Avant-extreme metallers Voices get ready to party in purgatory

Voices 2018 promo pic, Paul Harries
(Image credit: Paul Harries)

If urban life seems a bit alien and edgy right now, what with both personal and inner space not being what it once was, then this Sunday presents the perfect opportunity to vent some frustration, and to bang your head in multiple dimensions while you’re at it.

Taking place at 7:30pm at Camden Town’s The Black Heart in the physical world, and online – via gig-streaming service Hotel Radio, in association with Old Empire – in the one we all inhabit now, London-based miscreants Voices are playing a live gig that may be under lockdown, but is guaranteed to be as wide-ranging, tuned in to all the stations on Your Overworked Brain FM and exhilaratingly immersive as extreme metal gets.

Forged in 2012 from what was then the ashes of Akercocke, Voices have proved to be an ever-evolving entity. Their fearlessly progressive take on death and black metal, not to mention restlessly angular post-punk, has recast the sensory overload of their home city as an hallucinogenic journey of dread, self-discovery and feverishly fraught wanderlust.

Tickets to the event are £2.99 – a small price to pay for a night of knife-edge drama, labyrinthine excursions and the sound of psychological faultlines being prodded to breaking point.

Voices livestream their show from The Black Heart at 7.30 on Sunday July 19 in association with Old Empire. Online tickets are £2.99, available via Hotel Radio.

Jonathan Selzer

Having freelanced regularly for the Melody Maker and Kerrang!, and edited the extreme metal monthly, Terrorizer, for seven years, Jonathan is now the overseer of all the album and live reviews in Metal Hammer. Bemoans his obsolete superpower of being invisible to Routemaster bus conductors, finds men without sideburns slightly circumspect, and thinks songs that aren’t about Satan, swords or witches are a bit silly.