Damnation Festival: A Hellish Celebration of Extreme Metal at Manchester BEC Arena [Photos]

With Summer now well behind us, for gig-goers who love nothing better than a festival, it’s always welcome to see Damnation Festival appearing on the gig calendar in November. Admittedly, the weather is a little chillier, but as thousands of fans descend on Bowlers Exhibition Centre in Manchester, the event, headlined by Suffolk gothic black metal powerhouse Cradle of Filth, was anything but cold.

Pulling together a line-up spread across three stages, Damnation Festival 2024 delivered everything an extreme metal fan could want. Grindcore, experimental metal, death metal, black metal, metalcore, pretty much all bases were covered, and with Virginia thrashers Enforced blitzing through their midday set and the first pits of the day erupting on the floor, Damnation was off to a ferocious start.

Through the dark, misty atmosphere on the main stage, A.A.Williams brought a moodier feel to the early afternoon. Not only showing the diversity of the line-up, A.A.Williams were the perfect example of how such intimate music can still work in a hall like this. As if to crack the mood, Gillian Carter hit the stage going off like a firecracker, and as the experimental hardcore outfit unleashed a barrage of feedback drenched tunes, those suffering from a hangover after the previous night’s A Night of Salvation, were now well and truly awake.

One of the things that really stands out about the Damnation crowd is how they’ll check out the bands on the smaller stage. Perfectly situated right next to the main hall, it means bands like Rezn are guaranteed an audience which very much what the Chicago band deserve as they unleash their crushing, doomy riffs to much nodding of heads across the room.

Back in the main hall though, there was the first of a number of mad rushes from around the venue to get a spot ahead of the arrival of Phoenix death metal titans Gatecreeper. Decked in shades and bathed in a swampy green light, Gatecreeper frontman Chase Mason leads from the front. Neck-snappingly heavy, the likes of “Caught in the Treads” point to the exact moment in the day where Damnation 2024 stepped it up to the next level.

A couple of hundred yards away, Georgia sludge metallers Black Tusk had the uneviable task of going head-to-head with Gatecreeper but the quartet had no issues holding their own in the smaller room. In fact, if anything, the more compact stage gave their sludgy grooves extra bite with heads banging all around the room to this wonderful display of gritty riff action.

It was balls-to-the-wall death metal for the next couple of acts as first up, 200 Stab Wounds delivered a hit-and-run smash on the Damnation headbangers with a no-frills, straight to the point slew of the gore anthems. Devoid of gimmicks, the death metal quartet were all about the brutality. Fuming Mouth continued the onslaught with more straight-up rage. Another band who steer clear of the gimmicks, Fuming Mouth smash out a stackful of tracks like “Out of Time” into the appreciative arms of a raging pit who need no encouragement to throwdown with the Massachussets bruisers.

Damnation Festival 2024 Poster Artwork

Heading into the early evening now, fans poured from all corners as American grindcore crew Nails made their long-awaited return to the UK and Damnation. For the next forty or so minutes, the Californian hatemongers chewed up and spat out this Damnation crowd with a set that was near on perfection. Littered with banks of flames, the band pummelled, pummelled then pummelled some more spitting out “You Will Never Be One Of Us” while those brave enough to venture close enough to the violence soon lost themselves into a mass of flailing limbs.

Brummie death metal legends Bolt Thrower are an iconic part of British death metal and in fact Damnation history so it comes as no surprise that there is a hefty crowd in attendance as frontman Karl Willets brings his death metal machine Memoriam to Manchester. Bludgeoning through “Undefeated”, this is as close as some fans will get to the classic era but, judging by the heads banging on the front row, very few people had any complaints about that.

By now, we’re heading into the final few bands of Damnation Festival 2024 and it’s becoming a test of stamina for some fans. So, up step Orange County metalcore veterans Bleeding Through to perform their game-changing This Is Love, This Is Murderous album. Following the onslaught of Nails, you would have understood a muted response especially given the slightly muddy sound but, nope, nothing was going to stop the pit losing its mind to classics like “Love Lost In A Hail of Gunfire” with frontman Brandan Schieppati orchestrating the chaos from the barrier. For forty-five minutes, Bleeding Through took us back to the beginning of the century and it felt absolutely great.

Instrumental three-piece Russian Circles again offered something different to what has been a skull cracking second half to Damnation but, while a large crowd are gathered and nod their heads appreciatively soaking up the sublime wall of progressive heaviness, all eyes are on watches to make sure of a spot at the Holy Goat stage where the mysterious Dragged Into Sunlight had emerged from the Liverpool underground to crush through their 2009 offering Hatred For Mankind .

Drenched in darkness, the Liverpudlians stand with their backs the crowd on a stage lit only by candlelight before pummelling through their life-hating fury. With no respite offered the band, identities obscured by hoods, take no prisoners with their onslaught. Blitzing together a bowel-damaging cocktail of grindcore and black metal, the Liverpudlians are utterly unstoppable in their onslaught. Judging by the queue at their merch stand earlier in the day, many fans had realised this was a rare opportunity to see Dragged Into Sunlight and were rewarded late in the evening with a true lesson in musicial hatred.

Two bands to go, funeral doom merchants Ahab make their welcome return to Damnation having been forced to pull out of last year’s event. Lurching through their nautical themed songs, the German band are no match for the unbridled brutality which preceeded them nor have the got the theatrical drama of the headliners but to the heads nodding along to these anchor-heavy riffs, Ahab will always be a welcome name on any Damnation line-up.

And so, two days later, it comes down to Dani Filth and his blackhearted henchmen to wrap things up for rollercoaster Damnation Festival. A late night running time means many fans have departed for last trains but that doesn’t stop a few thousand of Cradle of Filth’s ghoulish fanbase joining the Suffolk terrors for one final sermon of the weekend.

The frontman is his usual entertaining self “This album is thirty years old,” he announces early on before quipping, “which is funny because I’m only twenty-seven years old.” Setwise, the band faithfully rip through their iconic The Principle of Evil Made Flesh debut while familiar fan favourites like “From The Cradle to Enslave” are a haunting, dramatic and quite fitting finale to another stamina-sapping, muscle-wrecking, eardrum assaulting Damnation Festival.

Damnation Festival returns for its 20th Anniversary and a new format two-day event on November 8th & 9th 2025. For all the latest ticket information, head over to the Official Damnation Website.

Damnation Festival – BEC Arena (Manchester, UK) on November 2nd, 2024

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