Sydney’s Manning Bar is built for nights like this. Low ceiling, hard surfaces, nowhere much for the sound to escape and, tonight, four bands with absolutely no intention of treating anybody gently. Psycroptic and Rivers of Nihil are sharing top billing, with Growth and Slaughtercult completing a bill that covers several different shades of extreme metal without feeling thrown together.
Sydney’s own Slaughtercult are first into the breach, and there is no elaborate introduction required. They deal in straight-up brutality, hungry and heavy enough to make the early arrivals reconsider the wisdom of standing too close to the front.
Melbourne’s Growth take things somewhere more unsettling. Their music is heavy, certainly, but there is a psychological unease running through it that makes the experience feel considerably stranger. Where Slaughtercult come at the room directly, Growth twist the atmosphere, allowing tension and discomfort to creep into the gaps between the punishment.
Then there’s Rivers of Nihil, the Pennsylvania progressive death metal outfit who have spent the past decade making the genre increasingly difficult to pin down. They arrive on the back of their 2025 self-titled fifth album, bringing a catalogue where technical death metal can suddenly open into progressive passages, atmosphere and, yes, saxophone. In lesser hands that last ingredient could become a gimmick. With Rivers of Nihil, it has long since become part of the furniture.
Psycroptic need considerably less introduction on home soil. The Tasmanian veterans have been doing this for more than 25 years, taking Australian technical death metal around the world and building their reputation the old-fashioned way: records, touring, more records and then even more touring. The past 18 months alone have seen them on the road with Dying Fetus and Six Feet Under, and now alongside Rivers of Nihil.
But tonight isn’t really about industry milestones or career trajectories. It is about four bands, a packed metal bill and Manning Bar being subjected to several hours of increasingly complicated ways to make an enormous amount of noise. Slaughtercult bring the blunt force, Growth make things weird, Rivers of Nihil stretch death metal into unexpected shapes and Psycroptic remind Sydney why Tasmania has been exporting this particular strain of technical violence to the rest of the world for decades. A night of metal mayhem? Manning Bar has certainly had quieter Saturdays.
Images Deb Pelser
The tour moves to Brisbane and Tasmania next, tickets HERE.
