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Despite the venue’s confines, Ghost Bath have done their best to create an atmosphere. Spilling out onto the floor, their amps are draped in flowers and nooses, while even the merch table has candles like a vigil to a fallen t-shirt. It’s a depressingly sparse crowd tonight, but those here are kneeling at the altar of one of extreme metal’s most bizarre propositions in recent years. As the PA does its best to keep up with three guitars slashing through the post-black forest of sound, frontman Dennis Mikula is in a trance, shrieking in a blur of sweat and hair. It’s so quiet between songs you can hear orders being taken at the bar. The band and crowd (minus one or two dickheads) move as one to the celestial distress of Thrones and Ambrosial, while closer Golden Number incites the first rumblings of a pit. As the band leave through the crowd, the piano outro rings out, the lights come up, and we’re back in the room, having lost an hour to something that may not be the finished product, but is damn close.

Luke Morton joined Metal Hammer as Online Editor in 2014, having previously worked as News Editor at popular (but now sadly defunct) alternative lifestyle magazine, Front. As well as helming the Metal Hammer website for the four years that followed, Luke also helped relaunch the Metal Hammer podcast in early 2018, producing, scripting and presenting the relaunched show during its early days. He also wrote regular features for the magazine, including a 2018 cover feature for his very favourite band in the world, Slipknot, discussing their turbulent 2008 album, All Hope Is Gone.