At this point, it isn’t up for debate whether Lorna Shore have ‘made it’ or not; they have. Even if I Feel The Everblack Festering Inside Me wasn’t quite the nuke to deathcore’s landscape that the preceding Pain Remains was, it remained indicative of momentum that goes a long way. And for a band like this, who you could argue have brought a blackened texture into metal’s frontline more effectively than anyone in recent memory, that counts for a lot. Regardless of any derision for not being the ‘right’ kind of heavy (‘TikTok Behemoth’ is a particularly smooth-brained one stumbled across recently), Lorna Shore have presence now, and they aren’t squandering it. With the ungodly time of 17:30 for doors, this is clearly positioned as a capital-E Event, uncommon as it is for a venue the size of Manchester’s O2 Victoria Warehouse to host a night of cold, bleak, implacable deathcore. (Plus, no Manchester venue is colder, bleaker and more implacable than this one.)
There’s a bit of work to do before we get to the real cream of the crop, mind. You could categorise tonight’s first two as ‘tone-setters’, in that they carry the baseline of heaviness that stops short of the extra mile. Of those two, Humanity’s Last Breath have the most going for them, but still, after a couple of all-consuming death-marches shrouded in mist and visual murk, you get the idea. The pummelling size is impressive, though, and between Filip Danielsson’s evil growl and the weight imbued to every smack of Klas Blomgren’s drums, you’re not starved for brutality. Just a few extra sprinkles of variety would do the trick to top it off; even the most demolishing blows can struggle to maintain results when they keep landing in the same place.
Even so, there’s more to remember with Humanity’s Last Breath than Shadow Of Intent, who aren’t the beneficiaries of a deathcore stand more or less intrinsically tied to them. Nope, other than some brief flickers of piped-in grandeur and sharper death-metal soloing, this is…just deathcore. It’s alright for that, where songs like Flying The Black Flag and Infinity Of Horrors indulge in their thick, chaotic slamming. At the same time, you’d struggle to pluck an exceptionally memorable beat or trait that goes ahead. This is working the crowd, more than anything, using the deathcore’s tried-and-true bag of tricks to do so. Fine, functional, and little else stronger than that.
Thankfully, Whitechapel are quick to pick things up in a big way. They’re the first band to have the crowd chant their name, and elicit whoops when their now-signature wendigo mask is brought out. Not unsurprisingly, of course; they’re established heavy-hitters in deathcore, whose swerve back into the genre with Hymns In Dissonance last year was almost impossibly masterful. And while it’d be interesting to see how the swampy nu-metal of The Valley and Kin would land amid this throng of sweaty mosh-fiends, that’s not really in the spirit of things, is it? Even if Prisoner 666 is the most forgiving of melody of any song so far, it’s still dripping with the malevolent heft you’d want.
And with that as a thesis—and clearly hewn a lot more tightly than what came before—Whitechapel play a blinder. Phil Bozeman remains one of the greatest growlers currently working, doubling over as if to squeeze some more brimstone out of himself. A mention needs to go to the rhythm section, too, with Gabe Crisp always giving it both barrels on his bass, and Brandon Zackey’s drumming punishes throughout, specifically on the breakdown of A Visceral Retch. At their heaviest, there’s a fire to Whitechapel that’s borderline diabolical in execution. This is premium deathcore, all meat and muscle with no fat to be found. And as it progresses (namely after Bozeman’s well-received shout of “Right now, we’re gonna play some old shit”), it somehow gets even leaner. In this style of metal, this is how you do it as a legacy act.
But for as excellent as Whitechapel are, there’s a couple more rungs to scale to reach legit headliner status in a space of this size. As Oblivion decimates from the word ‘go’, boasting the most concisely-packed drumming yet and the first of many pyro blasts, Lorna Shore have reached it and then some. This is what it looks like when deathcore breaches a scale hitherto unexplored, and can justify it. You’ll get bands enjoying massive success in the style, but Lorna Shore push on with an arena headliner’s stance. It’s a testament to Will Ramos as a frontman, and how much of a different calibre he is to basically all comers. There’s not a fault to pick in his roars and squeals; it’s a repertoire that’s broad, soaring and intensely crushing. See that funnelled through the closing moments of Oblivion—head thrown back for maximum excess—or the triumphant, bellowed refrain of Unbreakable, and you wonder if Lorna Shore could take it further than this.
And, yeah, they probably could. Theirs is the perfect example of grand intent and mammoth intent coming to a head and working in harmony. It would be nice if their classical touches weren’t backing-track-only (a song like In Darkness is a great case on its own for shows with a live orchestra), but Lorna Shore aren’t stuck to just that. There’s a song like Glenwood that takes an obscenely huge emotional swing, almost like a melodeath ballad in how its clean guitar forms. On the other end of that discussion, War Machine’s closing run would probably register on the Richter Scale for how it brooks the upper limit of deathcore magnitude. If you feel it’s belabouring the point to continuously mention the size of this whole thing, you’ve clearly not experienced how impressive it is for yourself.
And sure, there’s definitely a ‘show-y’ element to prop a lot of that up. Unlike their tourmates, Lorna Shore are generally wired into a younger, slicker perception of deathcore, and that definitely shows. The production is a given; fire, CO2 cannons, flashbangs and the like are the established hallmarks of metal’s biggest show-people. But if view that as some betrayal of sacrosanct purity within a blackened-adjacent sound…well, why are you here in the first place? Lorna Shore have never kowtowed to purists, nor have they sold out in the way that said purists would want to believe. The fact they continue to bring their photographer Nick Chance up for guest vocals on Sun//Eater says plenty, where there’s still a connection to a human ideal that, no matter how expansive the outside may be, is yet to be severed.
And at the end of the day, there’s simply a feeling of something cool about Lorna Shore and how we’ve got here. Among the ‘mainstream’ metal space, they’re a breath of fresh air—epic and sprawling, without compromise. The generally longer runtimes of their songs speak to that clearly, where there’s space to feel their evolution occur. But when Ramos introduces the final run as “some ass-beaters,” he’s not wrong there, either. Prison Of Flesh thrashes and caves away, another vehicle for fire to be spewed. And with the three-part Pain Remains to follow, and To The Hellfire as the capstone, it’s a torrent of everything fantastic that’s taken Lorna Shore so, so far. It’s the pinnacle of deathcore in 2026, and as it stands right now, it’s not even remotely close.
Words by Luke Nuttall
