It began with a bang and ended with tinnitus. I hadn’t expected three people from Singapore to make me happier than any grand stadium concert ever could. But here we are: heart in throat, with Wormrot planted like a monument in my grindcore archive.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
This is the kind of thing you only say about Slayer, Converge and maybe Napalm Death on a good day: this could well be the festival’s best concert. And I say that without blinking. Wormrot wasn’t just a bull’s-eye — it was a total demolition of any doubt about how strong grindcore still is in 2025.
They’re three men. No bassist. That alone should make any metal purist freeze up with suspicion, but once drummer Arif — who plays at a speed you’d normally need a license for — launches his attack, you forget all about fullness and low end. He’s like an overheated human metronome from hell, and I could feel every hit in my chest.
Frontman Gabriel roars as if it’s the last day on earth, and in principle it might as well have been — at the very least, we’d lost all sense of time and place. There was screaming and switching between vocal styles with a technique that felt anything but humble — and yet it was. Because there was something singular about seeing three Asian musicians radiating a zen-like modesty while simultaneously splintering everything around them with a sound pressure that ought to come with warning labels.
And then it happened. A woman stepped out from the wings and took over the microphone — her vocal was so brutal and self-assured that the crowd almost inhaled in unison. She wasn’t just a feature, she was a force. And shortly after, another vocalist — this time a man — completed what felt less like a concert than a grindcore ritual performed with surgical precision and mad theatrical blood in its veins.
The songs were hurled at the audience like bursts from a machine gun. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Grind” was delivered with a twinkle in the eye and a shredding growl — and yes, you do smile a little when someone titles their songs with Charlie Kaufman references and then bellows them as if the sun itself is about to explode.
At one point they announced a “slow song”, and that made the whole pit grin. Because slow is, of course, relative when you play grindcore — this was still faster than anything Foo Fighters have ever managed.
That they’re standing here at Copenhell with this lineup again, 15 years after their last tour together, is moving in itself. And you can feel it. There wasn’t a trace of ironic distance or exhaustion — just a band that wanted something from us, and delivered it with a physicality and presence you rarely see on stages this size.
Reflection:
There was something almost pure about it. As if Wormrot were reminding us why we stand in mud and beer up to our knees and scream ourselves hoarse in sunburnt euphoria: because music can still be uncompromising, sincere and wildly life-affirming. And because you’re allowed to laugh, even when your head is being ripped off.
En stjerne
To stjerner
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Fire stjerner
Fem stjerner
Seks stjerner
