I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed when I cast eyes on the bill for the 2025 Doomsday Fest in Brighton, being mostly composed, as it was, of bands that had left me cold live, bands I liked that I’d seen a few too many times prior, bands whose studio output I’d found hit ‘n’ miss, and bands I just plain can’t listen to without wanting to put on something else. Indeed, a fellow attendee wasn’t exactly off the mark in dubbing the line-up “the Monty Python of bills”.
There was one glaring exception to this trend: Adorior, my favourite “fist metal” band, perched right at the top of the bill for their first UK show outside London!
I’d already been dipping into their discography prior to their 30th anniversary show in 2024, but that night sent me back in with a sharper appetite, especially for Bleed on My Teeth, which the show also served to launch. Even then, I experienced it as an intriguing but difficult record I’d intermittently return to amongst more immediately gratifying releases. Then came a night of charged interaction with frontwoman Melissa Gray (Jaded Lungs) at Subterranean Manifestation IV, where she was present as punter rather than performer. From then on, my spins of Bleed increased to the point that it became (and remains) something of a daily ritual, living up to its name (and cover art) at least metaphorically.
Add to that the fact that, up until a week prior, Doomsday was billed as Adorior’s only UK show for 2025 (and first UK show outside of London) plus the ease of getting to and from Brighton, as far as out-of-town locales go, and you can see why picking up a ticket became a no-brainer for me.
Come the day, getting to the venue proved to be a piece of piss, having taken a gander at it on the way to see Gary Numan a couple of months prior. Located below and behind the train station, The Green Door Store had something of a quirky, rickety youth-centre vibe to it, complete with kitschy decor, rainbow flags, and gender-neutral bogs plastered with old-school graffiti and the latest in ideological crusades, parking it firmly in the 2020s—#TurfTheTERFBigot!
Turnout-wise, I was surprised and disappointed by the dearth of “the London crew” — recognisable regulars — among the attendees. I knew the Necro Ritual lads had their own headline slot in Hungary that night, but most of the others who sounded like they were gonna make it just…didn’t. The only familiar face in the crowd was a Brightoner who frequents a fair few London shows. On the personnel side of things, I saw various members of the billed bands milling about or manning stands, including, in Adorior’s case, bassist Tom (TNT Tank) and axeman Steve (Stevil Offender, also the mastermind behind Qrixkuor). A chat with Steve confirmed what I’d already guessed: Melissa, drummer Dan (D. Molestör), and guitarist Ro (Ro) were off elsewhere. I figured they’d all show up…whenever.
Between all this, downing flat cider, and being held hostage by the terminally loquacious, I decided to take in the other bands, curious to see if they’d exceed my humble expectations.
Local act Noiseboy opened up the show in blunt and blistering fashion, with vocalist/programmer Adam Sedgwick growling over glitchwork, spotlighted and secluded by visualiser L. Bateman. Despite being generally disenchanted with the supports, I will admit I looked forward to this act thanks to the artful abrasion of their EP, Retina Burn. The grinding industrial menace of ‘Teethgrinder’ and ‘Feral Star‘ landed just as well live as on record, partly due to the confrontational on-the-floor performance of Sedgwick, who alternated between bellowing at assorted audience members and fine-tuning those gnarly samplers and synthesisers.
If Noiseboy met the audience where it was, Bognor Regis duo Troll Mother made first use of the stage, singer–guitarist Roman Boswell and sticksman Alex Trouchkin performing their brand of “power sludge” with shirtless abandon. Having found their Forest Child EP to be rather meandering, composed of a prologue that outstays its welcome and a pair of 11-minute slogfests, I found myself pleasantly upended by the verve and immediacy of whateverthefuck they chose to play that day. Upcoming tracks? Songs condemned to live-performance limbo, like a post-’90s Sisters of Mercy track? Answers on a postcard, please!
Having seen fellow Londoners Overthrow play virtually the same set multiple times over the preceding years, watching their set felt more like slipping into a pair of comfy-but-worn blackened-death loafers than the full-throated exhilaration of the first couple of times. Still, opener ‘Caustic Vengeance (Blindly Driven)’ and the EP’s title track, ‘Ascension of the Entombed’, retain considerable potency, hitting that sweet zone of immersion where tremolo plucks and blastbeats fuck. I’ll also give them kudos for their top-notch take on Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’, no doubt added to honour the recently departed Ozzy.
It only took seeing Vorga once to get the pre-emptive fatigue going. Their April set in London seemed to stretch on for millennia and a day, highlights such as ‘Starless Sky‘ and the excellent ‘Comet‘ being but buoys in a sea of sameness, the kind that offer a glimmer of hope before the tide drags you back under. It’s not that “cosmic black metal” can’t be done well — The Last Eon’s Internal Fractality being a sterling example — but, for me, the Teutonic troupe fail to launch more often than not, their aural output not quite reaching the heights of their impressively interstellar visuals, cyberkvlt get-up, and flashes of lyrical nous. Their Doomsday set didn’t do much to change my mind, and the equipment hiccups probably helped bench ‘Comet’ for this set. At least things were kept briefer this time.
Cambridge chunder merchants Celestial Sanctuary stepped up next, their chunky, pounding riffage kicking off the first moshpits of the day. Vocalist–guitarist Thomas Cronin also made a point of barking the crowd awake, even throwing me a fistbump at one point — can’t fault the energy! That said, their stuff plays in the lane of what I like to call “dull-bludgeon death metal”: the kind of DM that struggles to keep a grip on me, too light on memorable hooks, shapely riffs, or any ritual texture, occasional standouts like ‘Trapped Within the Rank Membrane‘ aside. Seeing them a third time only reinforced that view.
Belgian deathgrind nutters Brutal Sphincter did a better job of churning out distinctive ditties from their gonzo blend, amping the throb of the crowd several notches up from the last set. Going by the pit eruption and the chatter of a few people earlier in the day, I figured that this was the band most Doomsdayers had turned up for. Crabwalkers and windmillers collided to the bouncing grind of tracks like ‘Sphinct-Earth Society’, ‘Tony Hawk’s Pro-Choice 2022’, ‘Anders Breivik Utoya Party’, and (aptly) ‘Beatdown Syndrome’. Fun tracks on the whole, even if the more topical ones verged on boilerplate. Between songs, vocalist GG Stalin’s brave and unprecedented stabs at antivaxxers, flat-earthers, and Nazis reminded me of Xander’s pro-fight speechifying in Cobra Kai, prompting my inner Johnny Lawrence to roll his eyes as the crowd cheered on cue.
As the sphinctered and satisfied shuffled out for a post-set ciggy, my arse stayed parked for Adorior. Before long, the blokes in the band filed in to set up, followed shortly by Melissa; clocking each other, we shared a brief but warm exchange before she too fell into set-up mode, readying the night’s final strike.
And what a fucking strike!
Growling “GET DOWN THE FUCKING FRONT!” through jaded lungs at those furthest from the stage, Melissa introduced the band, who launched straight into ‘Ritualised Combat (Sin, Sin, Sin)‘, the second track from their much-lauded sophomore album, Author of Incest. Snarled descriptions of burning messiahs, scraping skins for dancing in, and Christridden whores getting their faces caved in rode on a wave of careering guitars and undergirding drumwork, Melissa thrusting her mic at the front row to catch the errant cries of “HAIL! HAIL! HAIL SATAN!”, bolstering her bandmates’ own bellows. As the song neared its end, she rose in coiled fashion to survey her prey; the instrumentals gave way, leaving only the squeal of Ro’s guitar, offering her a pocket to address the “morsels to [her] altar”:
“ALRIGHT, BRIGHTON — HAIL SATAN!”
On cue, Dan drummed back in for the outro, stickwork fit for a tribal warband; the others followed, instruments crashing back in as they kicked off an infectious chant of hails that gripped certain front-row diehards; finally, Melissa swooped in with her own hails to His Infernal Majesty, seeing out the tone-setting opening attack.
And, make no mistake, the band were in attack mode on hitherto unclaimed terrain, Melissa bearing down on the audience like a feral war priestess, all death glares, gritted teeth, matted mane, and a choice line in taunts: “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of me? You should be.” Given this, and given that Adorior dub themselves “fist metal”, with her as the onstage focal point, ritual commander, co-founder, and the main creative axis, how the fuck could I not nickname her “(the) Fistress”?
That same energy coursed through their performance of Bleed’s opening track, ‘Begrime Judas‘, a sober, considered meditation on leaving the treacherous with “EYES POUND SHUT”; seeped through its second single, ‘LOTP — Vomit, Vomit, Vomit, Bastard‘, a track characterised by a cryptic title, a protagonist as competent as he is contemptible, riffs fit for a grotesque carnival, and Melissa sounding like Nina Hagen and Wendy O. Williams having a knifefight or mudwrestle — pick your poison; and throbbed through Author of Incest‘s title track, basically Pay It Forward but with demon rape. Cursory glances behind me showed the floor split between the immersed and invested at the front and those further back, who seemed united by a shared sense of What the fuck’s this?
Following a drum-key mishap, the engines revved up again for Bleed‘s heralding single ‘Scavengers of Vengeance’, a whirlwind ride along the blackened junction of death and thrash, with “pentagrams of petrol burning hot” lighting the path to retribution. Performance-wise, it brought out the best in the band, with Ro especially losing himself in the frenzy and Tom, their self-described “dirty shirtless animal”, adding a procession of hails at key points. Melissa and I shared a lyrically appropriate “stinging” fistbump as she tore through a tale of “teeth kicked out”, eyes “beaten SHUT” (a recurring Bleed motif), and “wonder stolen, broken, soiled”, its protagonist denied release and resolution even as its galloping stampede of a riff — earlier interrupted by design in an act of aural edging — is allowed to play out the song in full.
Then came ‘Birth of Disease’, the closest thing Adorior have to an “epic”, clocking in at almost ten minutes! On paper, that reads like an exhausting, skippable bloatfest — think latter-day Maiden or a studio slog by the aforementioned Troll Mother — but in execution, it’s a twisted, blasphemous erotic-grotesque masterpiece gagging for back-to-back replays. Imagine Toshio Maeda writing the Nativity, and you’re basically in the right thematic ballpark.
Ro and Steve kicked things off for its Brighton premiere, riffing up the anticipatory fabric that Melissa promptly tore through with a scream before she snarled out the story of the “spawn of slut and abattoir semen” in a manner that’d make Sade squirm. As on disc, she sold the build-up to the little fucker’s depraved emergence “on a gust of vaginal breath”, with the slow, portentous riffage framing her account of him “tast[ing] the cunt of the cunt” who birthed him; Dan’s infectious drum-in then kicked off the gang-chant refrain that makes this track especially memorable, hitting harder this time as Melissa swung the mic my way for the first couple of cycles. She then gave a cycle to another at the front before pulling the mic back for the remaining chants:
“CRUSHED… BY THE FIST OF THE MASTER!”
From then, the song became an indictment, Melissa fingerjabbing at the crowd with “CUNT! CUNT! CUNT! CUNT!” before sneering about how “the scent of mankind’s weakness makes his cock hard” and how “spineless fucks will pay his price” as the bass became more thumpingly insistent — not just aurally in my case, as Tom’s axe ended up twatting me on the bonce!
“I was waiting for that!” I laughed, given he was the closest body to my side of the stage.
After further serrating of the species’ slavishness, the grand unveiling of its malevolent lord/master/pimp (I’d say whom, but I’m scribing this on a Sunday), and a chaotic spiral of solos and returning riffs, the track reached its end with Melissa glaring from the stage, leg cocked, caked in sweat, hair plastered to her face, looking wrecked in the best possible way.
The strike drew to a formidable close with the one-two punch of ‘Hater of Fucking Humans’ and Bleed‘s title track: the former with the title that played its part in turning me onto this band, the notably sadistic chorus (“I like to make things suffer ‘cuz it makes me feel alive!”), and one of the best parting salutes put to disc (“Hail Lucifer — Prince of Thrones, the light of my fucking world!”); the latter, a memento-mori rumination on loss, choice, and how Chronos, the greedy cunt, feasts on all his kids. “Time takes everything” indeed, including this sterling set, but at least the Strike of the Knuckleduster had well and truly left its mark on Brighton.
In the hustle of the fest’s aftermath, I caught up with Melissa for a pocket, during which she made clear — in words far from generic — how much my being down the front had helped. Satisfied with the payoff after a long, bumpy road of a day, and with her and the other personnel being pulled 666 ways towards a rushed exit, I grabbed some grub from the local chippy and got on the first train back to London, hoping it’d get there before my Tube turned into a fucking pumpkin.
Such was Doomsday 2025, a mixed bag, containing some surprises, some solid efforts, and some short of the mark, ultimately redeemed by a first-class choice of headliner. The presence of Necro Ritual and Devastator, two other firm favourites, on this year’s bill promises better for it as a whole, enough for me to snap up a ticket for another end-of-summer outing. Rotting Christ’s Sakis Tolis as headliner’s a decent pick too, even if his output doesn’t quite fire the blood the way Adorior’s does; in any case, it’ll be a fucking feat not to measure his performance against that of the Haters of Fucking Humans.
~MRDA~
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