PRONG celebrates 31 years of CLEANSING at The Copa Room

October 3, 2025 – Friday night at The Copa Room inside The Tuscany Hotel & Casino, the legendary PRONG performed in celebration of 31 years of their 1994 album, Cleansing. For those unaware, this album featured one of the band’s most popular songs, “Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck.” 

This was my first venture to The Copa Room, and at first glance, the venue is clean, well organized, and very intimate. There’s no barricade, which grants the audience a special kind of up close performance. (As someone who’s worked many shows that did not have barricades, this is never a problem for me. I enjoy moving through crowds and finding photo framing that may not be conventional for the regular person.) This venue is listed as having a 180 standing room capacity, so this made Prong’s performance all the more cool. To see such a landmark band of the 90’s groove/thrash/industrial sound in such a small place is a rarity these days. 

I last saw Prong in 2019 in support of Hatebreed’s 25 year tour. I couldn’t recount much of that show, (thank my toddler, my brain’s been pretty fried since 2020) I felt like I was walking into this with a fresh set of eyes. A massive 28 song setlist was taped to the stage prior to the band starting up. While this small run of shows was in celebration of Cleansing, the setlist featured songs scattered throughout the band’s thirteen record discography. 

The crowd seemed relatively calm for the first half of the show, which slightly made me question if the base is just getting a little too old to show some more energy and enthusiasm. But at about the halfway mark the crowd had a surge of energy and fans could be seen moshing in the small space in front of the stage. This isn’t a criticism of the band in any way, Prong delivered their set with precision, and Tommy Victor could be regularly seen engaging the crowd and demonstrating his guitar skills while people in the front row held their phones close by to capture the magic. Outside of the seemingly regular occurrence of a drunken patron causing a slight distraction towards the end of the evening, the show stayed solid. 

My only complaint as a viewer is the lighting, while it’s not terrible lighting, there wasn’t any movement or effects to heighten the performance. This doesn’t deter me from coming back in the future, this space is really neat and it’s exciting to see the promoted shows popping up all through my feeds, but it would be cool to see a varied set of lighting to match the type of music being played. Outside of that complaint, I very much enjoyed getting to see such a monumental band that has such an extensive history, performing in such an intimate setting. There were a lot of things going on this night, and I’m glad I was able to see this one in particular. 

As mentioned above, the advertised dates for this celebration were skim, but the show is PACKED with all the goods. So if one of the few remaining days hit nearby, make sure you go get your groove on!!

PHOTO CREDIT: Live photos by Courtney Ware for ZRockR Magazine – (c) 2025 – All Rights Reserved.