What happened when Nails, Gatecreeper, Cradle Of Filth and a ton more brought the noise to Manchester for the biggest Damnation Festival yet.
Damnation Festival isn’t just about the hardest, heaviest sounds from the world of extreme music. From the glassy, classical-inflected delicacy of A.A. Williams to Russian Circles’ more sweeping post-metal moments, there is always space for the subtler sounds of the alt. underground.
But this year’s 19th edition must stand as one of the most unforgiving editions yet, with everyone from UK heavyweights Employed To Serve, Memoriam and Cradle Of Filth, to rising stars of American metal like Enforced, 200 Stab Wounds and Gatecreeper, and European titans The Ocean, Cult Of Fire and Ahab absolutely throttling Manchester’s massive BEC arena into submission.
Marking their 20th anniversary in 2025 with the addition of an extra day across the weekend of November 8 – 9, things are only going to get bigger, better and more bruising from here on out. But rather than getting ahead of ourselves, we grabbed a double-pinter of Damnation-branded beer and chucked ourselves headlong into a weekend of joyous, ear-wrecking carnage…
Damnation’s excellent Friday night pre-show has expanded into a de facto second day for the festival since it moved into the same venue post-COVID, and if its ‘A Night Of Salvation’ moniker suggests a calm before the storm then you’d better think again.
There’s no better band to press that point home than Underdark. The couple of thousand punters spilling into Bowlers are ready to get the party started, but the Nottingham crew soundtrack the first drinks of the day with one of the most remorselessly bleak sets imaginable. That’s not to say its anything less than brilliant. Leaning heavily on last year’s superb second album Managed Decline, vocalist Abi Vasquez and the gang drag Damnation into the darkness of life in the UK’s ever-more-downtrodden working classes. It’s grim up north. Thrillingly so. (SL)
Who would’ve thought Pikachu could become a Damnation icon? Picking up where they left off in this room back in 2022, Austrian thrash jokers Insanity Alert prove they’re just about as much fun as you can have with oversized inflatable clothes on, as a bloke dressed as everyone’s favourite Pokémon once again gets absolutely wrecked in the pit.
The main attraction for this exclusive set is a run-through of gnarly highlights from S.O.D.’s 1985 classic Speak English Or Die – complete with deliciously ironic ‘Guten Tag!’ signs being lifted up amongst the chaos (about as sensible as the massive inflatable cocks waved around). However, the reworked classics from their new EP Moshemian Thrashody are even more ridiculous fun. Welcome To The Moshpit, for instance, sees them ham up Guns N’ Roses’ Welcome To The Jungle, while Beerless Fiesta is a 100mph twist on George Michael’s Careless Whisper. However, it’s their version of Iron Maiden’s Fear Of The Dark – ‘Beer In The Park’ – that sees absolutely everyone shouting themselves hoarse in one of the best moments of the weekend. (SL)
Like Enslaved gazing out over the flat lands and big skies of East Anglia rather than the Norwegian mountains, Fen's black metal is one of otherworldly atmospheres and vastness. It's a sound that ably fills the enormous room housing the stage, and manages to turn this industrial aircraft hangar-looking expanse of concrete and metal girders into something far more inspiring. Frank 'The Watcher' Allain's riffs are vast, impressive things that do a lot with a little, occasionally picking things up into proggier territory, creating a vibe that fits perfectly with the autumn cold outside. Fen-tastic stuff. (NR)
Anyone who’s encountered them tearing up the UK underground circuit over the past few years will already know that Sugar Horse have grown into one of the most exciting new bands in the UK. Chucking elements of doom, hardcore, stoner and punk into an untamed, unrestrained racket that revels in the contrasts between light and dark, pain and bliss, the sacred and the profane, it was always clear they’d go down a treat. But nobody anticipates just how hard they decimate, with the unruly The Shape Of ASMR To Come, Shouting Judas At Bob Dylan and Office Job Simulator expanding in scale and volume to truly awesome levels. Behold: there's a new set of UK titans on the rise. (SL)
With Sick Of It All sadly forced to cancel their appearance due to Lou Koller’s ongoing cancer recovery, those looking for a good, old-fashioned hardcore treat are just as well served by Discharge. Celebrating their essential Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing debut album from 1982, the Stoke punks are on riotous, snotty form today. As ever, there's something perversely peculiar about having a whale of a time to songs as stark as Protest And Survive, Drunk With Power and the still-chillingly relevant anti-nuclear diatribe of The Possibility Of Life's Destruction, but it's also a marvel that a band of Discharge's vintage playing songs now 42 years old can still make such an aggressively razor-sharp impact. (NR)
It's been a relatively quiet year for Employed To Serve while they finish up work on their fifth album. What this means today is that the Woking wrecking crew are particularly energised and fired-up – literally, when they begin unleashing enormous columns of fire. Playing 2022's stunning Conquering album in full, from the moment the shimmering intro of Universal Chokehold is smashed to pieces as the song's tumbling heaviness roars into view, they are unstoppable today. Once the first crowdsurfers go up at Justine Jones' command, it's a non-stop avalanche over the barrier, while the pit is pandemonium, even with one bloke eating a full-on pizza in it. The time spent in arenas with Gojira last year has hardened them into the sort of band capable of flexing in places this size, and there's not a moment today when they're not a finely-tuned musical weapon. Absence has only made the heart, and the mosh, grow stronger. (NR)
One of the most booked bands in its history, The Ocean have a special bond with Damnation. Even still, their addition to the bill is a pleasant surprise, following the cancellation of Sick Of It All’s set, doing one final run-through of their classic sixth album Pelagial before the current line-up go their separate ways.
"Come join us, as we sink through the boundless vasts of blue," they teased on that announcement, and that’s largely the experience they deliver, pulling the crowd under with the jazzy melody of Mesopelagic: Into The Uncanny, filling lungs with the fury of Bathyalpelagic III: Disequilibrated and waving goodbye with the crashing majesty of Benthic: The Origin Of Our Wishes. It's enormous music deserving of this massive stage. (SL)
Incense at festivals is always a good idea. Especially when it's doing more than just covering the smell of dropped guts and helping masked Czech black metallers Cult Of Fire create a suitably ceremonial vibe. So, too, do the altar at the front of the stage (featuring, among other things, a pineapple), Vojtěch Holub's enormous horns sticking out of his head, and Vladimír Pavelka and Marek Opatrný playing their guitars while sat on enormous, throne-line structures at either side of the stage. Musically, the band's mix of metallic power and moments of almost meditative repetition are a treat, but it's a show as striking and enticing as this that does much of tonight's heavy lifting with ease. (NR)
Tongue-in-cheek conversations abound throughout Damnation about how exactly you pronounce the name of one of the most exciting new bands on the bill. Is it ‘L-L-N-N’? Is it ‘Linn’? For the record, we’re pretty sure it’s the former but, frankly, it doesn’t really matter when the music is this suffocatingly intense.
The Copenhagen collective already blew UK audiences away, ramping their sci-fi-meets-post-hardcore attack up at the last two editions of ArcTanGent, but they seem emboldened and enhanced by the concrete surrounds of the BEC, wringing levels of suffering and ear-rattling horror from Desecrator and Obsidian that make them seem like a different beast entirely. Our ears haven’t stopped ringing… (SL)
"Dude, we were not ready for that this morning," Knox Colby tells K! after their set. "We had no idea how that was gonna work at noon." On the other side of the barrier, Enforced's jolly frontman clearly couldn't see what several thousand punters do: a masterclass in heavy thrash that starts the day like an alarm clock with a hand grenade attached to it. With no time to stop for breath, the Virginia crew feel even more intense than usual, ploughing through the set as fast as a shark and as heavy as an elephant in a skip. Too early? More like the perfect wake-up call. (NR)
You’d think that Pijn might struggle to make their mark at midday on an atrociously hungover Saturday, but the hometown heroes blow everyone away. Even shorn of violin following the departure of ex-Dawn Ray’d man Simon Barr, Our Endless Hours and On The Far Side Of Morning unfold with a fathomless emotional weight that more than makes up for any shortfall in riffy churn. And compared to the more set-in-their-ways other acts on the bill, it is the fluidity of the Pijn setup that makes each performance a priceless moment in time. A band to cherish. (SL)
For those seeking a more mellow start to the festivities, A.A. Williams' shadowy showing on the Pins & Knuckles Stage (her only UK gig this year) is the perfect way to ease in. Silhouetted against dusky stage lights, she appears as ghostly as her music sounds, a delicate, gothy mix that also wraps up this enormous room in a blanket of comfortingly heavy guitar. Recent single Splinter sounds particularly vast, while Hollow Heart and Evaporate have only become even more beautifully icy in the two years since they were released. Even the loud chatter of a couple of idiots during the quiet bits (most of them) can't shatter things, and it's another feather in the cap of one of the most singularly brilliant artists in Britain right now. (NR)
Last time Aaron Stainthorpe graced Damnation, he was immersing it in the misery of My Dying Bride. What a difference a couple of years can make. Although the ‘death pop’ branding of new band High Parasite might suggest something even fluffier than the synthy, gothy post-punk attack they actually deliver, the sight of a suited-up Aaron in a relatively flamboyant and manacled eye-shadow (“What time’s the wedding?!” comes one heckle) alongside bassist Tombs looking like a goth-rock Wes Borland confirms that this is a welcome, much needed change in pace for the Yorkshire legend. One album in, they might not (yet) have MDB’s peerless catalogue of proven hits, but the shadowy grooves of fresh bangers Hate Springs Eternal and Forever We Burn make sure that every misanthrope in attendance is having a damned good time. (SL)
With a production revolving around single red head torches attached to each of the four members, it looks initially like Celeste might have underestimated the scale of their assignment, but the Lyon extremists step it up startlingly. There’s a serrated edge to the blend of sludge, black and death metal in songs like Des torrents de coups and Le cœur noir charbon that seems destined to break free from the underground. And although the intense footage that eventually illuminates the video screens leads to some punters leaving the hall (preceded by a brief trigger warning missed by many in the festival churn) their sense of confronting, modernist theatre will live long in the memory. (SL)
There’s a hell of a lot going on with REZN. Rather than the straightforward exercise in stoner-doom some awestruck punters seem to have been expecting, there are wails of saxophone, jangling sitar and modular synths that seem to be controlled through some kind of games console controller. Even amongst some gloriously experimental contemporaries, Chasm, Indigo and Scarab feel like legitimate adventures into the musical unknown. Like a spliff soaked in acid, the Chicago collective offer up a trip tailored to those with the strongest, most open-minded constitutions, but you can bet your third eye it’s one worth taking. (SL)
"Headbangers to the front!" demands Chase Mason. Judging by the huge crowd who have gathered for Gatecreeper, the frontman is going to need a bigger stage to accommodate everyone along the front of it. Decked out in mirrored shades that, twinned with moustache, make him look like a metalised version of Jesse 'The Body' Ventura, he leads the Phoenix five through a set that makes Damnation submit as if it were no bother at all. The riffs to the chunky Ruthless and the malevolent, doomy moments of Craving Flesh see that the frontman's demands are met, kicking up a massive pit when the pace picks up, while newie Caught In The Treads from this year's brilliant Dark Superstition shows just how effective this stuff can be on a big stage like this. People in the pit singing HIM's Poison Girl to the chorus of The Black Curtain? Just adds to the party.
"Who here's got church in the morning?" enquires Chase at one point. "You need to go and say, 'Father, I'm sorry, I was bangin' with the 'Creeper last night.'" Too late, they've already got our souls. (NR)
It's almost impossible to get into the Holy Goat Brewing Stage for 200 Stab Wounds, with a big load of people stuck watching from the Bowlers' lobby. Such is the wage of being one of the most exciting new-ish death metal bands on the planet. And, frustrating as it might be for those unable to see, for the band it's a reward entirely deserved.
Hands Of Eternity absolutely bristles with morbid power, kicking up a pit from the off, Skin Milk is as knuckle-dragging as it is electrifying, and Drilling Your Head and Tow Rope Around The Throat remain as disgustingly delightful as their macabre titles. By frontman Steve Buhl's own admission they're not reinventing the wheel, but death metal doesn't need that. What 200 Stab Wounds add is a messy transfusion of new blood and then shock it into reanimation like a lightning bolt. Gorily great stuff. (NR)
“Three years ago today I found out I had cancer,” announces Fuming Mouth frontman Mark Whelan, recalling his recent experience with leukaemia as the Massachusetts maniacs unleash Hell. “But here I am today. I beat it.” There’s a sense of defiance burning through the walls of blistering guitars and the bulldozer energy of Master Of Extremity, Kill The Disease and Out Of Time that sees them stand out even on this stacked bill. And with a pit full of unhinged bruisers making sure they get a deserved heroes’ welcome, there’s real joy shining between the cracks of their concrete performance. Who knew that death metal could be so full of life? (JM)
Dark, brooding and unapologetically downbeat on record, Hangman’s Chair feel like a weightier, more unruly beast in the live arena. There’s a different flavour and a more fickle crowd this evening, compared to those on the rest of their ongoing co-headline run with superb Dutch rockers DOOL, but at the tail-end of the touring cycle for sixth album A Loner they’re a well-oiled machine, with the dusky sexiness of Cold & Distant and Who Wants To Die Old pulling you in, before new tracks such as DOOL-collab 2AM Thoughts and goth-rock banger Kowloon Lights hint at something truly special on the horizon. Well worth hanging on for. (SL)
Security look legitimately anxious as Nails plug in for one of the most eagerly-anticipated sets of the weekend. Violence is in the air, and the California icons are here to spark it into the flesh. Well, it’s more than a spark, actually, with flame stacks burning blue to supercharge the already ferocious You Will Never Be One Of Us, Scum Will Rise and Suffering Soul as fists fly through the pit and bodies topple freely over the barricade.
Arguably, they could’ve shorn some of the 20-odd songs from their setlist and actually increased the sense of panic-inducing urgency – they reach terminal velocity around the 30-minute mark, when a sense of rampaging repetition begins to creep in – but there are absolutely no complaints from the horde of gluttons for punishment fanatically hurling themselves at the stage. Nailed it. (SL)
Ten years ago, Bolt Thrower unknowingly bade farewell to their home country with a Damnation Festival headliner, less than 12 months before the passing of legendary drummer Martin ‘Kiddie’ Kearns. It's still arguably the greatest set in this festival’s glittering, storied history. It’s fitting, then, that their legendary frontman Karl Willetts is on hand to mark the occasion and renew the tank-track attack with current outfit Memoriam. The old magic can never fully be recaptured, sure, but with squadrons of the faithful turning the front rows into a war zone, weaponised cuts Surrounded (By Death), Undefeated and To The End are every bit as explosively defiant as their titles would suggest. (SL)
There are about 5,000 miles separating Orange County and the Borough Of Trafford, and the members of Bleeding Through look amusingly out-of-place when we spot them spilling from their transport sporting sunglasses under Manchester’s pale grey skies. They’re utterly dialled in come stage time, mind. Just over two decades since it ripped through the metalcore boom of the early 2000s, third album This Is Love, This Is Murderous is the main focus of this evening’s set, with Love Lost In A Hail Of Gunfire and On Wings Of Lead having lost little of their impact.
Brilliantly, the band refuse to get lost in nostalgic wallowing, finding time to showcase new single Dead But So Alive which – alongside the ravenous that pervades their performance – teases there’s still a world of heartfelt heaviness to be pumped from their beating chests. (SL)
Slipping deeper into Saturday night, many of this massive audience are beginning to sag from the sheer relentlessness of a mercilessly stacked bill. Thank fuck for Chicago post-metallers Russian Circles, then, whose mesmeric instrumentalism acts as a salve without sacrificing an ounce of heaviness. Like The Ocean, their proggy complexity and deep-layered atmospherics are elements integral to the Damnation formula. Not to downplay their visceral impact, of course. On their own tectonic terms, Quartered, Betrayal and Gnosis are compositions with the emotional weight to match any others on this line-up – or further out in the world of heavy music. No thanks to a narcissistic ‘influencer’, who spends a significant section of the set pinballing between the front rows, disrupting the dark magic by dazzling punters with a fucking ring-light, but it’s credit to Russian Circles’ elemental power that even that can’t ruin a(nother) spectacular showing. (SL)
Dragged Into Sunlight deserve their own ‘metal chad’ meme at this rate. Having apparently disappeared off the face of the earth for the past five years, the enigmatic Liverpudlians rock up at Damnation with minimal fanfare to absolutely level the place, then dissolve, with no explanation, back into the night. Earlier in the weekend, it’s possible to worry that their show can’t live up to the fan-generated hype. There’s constant chatter on excited lips and queues dozens deep for their limited merch. From the moment the sheets are pulled from those familiar bone-wreathed stage ornaments, the candles are lit, and the first notes of Boiled Angel rock the venue’s very foundations – heralding a full play-through of 2009’s Hatred For Mankind – it’s clear that all hell is being loosed.
From a lesser force, the old playing-with-backs-to-the-audience shtick could feel downright gimmicky at this point, but with the unholy power of Lashed To The Grinder And Stoned To Death or Totem Of Skulls crashing from the PA, and a strobe-heavy light-show that makes it hard to even look at the stage, it feels like a (super)natural part of the show. Fuck knows if there’s any new music in the works, but it’s reassuring regardless to see these demons’ fire is undimmed. (SL)
After having to pull out of last year's shindig due to illness, and even going up against Dragged Into Sunlight, expectations for Ahab are even higher than normal. Or should that be deeper? Plunging into the darkness of the oceans with their brand of Nautik Funeral Doom, the sea-obsessed German crew are well worth waiting for. Rowing their way through six songs in an hour, they're in no rush to make it to shore, but the heaving heaviness of O Father Sea and Antarctica the Polymorphess' ebb and flow from gentle to stormy are worth taking a dunk in. The Sea Is A Desert is appropriately vast and desolate, while the chunks in The Mælstrom are like being battered by the waves. Absolutely spellbinding, as ever. (NR)
There's a fair bit of divided opinion on headliners Cradle Of Filth. Of course, more than three decades down the Suffolk crew’s gothic, symphonic-inflected extreme metal path there’s no question about Dani Filth and co.'s credentials. But at the same time every metalhead and their mum has already made their mind up about what they think of them: a meme-worthily absurd Brit-metal institution or a troupe of unmissable heroes.
Resultantly, the main room’s crowd is somewhat thinned as things whip towards the witching hour. Those who do stick around are rewarded with a ruthlessly vampiric throwback showcase, encompassing – ironically – only material from before 2003’s Damnation And A Day. There might not be anything hardened fans won’t have heard in the past couple of years, perhaps, but for a festival crowd like this, it’s a real thrill to see deeper cuts like Heaven Torn Asunder and Scorched Earth Erotica wrapped around old favourites Cruelty Brought Thee Orchids, From The Cradle To Enslave and Her Ghost In The Fog. Dani and the crew are visibly having a grand old time, too, swirling between ivy-wrapped stage furniture and towering flame stacks, relishing the chance to reconnect with the past before the arrival of album 14 in March 2025.
It’s perhaps an even more important moment for Damnation as a festival, proving that even at the niche end of the alternative underground, there are still bands with whom they can break fresh ground after almost two decades as a going concern. Tellingly, the whispers are that next year’s expansion to two days will see one eye on the festival’s storied past while the other concentrates on the possibilities of its future.
Come whatever may, we’ll catch you down the front. (SL)
Damnation Festival returns November 8 – 9, 2025
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