Live Review : Slaughter To Prevail + Dying Fetus + Suicide Silence + Annotations Of An Autopsy @ O2 Victoria Warehouse, Manchester on January 17th 2026

Rock 'n' roll is founded on controversy. From Elvis swinging his hips in a sexualised manner, through the Beatles declaring themselves to be bigger than Jesus, the Sex Pistols dropping the F-bomb on prime-time telly and onto Ozzy urinating on the Alamo while wearing one of Sharon's dresses. One of its fundamental tenets is to cause the generation before it to look at their children and say, “don’t grow up like that”. The latest in a long line of controversial acts to shake the moral fibre of the nation are Russian/British deathcore agitators Slaughter to Prevail.

Live Review : Paleface Swiss + Static Dress + Stick To Your Guns @ Academy, Manchester on January 15th 2026

What we have tonight is less a straightforward bill and more a kaleidoscope of alternative and melodic hardcore, each band bending the genre to their own will. Tonight is less about genre purity and more about evolution. Stick To Your Guns remind us of the roots, of the communal spirit of hardcore. Static Dress show us what happens when you twist those roots into something chaotic and dangerous. And Paleface Swiss prove that deathcore can be accessible, commanding, and even mainstream without losing its bite.

Live Review : Born Of Osiris + Within Destruction + Aversions Crown + Larcenia Roe @ Academy 3, Manchester on January 13th 2026

We are now into the second week of 2026 and we are very much back to business as usual. We start the year in many ways as we ended it with an extremely tasty quadruple bill that illustrates the array of different flavours and textures currently available within extreme music. All four bands represented here this evening in some way galvanise around what we know as death metal, but all four bands come to this musical mecca from incredibly different directions. It is like watching four distinctly diverse interpretations of the same play. There is a shared DNA, but the shells it is housed within are remarkably different.