Chris Earl
Opening the show was the Essex five piece Existentialist. Fronted by a man with some of the coolest tattoos in existence, looking like scorch marks across his body), they blast and grind their way through a frantic opening set. Mixing soulful solos in with crushing breakdowns and searing blasts, they get a good reaction from the early crowd. ‘Usurper’, the band’s penultimate song hit the hardest and garnered the first arm swinging pit action of the evening, before the key-laden closer brings things down to a slower tempo in an oddly beautiful moment that has a few members of the front row arm in arm, swaying.
Perhaps the most straightforward, old school death metal worshipping of all the up and coming bands on show, Beyond Extinction bring a more disgusting, less synth driven brand of deathcore to proceedings. Mixing older tracks from their EP with songs off their as yet unannounced debut album, it gets unfathomably heavy at times, sending faces across the room into a state of gurning madness. Frontman Jasper Harmer nails the screeching highs and toilet-gurgling lows with ease, while still being a charismatic, endearing presence (commanding the baying crowd to get “categorically fucking silly” at one stage), while both guitarists belch riffs from their fingertips that wouldn’t sound out of place in the bowels of hell. With an album release teased for 2025, this is a just a small taste of what they can do.
The furthest travelled of the bunch, To Obey A Tyrant take to the stage with the unenviable task of following Beyond Extinction, but manage to hold their own. All the way from the south coast, the former Bloodstock performers take the main support slot with brute force. A relentless onslaught of gutteral highs and lows, they get arms swinging in just thirty seconds. Doing a fantastic job of staking their claim to being the sub-headliners, they sound absolutely massive at times, belying the small stage that they’re in. At this point in the evening it may be all relatively similar on a sonic level but the flashes of purer death and even black metal in the band’s sound keep things interesting and vocalist Brandon keeps the crowd involved with his natural charisma.
Local heroes Osiah had the honor of not only headlining the bill, but doing so in their home town. The North East lads have the crowd in their hands from the off. With an early guest spot from Beyond Extinction‘s Jasper, they unleash their downtuned madness onto the crowd in brutal fashion. New and old songs meshed together perfectly and the sea of Osiah shirts in the crowd matches the fervor and devotion from the fans. Held in such a high regard by their peers, it’s not surprising but still great to see members of every other band out to watch and sing along to every word that is vomited from Ricky Lee Roper’s talented throat. Finishing on a high and then returning for the elusive deathcore encore, they delight the longtime fans with a devastating rendition of ‘Perennial Agony’ (complete with “ay, where the white women at?” sample) and you can tell from the smile on all of their faces that the night has been a resounding success, cementing their status as the North East’s deathcore icons.