FESTIVAL REVIEW: Incineration Festival 2025
The multi-venue day festival is a growing phenomenon that allows the festival summer to move earlier and earlier each year. On a sunny Saturday in early May, the weather forecast obliged with scorching sun accompanying Incineration Festival – the capital’s premier one-day celebration of everything extreme across five beloved Camden venues.
Raising the curtain on the day are US thrash revivalists WARBRINGER (8) at the Electric Ballroom. The California crew bring immensely fun energy and successfully inject adrenaline into the fans who’ve queued long in the heat. Whilst promoting their recently released seventh record Wrath and Ruin, their 30-minute set finds room for songs from most albums in their catalogue. Culminating with rager Total War off their acclaimed debut, WARBRINGER deliver a winning festival opener and a much-needed warm-up for those neck muscles.
Things darken with the arrival of up-and-coming US black metallers LAMP OF MURMUUR (7). What is a one-man-project in the studio, spearheaded by mysterious leader M., comes alive with raw energy in its full-band live presentation. M. is a ferocious presence on stage, rendering his dark lyrics more through gurgles and grunts than mere consonants and vowels. The music touches on influence from EMPEROR, DISSECTION and WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM, with a tinge of goth present in more ethereal moments, and represents one of the purest black metal sets of the day.
Over at The Underworld, Belgium’s CARNATION (8) present their old-school death metal of the highest quality, with bulldozing rhythms and a vicious buzzsaw guitar tone straight out of the DISMEMBER rulebook. The Antwerp collective turn the venue into exactly what its name represents – through his demonic barks, blood-red facepaint and savage stage presence, frontman Simon Duson invokes a maniacal demon, and ensures the crowd in front of him don’t remain stationary despite it feeling as hot as the fires of hell. The kind of festival set that makes you stop for a moment and think to yourself “Isn’t metal absolutely class”.
The fifth and biggest venue of the day – the iconic Roundhouse – opens its programme later than the rest, with Icelandic post-metal collective MÚR (10) who came seemingly out of nowhere to release one of 2024’s best albums. If that record left one surprised by how fully-formed they sounded, then to see them live is positively jaw dropping. The quintet exude pure heaviness, combining the technical catchiness of GOJIRA with the cold pummelling of CULT OF LUNA. Frontman Kári Haraldsson screams with a power that should leave him unable to speak for days, and simultaneously manages to make the keytar – yes, the keytar – look like the coolest instrument in the world. All the meanwhile, they each emanate confidence and bravado. MÚR are insanely good, and they know it – and now, so does everyone who caught their Incineration set.
The multi-venue layout works well for the most part, though some early sets are oversubscribed and institute a one-in-one-out policy. This causes us to miss checking out SPECTRAL WOUND and BLACKBRAID, but clears once a portion of festival-goers have migrated over to the Roundhouse where the main stage is packed with so much quality. BATUSHKA (9) make an awaited return to the UK after the notorious band split / naming rights drama was eventually resolved. They create the most immersive staging of the day, surrounded by burning incense and candles lighting up Orthodox Christian iconography. The band themselves are clad as faceless clergymen who blast wall-of-sound liturgies at the gathered congregation. The resulting theatrics make for a powerful ritual, though one that can feel a little awkward during between-songs setups. Presenting pieces from the two albums of the “true” BATUSHKA, they are at their most majestic when the melodic subtleties in their riffs and Gregorian-style chants are at full strength. While the mix did not always render those elements with the clarity they deserve, the set was nevertheless an impactful showcase of why they are one of the most original voices in black metal in the last 10 years.
Legging it over back to the Ballroom, we carve out a brief moment to check out tech-death legends CRYPTOPSY (7). As expected, their set is brutally in-your-face, like the sonic equivalent of getting your head kicked in. Growler Matt McGachy towers over the stage, delivering relentless unnatural sounds with a smile, while drumming bandleader Flo Mounier and co. batter the life out of their instruments. Alongside cuts off their classic None So Vile and acclaimed return-to-form with As Gomorrah Burns, the Canadian crew give the live debut to new single Until There’s Nothing Left – presumably the answer to the question of how much musical destruction they planned to unleash upon the venue. Mission accomplished.
An early exit is required though to make our way over to the Roundhouse for potentially the most anticipated set of the day. Few albums made the splash that BLOOD INCANTATION’s Absolute Elsewhere managed, and today they pack out the historic venue. The prog-death favourites send us on a cosmic voyage, framed by obelisks at each side of the stage and accompanying their otherworldly genre-blend with trippy space imagery on a backing screen. The quartet are tight musically but also obviously enjoying themselves on stage as they shift frequently between relentless death riffs and expansive 70s prog musings. Playing a set made-up of two songs clocking in at over 20-minutes each is demanding, but everyone here is along for the ride. The event of the day with the biggest crowd, BLOOD INCANTATION (10) deliver 45 minutes of celestial perfection.
Over at one of the smaller stages in The Black Heart, young Italian hopes BEDSORE (8) carry on in much the same vein. There is something intriguing about a contrast between how a band presents visually and what they sound like, and the sight of four polite lads in floral shirts creates a fascinating contrast when they go at their instruments. They take their time with drawn-out intro Minerva’s Obelisque to build up a powerful sense of dread, before they unleash their full-on musical assault. Ranging from punishing death metal cacophony to beautiful Floydian soundscapes, their art straddles the line between dream, hallucination and nightmare. A fascinating set by a band that is bound to keep making waves in the scene.
Soon it’s time for the headliner, but time permits a brief stop-off at the Ballroom where Polish masters of death metal DECAPITATED (8) are in full swing as the second stage headliners. Their new frontman Eemeli Bodde made his debut on a UK stage at last year’s Damnation Festival, and all the gigging in-between has firmed up how at home he looks and sounds. Songs like Cancer Culture and Kill The Cult are bursting at the seams with memorable death metal riffs, whose mix of catchiness and technicality prove Vogg is one of the most gifted guitarists in death metal today.
After a day mostly dedicated to the contemporaries and future hopes of extreme metal, it’s time to pay respect to the pioneers who first laid down the path. Billed as “TRIPTYKON Performing CELTIC FROST” (8), Tom G. Warrior and co. revisited his influential 80s output which left its mark on all branches of extreme metal to come. Opener Circle of the Tyrants sets the tone early on and keeps it for the duration of the set – raw riffs and droning grooves amid unflashy staging. Whether it’s the speed metal of Into the Crypt of Rays or the slow stomp of Procreation of the Wicked, it is undeniable that these are classic metal anthems for a reason. In-between songs, crowd members greet Tom with his trademark ‘UGH!’, prompting him to smile and quip “forty years of music and that’s all you remember”. A special moment comes with the first-ever TRYPTIKON performances of two latter-era songs off the celebrated Monotheist album. The grooving Ground and the delicate-to-demented build-up of A Dying God Coming In Human Flesh showcase their more mature 00s songwriting, the latter especially impactful through the way it mixed up the sonics. The long epic Synagoga Satanae rounds up this celebration of CELTIC FROST suitably, and brings to an end a brilliantly curated and well executed edition of Incineration Festival.
Check out our photo gallery of the action at this year’s Incineration Festival from Sarah Tsang here:
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