How to have a smashing time in L.A.’s rage rooms

It’s Sunday morning in Downtown Los Angeles and the city is mid-yawn, slowly stretching itself awake. The streets of the Fashion District are deserted save for a lone dog walker trailing a tiny chihuahua, its nails scratching softly against the pavement. All is hushed. Yet when I push open the unassuming door of Rage Ground, an entirely different scene is unfolding.

Above the thrash metal soundtrack blasting through the speakers, a woman — who, just minutes earlier, had quietly entered the building and tapped her bank card at the welcome desk — is letting rip. A visceral scream ricochets off the walls of the former warehouse as, feet planted like a baseball player at the plate, she takes a full-bodied swing with a bat at a beaten-up old car parked inside a steel cage.

I’ve come to LA to explore the city’s rage room trend. Since Rage Ground opened in 2017 as the city’s first anger-release experience, a handful of others have popped up in California. The concept didn’t start in the US — rising to prominence first in Japan a decade earlier — but it’s found fertile ground here. Perhaps that’s unsurprising given it was in Los Angeles that psychologist Dr Arthur Janov popularised primal scream therapy in the late 1960s. The avant-garde approach focused on releasing screams and sobs to access repressed pain, and it soon captured the imagination of countercultural types and celebrities, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In more recent years, rage-ceremony wellness retreats organised by the likes of Secret Sanctuary — along with practitioners including rage ritual facilitator Mia Banducci and somatic healer Rachel Pringle Urb — have found a new audience, fuelled in part by hashtags such as #rageritual on TikTok and YouTube.

(Related: Scream therapy is making a comeback—here's why.)

Karla Torres, Rage Ground’s manager, says the trend is particularly appealing to women. “I’d say between 60-70% of our guests are female,” she says above the sound of shattering glass. “It’s usually someone going through a hard time, like a breakup, divorce or just a frustration in their everyday life.”

Keen to see what all the fuss is about, I sign the waiver and slip into green canvas overalls, welding gloves and a construction helmet with a flip-down face shield. My rage booth is clad in graffiti-covered plywood. Inside, a pyramid of glasses and bottles towers before me, stacked like a champagne display at a ritzy cocktail reception. Picking up a crowbar, I suddenly feel like I’m confronting more than just breakables. There’s also the weight of generations of female social conditioning that discourages displays of anger, compounded by a typically British instinct for emotional restraint.

All of that melts away within minutes, however, as I take a deep breath and bring the crowbar down hard, smashing the bottles to smithereens. They explode in a deeply satisfying cacophony of clinks and pops, shards of broken glass scattering across the floor like twinkling gems. By the time the knock on the door comes to signal the end of my 30-minute session, the rhythm of destruction has become almost hypnotic.

Next, I head to Hollywood Boulevard, the palm-tree-lined artery that’s home to a constellation of Walk of Fame stars. It’s also home to World of Illusions’ Smash It! experience. Here, guests are invited to write on a plate the habits, traits, fears or irritations they want banished from their lives, before getting them to hurl the personalised crockery against the walls of an aluminium-lined gallery room visible from the street. ‘Laziness’ is the most common scrawling, the woman behind the desk tells me as she hands over a pair of safety glasses and a neat stack of plates. I launch the latter, one by one, at the wall with gusto just as a tourist bus pulls up alongside the kerb.

As passengers crane their necks to watch the destruction unfolding, it’s tempting to dismiss rage rooms as just another performative LA fad. And yet, in a modern world thick with low-level anxiety and unprocessed frustration, these spaces are finding an eager audience. As Karla at Rage Ground put it earlier, most of its visitors come to work through the weight of emotions that everyday life asks them to shoulder. It seems that, in a city built on unfiltered self-expression, LA’s rage rooms offer travellers a rare souvenir: not something to carry home, but, in fact, something to leave behind.