Live Review : Dragged Into Sunlight + Vacuous + Plague Pit @ Club Academy, Manchester on April 30th 2026

Metal has always been about extremities. For decades, it has vigorously pursued pushing boundaries, whether this be regarding volume, obscenity, speed or depravity. The point with extremities, though, is that there is always an endpoint, a summit, an apex of conclusion. If you push so far, you will reach the end of the envelope. Dragged into Sunlight feel like the pinnacle of metal's obsession with extremity. They are every heavy, impenetrable act taken to the nth degree. They are an extraordinary experience because it seems unfeasible that there is anything else nastier or more discombobulating than this. We have reached the end of metal's quest to deconstruct and desecrate music. We have reached pure, unadulterated noise, and it is frankly astonishing.

The reverberations from their now legendary Damnation set a couple of years back still echo through this city. Therefore, there is a wanton expectation about their return. The room is busy from the get-go, and the merch line snakes around its entire circumference. Plague Pit provide an intriguing soundtrack for those in the infinite queue. They provide a very stripped-down version of Death metal. The riffs are crusty and curvaceous. They are given plenty of space to breathe, and the tracks aired are constructed in a distinctly minimal fashion. W.B.’s howled vocals feel like a distinct juxtaposition to the rest of the band’s output. His contribution is pained Black Metal gurgles, whilst everything else operates at a more melodic and accessible register. The concoction works, and Plague Pit’s slow and sparse delivery proves to be decadently delicious.

The merch queue is still threatening to achieve sentience and become its own free-thinking organism when Vacuous take to the stage. Their take on death metal is very intriguing indeed. On the one hand, and to the untrained eye, it is a blisteringly heavy cacophony of sound. It is a much more claustrophobic and tight-knit endeavour than Plague Pit. The different sounds from the guitars, bass and drums are squeezed together into a tunnel of pulsating noise. But, and there is indeed a but, there is something else dwelling below the surface of coarse, brittle riffs. There is an intricate complexity at play that feels at complete odds with the veritable simplicity of death metal. The harder you listen, the more the textures and melodic intent come out. It is as if someone has scribbled black crayon over a beautiful, Technicolour design. It is, of course, completely intentional and the tension between the harsh density and the snatches of vulnerable fragility create an absorbing and enthralling half an hour.

But no matter how good the undercard is, this evening is only about one act. The stage setting is imposing and highly theatrical. A mammoth candelabra, bastioned with goat's skulls, stands stage centre. A fortress of similarly skull-adorned amp stacks sits behind it. Five minutes before the anointed stage time, the lights dim, and an opaque, indecipherable noise belches out from the stage. As this reaches its climax, five figures emerge into the gloom and proceed to cultivate the sound of all the joy being sucked out of the world. It may feel like a cliché but Dragged into Sunlight sound simultaneously like what we have heard before and also like nothing we have heard before. They take the nastiest, most repulsive and repugnant parts of every death and Black metal album that has been released in the last 30 years odd years and amalgamate them into a single 50 minutes of insular, indecipherable noise.

It is an astonishingly vociferous and enigmatic experience. It is a sound bath but designed to deprave as opposed to cleanse. You feel as well as hear the monstrous waves of cacophony as they remorselessly belch forth from the stage. It is bewildering but also entrancing and hypnotic. The strobes, low lighting, and immense amount of smoke create an obscured performance area where you get mere glimpses of those creating the sounds. This detachment makes the whole thing feel even more unworldly and incomprehensible. It is a disorientating kaleidoscope of brittle brutality but you just can't keep your eyes off it. At no point does any note or riff feel that it has any connection with the one that came before it or will appear after. There must be semblance and structure, but in the room, the feeling is one of freeform disparity. 

This Evening has not necessarily been marketed as a single album performance,  the set is made up exclusively of a chronological performance of their debut album, “Hatred for Mankind”. Whilst there are pauses to allow for applause and catching of breath, the whole thing comes across as one continuous suite of music. All seven tracks blur into one intense fuselage of furious fretwork, decaying distortion and strangulated screams. This is a performance like no other, and its intensity is insurmountable and overwhelming. The band members are anonymous and have their backs to the audience for the entire set (photographers are specifically asked not to capture faces). However, this doesn’t stop them from cultivating a performance that is brimming with passion and euphoric enthusiasm. We are unlikely to ever know who is actually in the band, but there is a massive amount of skill required to play with this intensity. 

Trying to sculpt words to portray tonight feels at best counterproductive. Having tried valiantly over the last three paragraphs to paint a picture, the only thing that feels appropriate is indescribable. Tonight is something you experience in the flesh as opposed to read about in a detached manner. It feels unfeasible that anything could ever be more intense, more extreme than this. In the close confines of the Club Academy, they create an undefinable experience of sensory overload. As the house lights rise and the ears start ringing, there is a collective moment of astonishment and incomprehension as we all begin to try and process what we have all just witnessed. Unsurpassable.

Check the “In The Flesh” page for more photos!
Dragged Into Sunlight + Vacuous + Plague Pit