Incineration Festival 2026 – Camden, London: The Review (Part One)

Yersin

The day starts with some sad news: Danish black metal project Afsky, who were set to open The Electric Ballroom, have had to pull out due to medical reasons. And so it is that The Black Heart sports a queue that reaches down the stairs, past the bar and almost all the way to the front door for the opening band, Yersin. According to their Bandcamp, Yersin are “true Northern extreme metal, for fans of aggression, hatred, violence, riffs, screams and blastbeats” in that order. What’s clear from the moment you’re able to nab a space in the upstairs dungeon is that these Northerners know the meaning of a brutal barrage of extreme metal. Like a starving troll that has awakened from a deep slumber only to discover he has been robbed of his store of goats, Yersin is sheer chaos, fuelled by impulsive, riffed-off cravings. Their vocalist drools out a torrent of screaming noise whilst strangling himself with the mic cord and playing air baseball, likely envisioning the stillest crowd members’ heads as the ball. When his multiple attempts to encourage the first-pint crowd to move fall on deaf ears, he takes it upon himself to get in the pit and undergo a sort of exorcism on the floor. One can only hope that the exorcism was unsuccessful so that this madness will continue for years to come.

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Sarah Tsang

Der Weg Einer Freiheit

Although now opening the Electric Ballroom stage, German extreme metallers Der Weg einer Freiheit delight in thanking London for being here with them “tonight”. Who cares that it’s 2:30pm? When your music is the aural embodiment of the kind of vulnerability you can only find at nighttime, you convince everyone that the construct of day and night is yours to bend. Their set begins with a woman singing a harrowing, tribal melody that strips away the last remnants of light and builds like the starting ramp of an extreme rollercoaster. The bleak anticipation gives way to a rapid stream of tremolo-picking, blast beats and erratic strobe lights, ensuring that only the band’s shadows are visible. You want to close your eyes and let the entire intoxicating black metal spectacle wash over you. But you also don’t want to miss a second of Der Weg einer Freiheit’s sonic and visual rainbow of melancholy. Disorientating and utterly mesmerising, good luck shaking off the existential wonder from this early afternoon set.

Negative Frame

Calling all hardcore kids to The Underworld. Incineration Festival is a great one for gambling addicts and deciding which acts require you to abandon sets halfway through and race to a different venue if you want the chance of seeing even half the singer’s eyebrow and which acts you can throw caution to the wind and stroll to 2 minutes before curtains. Unfortunately, Negative Frame fall into the latter category, and while the crowd fills up somewhat during their set, it doesn’t burst at the seams with as much unhinged energy as London’s hardcore metal hybrids deserve. It’s too bad that today’s punters have deemed them too hardcore for their extreme metal sensibilities, because this five-piece are a relentless riff factory with more pugnacious stamina than a den of angry Russian bears. Vocalist Kesari Gorin is a cartwheeling, groin-stretching, screaming force of nature, shoulder-barging his bandmates in a humorous manner that highlights their nine-year-long camaraderie and aggressive determination. While the circle(ish) pit might not have been up to anyone’s standards, everything else, from the maniacally crisp sound quality to their unbridled fervour leaking off the stage, is fantastic.

Vreid

Black ‘n’ rolllllllllllll. After an intro that straddles the momentum and atmosphere of a funeral march with that of Darth Vader’s The Imperial March, Vreid take their turn in The Electric Ballroom. The Norwegians may be a black metal band, but they’re here to rock. You can almost hear the Prince of Darkness himself screaming ‘rock ’n’ roll’ at every rhythmic groove and gravelly vocal. One minute it’s a pitch-black attack of blasting tremolo-picked walls, and the next it’s swaggering Motörhead-esque riffs and propulsive beats; even the Grim Reaper is dancing. They dedicate ‘The Skies Turn Black’ to Ozzy, which gets the crowd raucously pumping their fists and swinging their heads. However, not only are Vreid black metal rockers, they’re also storytellers and travel back in time to the Second World War to play a song about a Norwegian who chose death over betraying his nation. Speak, Goddamnit, is a masterpiece, the raspy vocals and majestic riffs sonically encompassing the prisoner’s tortured drive, and the stomping, prominent bass taking on the power of the enemy. Story time with Vreid is a bludgeoning, bouncing bit of fun.

Fuming Mouth

Mark Whelan’s furious zest for life is not to be underestimated. So when the energy in The Roundhouse more closely resembles a newborn litter of kittens than an angry viper’s nest, the Fuming Mouth vocalist speaks up. “This is boring. Somebody start a mosh pit. I don’t care who goes first, but somebody needs to push someone.” The result is a two-and-a-half-person car crash, and while a pit doesn’t exactly open up or continue after the beers go flying, the crowd does at least ramp up the headbanging. And Mark proceeds to produce some of the most eye-bulging glares and facial expressions so obscene his whole head visibly vibrates from the effort. Fuming Mouth are a welcome slice of sadism on this already magnificently dark day. Their two-toned screams, coupled with distorted guitar slides and ominously crushing drum beats, drill gaping holes into your eardrums before causing you to grind your teeth together at just how visceral their blend of death metal and hardcore is. You can almost imagine Michael Myers cutting himself out of Mark’s chest (technically, off his T-shirt, but that doesn’t nearly sound as gruesome) and rampaging through the crowd. Maybe then this batch of metalheads would start moshing as if their lives depended on it.

 

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Final Dose

It’s about that time in the day where the cravings for a proper beer slip ’n’ slide mosh pit are getting out of control, so thank god it’s also time for London’s blackened punk band, Final Dose, to get rowdy in The Black Heart. The corpse-painted punks blast straight into a maniacal concoction of d-beat-fuelled punk urgency and bloodthirsty black metal bleakness, fronted by their balaclava-wearing vocalist – although he looks more like an executioner than a robber. The venue quickly becomes a beer-soaked sweat chamber of writhing lunatics, one that the singing executioner admires in between his screeching snarls. They command a frenzied reverie from the crowd, with some fans breaking out into wild gesticulations of worship and others doing whatever it takes to get onto the stage for a quick dive and crowdsurf. This is feral black metal punk at its gut-wrenching finest, and Final Dose immediately becomes a highlight of this year’s Incineration Festival.

 

Tomb Mold

Welcome to Tomb Mold’s universe. To the left, we have their first few years of weighty stench and old-school death metal rawness. To the right, we enter a void of celestial technicality, spanning progressive guitar noodling and beefy jazz grooves. The Canadian progressive death metal outfit may only have four albums to their name, but they already have an armoury of metallic variation that makes their set a disturbingly tantalising experience. They are led by Max Klebanoff, who summons demons from behind his drum kit with his unholier-than-thou grizzly growls and breakneck beats that The Roundhouse tries their utmost to keep up with. And where tracks like ‘Final Struggle of Selves’ see Tomb Mold charge into a full-throttle channelling of the nastiest dimensions of down-tuned suffocation, others, such as ‘Will of Whispers’, are a kaleidoscope of stripped-back riffs that border on shoegazy-ethereality. It’s hard to tell who is smiling more by the end of Tomb Mold’s set, the band themselves or the old and new fans they’ve left in a heady, well-pummelled daze.

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