EVIL The Following

Hot Take

The Following is a short-travel bike that rides like a trail bike and corners like a BMX. It's slacker than most bikes in this category, shorter in the chainstays than anything comparable, and rewards riders who treat it as a small enduro bike rather than a big XC bike. It asks more of you on long flat climbs than a Tallboy or a Spur does. It gives more back when the trail points down. The Radavist's Paul Kalifatidi called it "an enduro bike repackaged with a shorter-travel suspension system," which is the cleanest framing anyone's landed on for this bike.

The Brand

Evil is a small Bellingham outfit with the sort of branding that makes clear they haven't run their marketing past a focus group. The full-suspension lineup runs from the Following here through the Offering, the Wreckoning, the Insurgent, and the Epocalypse e-MTB, with a Chamois Hagar gravel bike and a Faction II steel dirt jumper rounding out the catalog. Names are either poetic or a brand war crime depending on your tolerance for it. Every full-suspension Evil uses Dave Weagle's DELTA suspension system, a short-link four-bar layout that Weagle tuned specifically for Evil's rearward axle path. DELTA is not what most brands do. Most brands run Horst-link or a four-bar with a lower pivot ahead of the bottom bracket. Evil's is tucked low and forward, giving the linkage that busy-looking cluster of pivots between the down tube and the shock, and the axle path that results is unusually rearward for a short-travel bike. It makes the Following feel like a longer-travel bike in rough compression, even though the numbers say otherwise. The full-suspension and gravel frames are bonded carbon with no welds, which is more expensive than welded construction by a meaningful margin. The dirt jump bike is Reynolds 520 steel, because dirt jumpers don't want carbon.

The Bike

The Following arrived in late 2014 as Evil's first 29er and one of the first short-travel bikes anywhere with seriously aggressive geometry. It's now in its third generation. The current production form is the Following LS ("longer, slacker," though Evil has variously called it "Lightly Salted" in marketing). Evil has retired the standard-wheelbase Following and consolidated on the LS. 120mm of rear travel on a 130mm fork, 29" wheels, 66.3° head angle in the Low position, 65.6° in X-Low. Chainstays are 430mm, which Evil markets as "wheelie short." Slack head angle and short chainstays is an unusual combination, and a lot of the Following's personality comes from that pairing.

Matt Beer put the Following in Pinkbike's 2022 Downcountry Field Test and wrote that "the Following shouldn't be neglected, because it punches well above its rank." MBR gave the V3 a 10 out of 10 and an Editor's Choice, describing it as "agility overload, combined with float-then-pop suspension." Singletracks reviewed the LS after a couple of months on it and wrote that "the whole downcountry category exists to thumb its nose at stuffy XC geometry" and that the Following embodies that ethos. BikeRadar wrote: "stick it in the X-Low bottom bracket position, and the Following has a special X factor that shines every time you lean it, flick it or smash it through corners."

The Last Word

If you want a downcountry bike that leans toward "rowdy," this is one of the clearer expressions of it. If you want one that leans toward "efficient," look elsewhere in the category.