NORTHWEST TERROR FEST 2024: A REPORT ON DAY ONE

(We are very fortunate to have two wonderful talents reporting on the 2024 edition of NCS-sponsored Northwest Terror Fest — writer Gonzo and photographer John Malley. Together they have made it possible for those who weren’t there to get a sense of the experience, and to remind those of us who were there how great it was. Here’s their report on the first day. Reports on the next two days will follow in the two days ahead.)

Few cities in the US have a relationship with music quite like Seattle does.

Beneath the city’s foreboding skies, seemingly every decade since the early 1900s carries the weight of some musical movement it spawned, and the net it casts is as wide as it is diverse.

Musicians of all backgrounds and ethnicities, playing every type of music imaginable – from jazz and folk to alternative rock and death metal – have left an enduring, tireless mark on the Emerald City, and in so many instances, the ripples that start there would be felt throughout the rest of the world.

Beyond just the music, though, the city has historically been a sanctuary for artists so often met with resentment, rejection, and outright hostility everywhere else. Cities like Seattle are where creative people come to galvanize their thoughts into action while waving a middle finger at the status quo.

When you consider all this, it only makes sense that Seattle is still proudly carrying on this legacy. And to me, no music festival is more emblematic of all this than Northwest Terror Fest.

I’m sure as hell not one to observe many traditions – at least, not in the “widely accepted by the people” sense – but the yearly tradition of coming to this festival and word-vomiting my experience into the void is one I’m more than glad to uphold.

Buckle up, my friends – it’s about to get fucking weird.

Over the years, I’ve become intimately familiar with this festival and what goes into the months of meticulous planning and execution of it. I was there in its humble beginnings in 2017, when a confused volunteer tried to tell me “That’s UADA,” shouting over the noise of the performance that was 100% not the cloaked-and-hooded members of UADA and most definitely Seattle’s Isendoral.

Things have come a long, long way with the festival since then. The two-stage hosting venue of Capitol Hill’s Neumos and Barboza was once again ready to party at 4 p.m. on a Thursday, welcoming those of us blowing off their day jobs. The venue is the hallmark of consistency – I recognized some of the same staff as when I lived down the road from this place, and aside from an interior upgrade that happened sometime since I left, not much has changed. Amid the backdrop of a neighborhood that’s seen nothing but change over the past two decades, I found this comforting.

 

Before I could finish sending the requisite number of “I’m here” texts to old friends, local goth rockers Nox Novacula began kicking things off. I’d been intrigued by Nox’s sound since I discovered them months ago on the NWTF playlist – think a female-fronted Grave Pleasures and you wouldn’t be too far off – and their stage presence immediately drew everyone in.

There’s a long list of shit that impresses me every year about this festival, and one item that’s consistently on it: People fucking show up, even if the band isn’t exactly a household name. Nox Novacula brought in a sizeable crowd for it being 5 p.m. on a Thursday, and once they wrapped up their engrossing set, NWTF already felt like it was in full swing.

 

Meanwhile, a portion of the crowd had already been migrating downstairs to Barboza to see the spooky ambience of Spiritual Poison. It’s not every day that you see an experimental noise unit get a 30-minute set at a festival, but – and I’ll say this an annoying number of times between now and whenever this is finished – this is part of the beauty of Northwest Terror Fest. The way I saw it, the experimentation of adding Spiritual Poison to the lineup was just as experimental as the sounds that were emanating from the speakers during their set.

 

In what would be the first of countless trips back up these stairs until Saturday night, I trudged back up to Neumos. San Francisco’s Body Void was already pummeling the crowd with the kind of white-hot sludge that we’d be hearing a lot of tonight, with Primitive Man and Amenra making appearances later. Body Void quickly convinced me that the suffocating feeling I get in my chest whenever I hear their music isn’t just when I hear it at home. Their live show was absolutely thunderous, with vocalist Willow Ryan’s feral shrieks highlighting the slow-burn aesthetic that’s gotten this band so much attention over the past few years.

 

It might be easy to throw the “gimmick” label on anything that’s self-branded as “bimbo-core Barbie-violence,” but New Orleans’ Brat probably doesn’t give a fuck. The band’s unlikely marriage between ’90s pop anthems and Escuela Grind-style riffs and breakdowns is most certainly unconventional, with vocalist Liz Selfish doing a cheerleader-style dance shortly before roaring at the crowd to get a bigger pit going.

But you know what? Good. If bands like this are going to teach us anything, it’s that you don’t have to look or act a certain way to play metal. And if unconventional and even risky acts are going to be welcomed somewhere with open arms, it would be at this festival. (It’s also worth mentioning that the song “Human Offense” whipped up Barboza’s craziest pit of the day so far.)

During the climb back upstairs, I realized that if I didn’t cater to the demands of my jetlagged stomach, it would be a very long night. Sacrifices must be made, I thought.

I was repeating that phrase in my head while shoveling a cheeseburger into my face at my old haunt Lost Lake. Sadly, this made watching much of Daeva all but impossible. The two songs I did catch, however, reinforced why their last album was so revered on these very pages when it hit in 2022.

After that the beastly tech death of Vancouver’s Atrae Bilis was lurking downstairs like a dungeon-dwelling abomination eagerly seeking its first victim.

 

As they ripped into a blistering set, it soon became clear that the only “victims” in this scenario would be anyone who wasn’t there to witness it. The level of sheer audial destruction Atrae Bilis can dish out on stage is akin to their countrymen in Archspire, minus the unhinged rants and impromptu games of Twister. Cuts from Bilis’s brand-new Aumicide record seemed to practically set the room ablaze, and I was sure to swing by their booth afterward to pay my requisite respects of “sick set, my dude.”

Around this point in the day is when I customarily make my first realizations about the given year’s festival – what themes are in play, how they went about curating a lineup on a given day, etc. What I thought so far is what I thought last year:

1. This festival isn’t afraid to take risks
2. They’re very good at finding female-fronted acts that are changing the game
3. Today’s theme is sludge, shoegaze, and slow burns

 

All three of those might be relevant to a band like Blackwater Holylight, an all-woman psych-doom outfit from Portland. Their bluesy melodies and bass grooves hit just the right way after four straight bands of crushing heaviness, and vocalist/bassist Allison Faris looked calm and comfortable in front of a crowd that had just been hit by the death metal train.

Blackwater’s set ended up being a welcome respite from the chaos.

 

Slow Crush was downstairs with a generous dose of shoegaze. It was welcome, too, because Primitive Man, who would be up next, has a way of sucking all the oxygen from the room whenever they play. (Probably from living up here at elevation.)

I love Slow Crush and their variety of post-punk that found Alcest, but the combination of jet lag and sleep deprivation was starting to take hold. Their set felt the comedown to a bad acid trip. I retched at the thought of choking down a Red Bull to stay in the game, but it was looking increasingly necessary.

No, I thought. I’m in this for the long haul, and there’s no way in hell I’m missing any part of Amenra to close out the night.

 

All of this, it seemed, was to prepare my body for the glacially slow menace of Primitive Man back upstairs. I’ve often described their music as “so crushingly heavy that it makes me poop a little.” If you’ve seen them live, chances are you understand. Never trust a fart during a Primitive Man set.

Not only was the music at the required level of bowel-shakingly heavy, but it was also the loudest set I’ve heard in a while. My earplugs have more than a few miles on them by now, and I was beginning to question how effective they were at keeping Primitive Man from murdering what’s left of my hearing.

All told, fucking great set as usual from the Denver sludge kings.

Much to my bleary-eyed delight, we’d finally reached the final three acts of the night; the first of which would close out Barboza for the night: Ulthar.

 

The Oakland trio is a who’s-who of Bay Area death metal stalwarts. A huge swath of people were cramming their way into the basement venue to crane their necks. Ulthar didn’t disappoint anyone who paid the price in sweat. Their thundering blackened death whipped the crowd into a frenzy, albeit it was almost impossible for me to see anything beyond that.

 

Upstairs, Giant Squid was set to make their only regional appearance for the foreseeable future, so that was a no-brainer. Even more intriguing was the chance to hear them play Metridium Fields in its entirety. I didn’t know the album very well at all, but it felt like the kind of thing everyone should see while they’re here.

Giant Squid’s sound is unique enough to warrant very few peers. They’re occasionally similar to what Mike Patton cooks up on his day off, but the sheer depth of these songs – especially the 21-minute title track – puts them in their own corner. So, naturally, they’d be a perfect fit for Day One of NWTF 2024, where the lineup is so strikingly diverse that it’s almost unfair to simply call it a “metal festival.”

The band barely managed to squeeze the entirety of Fields into their 50-minute set time. Considering the album clocks in at exactly 60 minutes, they probably omitted some part of it and I didn’t notice. Nothing like being an honest observer.

 

The set change up top would require some patience, but Amenra would soon be destroying this place. The Belgian post-metal icons were a huge part of why I felt this year’s NWTF lineup was the best it’s ever been. I’d only seen them once before this when they opened for Neurosis almost a decade ago at the Showbox Market. That may as well have been a lifetime ago by now.

Like Neurosis, though, their take on metal is almost instantly recognizable despite being immensely complex. A lot of Amenra’s songs require some patience, but the difference between the band and so many imitators? They can go from 100 to 0 just as easily as others go from 0 to 100.

Inertia is a hell of a drug, and nobody – no band, musician, or genre – is immune to it. It might be more common to hear bands lead a song with an intro that slowly builds until it explodes under its own weight, but in this humble scribe’s opinion, it’s way harder to do that in the opposite order.

Put Amenra to that test, though, and they’ll make your head spin. Opening with the stillness-turned-savagery of “Boden,” then with the marauding intensity of “Razoreater,” the band reminded us how refined they’ve become after 25 years. One moment, the sheer sonic density of their music leaves no room for an errant thought, and out of nowhere comes almost total silence except an acoustic guitar and vocalist Colin Van Eeckhout’s barely audible whisper.

It’s a fucking marvel to watch Amenra’s post-doom-meets-performance-art unfurl on stage. Each person seems to give so much of themselves with every performance that it’s almost incredible how they have the energy to tour. By the time they closed us out with “A Solitary Reign” and “Diaken,” it was clear that at some point in the past 10 years, Amenra has ascended spiritually into some higher dimension, and their music is but a testament to that communion. It’s kind of like talking to the smartest person in a room full of very smart people – some of them are just wired differently, and it’s not always going to be easy to understand.

As the Belgians wrapped up the immersive climax to their breathtaking set, I almost literally fell into my Uber outside the venue. We’d concluded Day One, and I was looking forward to the short coma that would come soon. In about 15 hours, I’d be doing this all over again – somehow.