September the 27th, 2025, was a day I’d pencilled in as a “maybe” for my gig log. ’90s alt-rock favourites Republica were scheduled to play at the Garage, and I’d waited quite a bit to finally see them in person, that first album, especially its infamous lead single, making an impression on me.
In the end, “maybe” became “definitely”, and I was indeed “ready to go” — just not to Republica.
Amongst other incentives, one thing that got my arse down to Brighton to see Adorior headline last year’s Doomsday Fest was its initial billing as their only UK show for 2025. As such, it certainly hit like a lightning bolt to see another home-turf date announced just days before their desecration of the South Coast, with Helgi’s — my most visited venue of ’25 — hosting the heresy ahead of the band’s Stateside strikes. The prospect of seeing its sepulchral sphincter get a right royal fisting from the Haters of Fucking Humans proved too tempting to turn down.
Fast forward to the day (exactly a year after my first encounter with them at their 30th-anniversary show), and I arrived to see Helgi’s stuffed to the rafters, the most packed I’ve seen it since frequenting the venue. Many familiar, friendly faces, including members of Overthrow, Priest Strangler, and Necro Ritual, helped make up the scrum of this sold-out show, further swelled by the straggler clog after opening time swung by without an opening of doors. Still, even with the bar area shifting into a bipedal-sardine tin, I shared a series of warm hellos with Melissa, the Jaded Lungs of Adorior, and caught up with various others, making the clogged wait less of a pain in the arse.
After an extra half-hour wait, the doors finally yielded, with proceedings getting off the ground not long after. Stepping onto the stage for their second-ever show, nascent four-piece Sätaniak, featuring London metal-media luminary Nattskog (Jørgen Kirby) shredding on strings, got things going with a set made up of songs from their demo and a pair of covers. ‘Reaper’s Wrath’ (quite jaunty for a song about Death) and ‘Aswang’ (a more sinister-sounding number centred on folklore from vocalist Dez Destructor’s Filipino roots) stood out, as did the covers of Manila Road’s ‘Necropolis’ and Whiplash’s ‘Power-Thrashing Death’, the latter being a particular favourite of mine from that band’s catalogue. As well as nailing it on sheer musicianship, they even managed to inspire the first pit motions of the night amongst the audience: not bad for a new, unknown opening band!
Under the Ashes followed, setting the rest of the night on more familiar ground. Having seen them open for Inhuman Nature months prior and acquainted myself with their subsequently released debut album, Sacrifices Heaped, I was more than prepared for the London quartet’s gravel-throated brand of death-thrash. They, in turn, were more than prepared for Helgi’s, vocalist/bassist Simon roaring over the riffs about such cheery topics as drone strikes (‘Circling Above’), religious indoctrination (‘Deus Vult’), being fed through the military meatgrinder (the album’s title track), and nuclear annihilation (‘Flash of Light’). A strong, solid set — all the more so for my increased familiarity with their tracks since I last saw them — and a fitting lead-in for the night’s headliners.
Adorior, of course, grasped the baton and ran with it, maintaining the military theme a mite longer with the battlefield-betrayal blitzkrieg of ‘Begrime Judas’, Melissa fixing the audience with stares, glares, and side-eyes as she snarled, “WOULD YOU DO IT AGAIN?”
So far so Brighton in tone, if not in structure. The omission of the rousing ‘Ritualised Combat (Sin, Sin, Sin)’ from the night’s setlist gave me some cause for lament: what better spot than the pit of Helgi’s to hail Satan?
However, that cloud came with summat much better than a silver lining in the form of a much-desired live debut.
During my months-long immersion in Bleed on My Teeth, one deep cut that coiled its way round my cranium was its second track, ‘Ophidian Strike’, a story of serpents seeking shelter, predatory priesthoods, succouring succubi, and dirty dyadic deeds of destructive desecration brought to full-bodied life by some of the blackest, gnarliest death-thrash chugs and snarls yet committed to disc. It even added a new word — “velleities” — to the vocabulary, which is always welcome.
As such, since before Brighton, I’d been badgering the band to grant the venomous beast a spot on their setlist.
And then, in the wake of ‘Gutters of Cum’ being blasted from the freshly erected six-incher of a stage, came the highlight of my night.
“This one’s for you, motherfucker!” Melissa declared, pointing my way. “Can you guess what it is yet?”
“Izzit about snakes?” I asked, playing along.
“Might be,” she replied over the shoulder before letting the viper rip.
What followed was a room pulsating to the menace of Ro and Steve’s riffage, with a pair of Jaded Lungs invoking vengeance, regurgitated semen rivers, prostrations before sacred cunts, and building thrones from the bones of “dead fucking gods”, during which, the owner of said lungs, noting my vocal participation, clasped my hand and pulled me in for this caustic verse:
Your kisses forked with skyte
I am toxic — you are spite
Sulphuric hearth is dusted
Neither can be trusted
Not to BITE!
Shortly after came the instrumental eruption that set off a heartily cheering blastwave of bodies, some catching me on the back. This would not be the only such instance during the night’s set.
Finally, as the serpent slithered offstage, Melissa, visibly spent, jolted forth and gasped, “Fucking hell! That song’s a cunt to sing!” Laughter ensued before the band tore through another blistering rendition of high-octane revenge tragedy ‘Scavengers of Vengeance’.
Indeed, her bearing throughout the set proved a sharp contrast to that at Brighton, more mirthful than martial this time around. Playing to a small room full of London regulars in a favoured venue no doubt helped, as opposed to the uncertain territory of the southern seafront. As such, banter flowed freely between songs, with Melissa charging the audience “an extra 50p” for seeing drummer Dan take his top off, joking about catching Tom’s bass up her arse (his instrument claiming yet another victim post-Brighton), later joking about the band saving up to get Tom an abortion, and ribbing one unfortunate front-row bastard for his “shoddy, cheap work” after the banner he’d helped mount took a stagedive between second-album title track ‘Author of Incest’ and ‘LOTP (Vomit, Vomit, Vomit, Bastard)’.
Speaking of ‘LOTP’, everyone’s favourite circus-riffed portrait of a sex predator proved to be the other number, besides ‘Ophidian Strike’, that really roused the room, the crowd throbbing tumescently in a manner the song’s subject would know all too well.
Author of Incest deep cut ‘Behold Barbarity’, heralded by Ro’s demand to “see some fucking aggression going”, also had a none-too-shabby airing, if not quite as propulsive.
Come the time of ‘Birth of Disease’, the whole room was sweating like a Mohammedan rape gang eyeing up some “easy meat”. With a dedication to their “brothers” in Deströyer 666 (who would’ve gone on to join them Stateside if not for logistical bollocks), Melissa and co. once again launched into their ten-minute take on the Nativity in all its blasphemous, erotic-grotesque, misanthropic glory. As ever, the addictive mid-song refrain — built up to beautifully by a sequence comprised of post-birth cunni-incestual ejaculation, “afterbirth”, “orgy”, and “umbilical autoerotic asphyxiation” — elicited enthusiastic audience participation and mic points from the Fistress of ceremonies, though I may have jumped ahead a repetition on my turn, such was the rush.
The Luciferian bile of ‘Hater of Fucking Humans’ and the memento mori of Bleed‘s title track once again saw out a stellar set with a “pentagram of swords”, London’s filthiest, aptly enough, declining to go down without a “STRIKE” or several.
Just as Brighton had been the coastal coup, Adorior’s assault on Helgi’s proved the sterling slither-off before they sank their fangs Stateside. Satisfied with the play of events, especially my desired deep-cut debut, I extracted myself from the sardine tin after some fond farewells, leaving it well and truly, to quote the refrain, “crushed by the Fist of the Master”.
~MRDA~
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