [producer] tags is ‘what is NOWHERE2RUN?,’” Morgan explains. “Because it’s literally like, ‘what is it?’ It’s not a band, it’s not just producers, it’s not just filmmakers — it’s an entity. Which I think can be cool and modern.”
In order to unleash this entity upon the world, Morgan and Balderose knew they needed to give NOWHERE2RUN its own “universe to live in.” Bloodrave is that very domain: a bass-heavy, leather-clad, sci-fi horror dance party directly inspired by the iconic rave scenes in action flicks such as Blade and The Matrix Reloaded. The production, entirely designed by Morgan and Balderose, includes gothic go-go dancers in cages, mesmerizing visuals projected behind the DJs, and a labyrinth of ceiling-to-floor sheets cordoning off the dancefloor to encase the audience in NOWHERE2RUN’s neo-noir chamber of reverie.
“We want it to feel like you’re in a movie,” Morgan enthuses.
Each Bloodrave boasts a mix of DJs that range from local party people to celebrity metal artists. Members of Kittie, HEALTH, and 3Teeth have performed at previous editions, and Shaun Lopez of Crosses (the darkwave band fronted by Deftones singer Chino Moreno) will be headlining this Halloween’s shindig in Pittsburgh. NOWHERE2RUN themselves perform at every Bloodrave, reconfiguring from two-man studio hermits into a mutant band — Balderose on the decks, Morgan on the mic, and Code Orange guitarist Domenic Landolina wielding his axe — that resembles a Frankenstein’s monster of Nine Inch Nails, The Prodigy, and JPEGMAFIA.
“Bloodrave is marketed and packaged as this goth industrial night, but really what I want it to be is like a new hybrid, where we kind of get some of the rap kids, some of the metal kids, and try to blend that a little.” Morgan says.
The sound NOWHERE2RUN harnessed on What Did You Do? is heavily responding to the energy they experienced throughout Bloodrave’s inaugural year. Whereas Code Orange’s The Above let the band’s warmer, softer alt-rock influences seep in, What Did You Do? is back to where Morgan and Balderose feel most comfortable — total darkness, conceptually and musically. The album includes an eclectic bunch of guest rappers — Backxwash, H09909, Lecxstacy, to name a few — spitting over Morgan and Balderose’s tantalizing beats, but the emotional continuity is sinister and cryptic.
“Our last couple years have been a little bit of a mystery to our fans,” Morgan says, referring to the unceremonious ending of Code Orange. They wanted to play into that sense of mystery and confusion with NOWHERE2RUN, piling on layers of meta meaning. The record opens with their glitchy producer tag, “we are lost in this maze,” a sentence that encapsulates how Morgan and Balderose have felt since Code Orange concluded and their futures became entirely uncertain.
“I felt like I was in this eternal blackness and I had to find my way out,” Morgan says. “Who am I? What happened here? What do I do now that my identity has been stripped away? What I did my whole life is gone, and I can’t hide behind a group.”
What Did You Do? is a total artistic reset for Morgan and Balderose. Although the album has traces of Code Orange’s industrial experimentalism, the genre-bending fusion of dance and rap music feels like a definitive de-coupling from anything remotely hardcore.
“I like the idea of this record being more of a question mark than an answer,” he muses. “It’s more of the beginning of a story than an end.”
Indeed, Morgan and Balderose know that they’re still rooting around in the dark. Although NOWHERE2RUN’s 2024 demo EP, Slivering the Senses, amassed some modest streams online, the project doesn’t yet have an audience anywhere near the scale of Code Orange’s. They’re very much still in the building phase, but they’re laying NOWHERE foundations wherever they can.
NOWHERE Recordings released an EP by Saphir Levi, a young L.A. songwriter, earlier this spring. Though Levi is nominally inspired by Michelle Branch and Alanis Morrisette, the EP carries a ghastly industrial undertone courtesy of NOWHERE2RUN’s production thumbprint. In early 2026, NOWHERE will issue a new album from Siiickbrain, another L.A. singer who Morgan and Balderose have A&R’d into a dark, futuristic pop industrialist.
With a film score agent in the bag and plenty more Bloodraves in the works, NOWHERE2RUN have big plans — including the impending release of new music under the Bloodrave moniker. All of Morgan and Balderose’s endeavors are in the nascent stages, but the universe they’re working within is vaster than ever.
“Code was a driven path,” Morgan says. “It was a purpose that I had to try to achieve, and it came to its conclusion, and I thought that would lead to my lights going out. But when my lights went out and I died, I just woke up in a new world. And it’s darker, but it’s bigger.”
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