Three shades of black metal: Noctem, Winterfylleth and Blackbraid at The Garage, London

Sometimes a gig tells you what kind of night it’s going to be before the first note. The Garage is a smaller room than most of the London venues this kind of bill usually ends up in, and that alone set the tone for the evening. To add to the feeling, there were football fans pouring out of the pubs around Highbury Corner, which made for a funny contrast with a crowd covered in black t-shirts and patches heading to a black metal show.

It was a compact room for this lineup — Spain’s Noctem opening, Manchester’s Winterfylleth in the middle, and Blackbraid headlining on their Blackbraid II tour — and the intimacy felt like a gift.

Noctem

1. The Black Consecration
2. The Submission Discipline
3. The Pale Moon Rite
4. We Are Omega
5. Let That Is Dead Sleep Forever
6. A Cruce Salus

Opening with Noctem was the best possible start. The Spanish band — already big back home — had only 30 minutes, but they made every one of them count. Pure carnage. The stage presence alone was worth showing up early for: the singer looked like a living corpse who’d come back just to perform, eyes locked somewhere past the back wall, every movement deliberate. They share some DNA with other bands in the scene, but the raw power of their set felt genuinely evil in a way their peers rarely manage. They were the highlight of the night for me.

The set pulled from across their catalogue, with “The Pale Moon Rite” alongside “A Cruce Salus” and newer material from “Credo Certe Ne Cras”. It was indeed a blast of a start.

Photo: Peterson Marti.

Winterfylleth

1. First Light
2. Heroes of a Hundred Fields
3. To the Edge of Tyranny
4. The Reckoning Dawn
5. Echoes in the After
6. The Unyielding Season
7. Upon This Shore
8. A Valley Thick With Oaks
9. Whisper of the Elements

Having seen Winterfylleth a handful of times now, I’ll be honest: the stage presence has never been their selling point, and it wasn’t tonight either. But that’s not what they’re about. Winterfylleth is about the beautiful tones in their songs, the raw British black metal coming out of the Midlands, the kind that doesn’t need masks or corpse paint to be called so.

The setlist leaned heavily into their brand-new album “The Unyielding Season”, which only came out at the end of March. “First Light”, “The Reckoning Dawn” and the title track “The Unyielding Season” anchored the new material, while “Upon This Shore” from 2024’s “The Imperious Horizon” was a real highlight of the set for the crowd. They also went back for older favourites like “A Valley Thick With Oaks” and “Whisper of the Elements”. Again, their performance was as unique as their music and left everyone in the venue asking for more.

Photo: Peterson Marti.

Blackbraid

1. Celestial Bloodlust
2. Wardrums at Dawn on the Day of My Death
3. The Spirit Returns
4. The Wolf That Guides the Hunters Hand
5. The River of Time Flows Through Me
6. The Dying Breath of a Sacred Stag
7. Twilight Hymn of Ancient Blood
8. As the Creek Flows Softly By
9. Sacandaga
10. Barefoot Ghost Dance on Blood Soaked Soil

Blackbraid hit the stage at 21:35, with a 22:45 curfew, and I’d been waiting a long time to finally see them live. For some reason, I came away a bit disappointed. The musicians played well and the songs were delivered with care, but something about the set didn’t hit the spot for me. The long pauses between tracks were the main problem — they stretched long enough that I started wondering whether there was some tension on stage, an audio issue no one was telling us about, or if they were simply choosing to take things slow. The crowd didn’t seem to mind, but for me the pacing kept pulling me out of the mood I’d wanted to settle into.

When it comes to the setlist, what we heard spanned the project’s whole discography so far, from “Celestial Bloodlust” off the self-titled debut “Blackbraid I”, through “The Wolf That Guides the Hunter’s Hand” and “Sacandaga” from “Blackbraid II”, to newer tracks from “Blackbraid III”, which came out last August. Which in my opening is a great album.

Unfortunately, on top of the “slow” vibes, the venue situation didn’t help either. A security guard spent most of the set telling people not to stand in front of the toilet door — a fair ask, probably, but repeated so often that it broke the mood of the venue more than once. A lot of people simply wanted to get closer to the stage and weren’t allowed to. I understand the room has its quirks and the layout isn’t easy, but when a security reminder comes every couple of minutes, some of those rules start to feel like they’re working against the night.

None of that takes away from the fact that three very different takes on black metal shared one small London stage in one evening: Spanish fury, English heritage, American wilderness. Noctem and Winterfylleth gave me everything I wanted and more, and while Blackbraid didn’t quite land for me this time I’d happily give them another try, perhaps in a better venue.

Photo: Peterson Marti.