Live Review : Arch Enemy + Amorphis + Eluveitie + Gatecreeper @ O2 Apollo, Manchester on October 31st 2025

It’s Halloween, the most metal day of the year, so it is only fitting that perennial metal troopers Arch Enemy have rocked up at the Apollo with a rather impressive battalion of supports in tow. Alissa proclaims that it is her favourite time of the year and she has gone all out to impress, besuited in luminous skull face paint. The audience itself is made up of a splattering of witches, ghouls and warlocks, though most have plumped for the rather benign fancy dress of middle-aged man in band t-shirt. The legends adorned on those shirts are liberally shared between the three main acts this evening, and, along with the reception afforded to Eluveitie and Amorphis, it gives the distinct impression that this is a three-way headline affair as opposed to a main act with a makeshift undercard.

Gatecreeper are first out of the traps and the most brutal offering of the night. Whilst the rest of the bill is metal of the sumptuously polished and distinctly arena-friendly variety, Gatecreeper come from a much rawer and visceral pedigree. They are coarse and heavy, filled with malignant bile. The early pit dwellers take full advantage of the granule heaviness and happily slam into each other with unrefined happiness. Gatecreeper take us back to a time before Death Metal became complicated and divided into different tones and sectors. This is pure, undiluted vicious music, designed to pump adrenaline and make you run around in circles. The room may be slowly filling, but it lands well and once again proves that Gatecreeper are veritable leaders in the rather exciting new wave of old skool death metal.

Folk metal gets a bad rap. It is viewed as plastic swords and synthetic battle cries. The assumption is that it is as genuine as anyone who claims they saw Nirvana in the early days. Eluveitie bring a completely different approach to the folk metal party. There are no hey-nony-nows here. Instead, we get a rich textured version of metal that uses traditional instrumentation, such as the tin whistle, bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy, to create additional depth and breadth. Their sound is astoundingly rich and expansive, with the different instruments flowing in and out of each other in a merry melodic dance. With that many musicians vying for your attention (there are eight of them), there is always a danger that the whole thing becomes a mess of ill-defined tones.  But not Eluveitie, the use of mandola and flutes are not a throwaway gimmick, they shape and guide the music, giving us a version of metal that is heavy but also distinctly alien and enticing.

Arch Enemy, Amorphis and Eluveitie are all on this trek with new shiny trinkets to offer to the public. “Anv” doesn’t particularly divert from the latter’s operating model, and the three tracks aired tonight fit well into their overall songbook. New Girl’s Lea-Sophie Fischer’s fiddle features heavily, and she weaves her way through the other members, often using the vanity podiums to show off her skills. With that many members, the whole thing is fantastically choreographed with a continual swapping of positions and, in many cases, instruments. It is a dazzling sight to behold, and the constant movement just adds to the frizzling feeling of excitement. There is obviously a vocal contingent up front hear just to see them and as they crash into ‘Inis Mona’ (complete with the aforementioned Hurdy Grudy) they raise their voices in rampant glee. Eluveitie are a massively unique act. An authentic intertwinement of folk and metal that actually manages to stay true to both disciplines. Fantastically entertaining.

Whilst more traditional than Eluveitie, Amorphis are still not your traditional metal act. They sit in a unique intersection of power, trad and death metals, but they belong exclusively to none of those camps. Musically, they are an indulgent swell of heavy guitar and luscious keyboard. It has a bounding aggression, but it is also laced with exquisite melody. Every track, whether it is from rather spiffing new album “Borderland” or way back in the nineties in the case of ‘Black Winter Day’, feels extraordinarily and evocatively anthemic. Tonight they on extra special form, Tomi Jouston playfully banters with uber fans up front with the air of a man that is very happy with his lot in life.

His voice is one of the cornerstones that makes Amorphis’s sound so distinctive. It moves in an instant from curt growl to capacious, harmonious might. It is awe-inspiring in both its range and its fathomless depth. It wraps us up in comforting, accessible refrains and then dumps into a jagged pit of guttural noise. The other extraordinary and against type thing about Amorphis is the veritable strength of their recent material. With bands of their vintage (they celebrated thirty years as a unit during the pandemic) it is usually a case of a gradual degrading of quality. But not Amorphis, as ‘Death of a King’ and closer ‘The Bee’ proves, some of their strongest and most popular stuff is what they have produced in the last decade. They are a band proud of their legacy but also unafraid to keep expanding and pushing their musical envelope. As ever, they are wondrously good.

Two things that are astonishing but true is that Alissa White-Gluz is forty this year and that there was a time when she wasn’t in Arch Enemy. She has the energy levels and unbridled enthusiasm of a performer half her age and she owns the stage as if Arch Enemy were a band she was a part of from inception, as opposed to joining twenty years into its journey as the third person to hold her position. Tonight, she is a joy to watch, happily daubed in white face paint. She pounds every inch of the vast staging, not just roaring her lyrics but performing each number with athletic dexterity. This is a slick arena show full of more precision-engineered set-pieces than an Arsenal match, yet it still retains a feeling of humanity and authenticity. Halfway through, Alissa uses the old trope of asking who has seen the man before and who is a newbie. But instead of riffing on the  “Welcome to the family” nonsense, she becomes intrigued by how many times members of the crowd have seen the band and is genuinely taken aback by those whose encounters with them number twenty and above. A rather enamoured and possibly inebriated fellow upfront called Tegan tries to up the ante by shouting millions and is given heartfelt adulation for his rather ballsy confidence. 

Everything feels immaculately executed right from the shadow puppetry of the opening intro, though the call and response of ‘Sunset over the Empire’ and to the almost Gary Moore blues of ‘Snow Bound’. The Arch Enemy, which last turned up in Manchester twelve months ago at the Academy, felt lacking in road miles and rusty from being too long in dry dock. There are no such problems this evening. They are brilliantly entertaining and running on the heady adrenaline of being on tour for over a year. They are meticulously tight, and every track is played with the frenetic energy of a set closer. Michael Amott is one of Metal’s unsung heroes and the architect of many of the blistering solos that make Carcass’“Heartwork” such a career-defining masterpiece. He is equally astonishing this evening. His interaction with newcomer Joey Concepcion is slicker and far more polished than it ever was with Bill Steers, but it still emanates a raw grandeur. Highly efficient and professional but heady with an air of unpredictability and improvisation.

Every track now belongs to Alissa, whether she originally recorded them or not. The quality of the four albums she has produced with the band (including this year’s “Blood Dynasty”) means that her era is beginning to dominate set-wise, but when the old skool cuts such as ‘Ravenous’ and ‘No Gods, No Masters’ do appear they are now so quintessentially Alissa in style and presentation that Angelia Gossow is but a dim and distant memory. Her growls and gruff pernoctations remain integral and absolutely incredible. A problem with some Death Metal vocals is that the harsh presentation lacks passion and pathos, but whilst Alissa’s delivery is coarse and abrasive it still manages to be shot through with vivid emotion.

Those in Eluvietite and Amorphis merch may start to wander off before the end, but this is firmly Arch Enemy’s crowd. They react to every note and every action, baying in delight as the band crashes through the motions. The encore is essentially a devastatingly impressive ‘Nemesis’ bookend by an instrumental ‘Snow Bound’ and the outro of ‘Fields of Desolation’. It is another immaculately undertaken set piece that puts the icing on the cake of Arch Enemy’s accession to the big league. Whilst the pulling power is not quite there (the back of the Apollo’s standing area remains doggedly empty for the duration of the show) their performance is that of an arena filler and festival headliner. This is commercial metal with its authenticity and anger in place. Exhilaratingly epic.

Check the “In The Flesh” page for more photos!
Arch Enemy + Amorphis + Eluveitie + Gatecreeper