Live Review : Testament + Obituary + Destruction + Nervosa @ Academy, Manchester on October 10th 2025

Tonight, Manchester is metal city, but there is a distinct air of age demarcation going on. If you are under 35 then you are off to Co-op Live to witness Architects' ascension to greatness in Europe’s biggest arena. However, those of the disposition of being over 35 you are heading to the Academy for a stunningly retro celebration of a musical art form that is now well into its fifties. This iteration of Thrash of The Titans brings together all the distinct flavours of the flash in the pan movement that steadfastly refuses to die. We have new blood from South America in the shame of Nervosa, teutonic terror from Destruction, old school thrash/death hybrid from Obituary and a headline stint from a band that should be king, the almighty and still thoroughly underrated Testament.

To get all that thrash goodness in during a single evening, it is an early start and Nervosa are pushed on stage at 6:30, with the tech Gremlins not far behind. During ‘Seed of Death’ all that can be heard is the drums and we are midway through behind the wall before Prika Amaral’s guitar is in any way audible. All of this is rather a shame as the move to Greece seems to have finally resulted in an at least a semi-stable line up. For the first time since Fernanda Lira left the band, they feel like a coherent unit as opposed to Prika’s plaything. That stability has bred a tightness that courses through the set. With a little less than half an hour to play with there is no room for padding so we get a machine gun like approach firing off grizzled thrash after grizzled thrash. By the time we get to ‘Endless Ambition’ those tech gremlins have been herded back to their containers and the band are cooking on gas. An enjoyable and rather frantic start to proceedings.

Germany embraced thrash in a very Germanic fashion. It took a rather scuzzy and ill formed proto-genre and precision-engineered it into something much more technical and streamlined. Teutonic pretenders to the crown started appearing almost as soon as “Kill em’ all”, “Show No Mercy” and Suicidal Tendencies self-titled debuts hit the streets. Destruction led the way as part of the self-titled German big four (the other three being Sodom, Kreator and Tankard).

There’s been a lot of ups and downs and lineup merry-go-rounds, but Destruction are still very much a going concern, even if Marcel Schirmer is the only member who was around when they last played Manchester in 2016, let alone their heyday. He apologises for their tardiness in returning and takes great pains in proclaiming that he wants to talk great things about us when they reach London tomorrow. The beauty of German thrash is its steely singularity. It’s not actually that much here but it is beautifully rendered and full of driving focused energy. They are out on the road promoting sixteenth album “Birth of Malice” so it takes up three berths in the short set. The rest of the aired material is from their glory days, including the relentless Mad Butcher from the first ever E.P, “Sentence to Death”. Be it a year old or be it forty-one, Destruction create compelling hurtling masterpieces that marry technicality and brutality. Fast, single minded and utterly captivating. German craftsmanship at its best. 

For all intents and purposes, Obituary have moved in. Our ears are still ringing from their startling closing set at this year’s Bloodstock, and this is their fourth show in Manchester within a three-year period. However, despite that level of familiarity they are still greeted like they have been starving the Mancunian metal masses of their presence. It is an astounding reaction as they hit the stage, and you would be completely fooled into thinking they were the headline attraction. The Academy is heaving and goes utterly ballistic with a gigantic pit forming that seems to suck in half the room. There is something wonderfully simplistic about Obituary’s approach to metal. They emerged out of thrash (hence their legitimate claim to be on this tour) but then moulded it into something nastier and distinctly more primordial and out of that Floridian death metal was born. With tracks from the seminal “Cause of Death” (which, since it is celebrating its 35th anniversary, we get over half the album, including the stunning cover of Celtic Frost’s ‘Circle of the Tyrants’) you can hear that return to base values. At the time it stripped back all of metal’s accumulated excesses to forge something that was far more organic, ugly and vital. Almost four decades later, Obituary retain that feeling of raw wanton power. There can't be a single person in the room that hasn’t seen them before during their never-ending circling of this country, yet they manage to capture the imagination of everyone in the whole room in a tempestuous torrent of nihilistic noise. There is such beauty in the uncluttered minimalism of their approach. Repugnant and malicious but still marvellously engaging and entertaining.

After the astonishingly virile reaction to Obituary, the initial response for erstwhile headliners Testament feels rather muted. They aren't helped by an incredibly murky sound that initially buries the brilliance of this band. It takes at least until ‘Practise What You Preach’ for things to sort themselves out and for the band to stop sounding like they are playing at the bottom of a swimming pool. The less than audacious beginning is a real shame as Testament are one of the finest bands to emerge out of the thrash era. The notion of the big four is actually at best a clever marketing ploy and at worst a lie. Testament were as integral to thrash’s development and initial success as any of the so-called big boys who still soak up all the platitudes. Also in Alex Skolnick they quite simply have the finest guitarist to emerge from the eighties first wave of thrash (we here at ROCKFLESH will arm wrestle anybody that thinks Kerry King or Kirk Hammet is better). An internationally renowned jazz guitarist, Alex’s virtuoso abilities bring a completely different level of variance to Testament’s sound. He can solo with the best of them, but there is increased depth and texture.

The beginning stages may have been bumpy, but Testament soon get in to the grove. Chuck Billy has carried this band on his enormous shoulders for most of its career and tonight he proves once again why is one of the most revered frontmen in thrash. Having obviously shed a large number of pounds, he glides around the stage with vim and vigour. He is particularly taken with the fact they keep a tally of the number of people over the barrier and sets his sights on breaking the house barrier. It is at that particular moment that everything seems to click and Testament (slightly belatedly) roar into action as the formidable live act we know and love. From Billy’s rallying call for record breaking endeavours onwards, the pit regains the level of incarnate energy it displayed during Obituary and the bodies begin to rain down into the photo pit like a plague of frogs.

The other thing people overlook with Testament is just how good they were at ballads. The thrash ballad became a thing during the mid-eighties, as the young whippersnappers of thrash wanted a way to show their musical confidence but also their tender emotional side. Testament initially embraced the format with the self-titled ballad from the “Gathering”. It is sadly absent tonight, but we do get ‘Trail of Tears’ and ‘Return to Serenity’. With the latter the Alex and Billy stand together on the vanity steps as roman candles erupt all around them. It is astonishingly good and proves that Testament are indeed at their best when they slow down and let their music breath. But we are not just here for the slow dances or the old shit. Billy declares that today is a special day for them as “Para Bellum”, their first album in five years has literally just hit the shelves (or to be more modern the streaming sites). Knowing that this is a firmly old school crowd they don’t over milk it (as we said anyone that wasn’t around for thrash’s first incarnation are across town) and we get just two choice cuts of new material (‘Shadow People’ and the prophetic ‘Infanticide A.I.’). They are politely welcomed but as they return to the old shit the atmosphere and frenzied furore returns. Billy jubilantly declares that the record has been broken and fervently demands more bodies so that they can put a firm grip on the honour for future years. ‘Electric Crown’ even has to be curtailed as the mayhem gets too much up front and someone goes down. Once the unlucky soul has been rightened and patched back together they decide there is no reason to restart it and instead plough into closer ‘Into the Pit’. Even with sound problems (even though it got better, Testament never sounded as clean and crisp as either Destruction or Obituary) Testament still prove that if you really need to fence off a thrash elite then it was and remains a big five with them firmly as a member.

Check the “In The Flesh” page for more photos!
Testament + Obituary + Destruction + Nervosa