I was last at Resistanz in 2014, ending three straight years of attending the festival, with various other life commitments (and Whitby, more often than not) meaning it hadn’t been possible for us to return for some time. But, when certain bands got announced this year, a plan was quickly hatched, and we found ourselves back in the city we left over fifteen years ago for a long weekend – extended that bit more once Front Line Assembly were announced for the Thursday night, beginning their first UK tour in what I think is seven years. That gig – which I deliberately went to as a punter, rather than a reviewer – was an exceptional show, a fully-electronic set (no guitars) that dug into some unexpected corners of their history alongside all the old favourites.

---

---

As is traditional, too, after a suggestion by my wife I pay attention to how many women/non-binary artists there are playing at festivals these days. There were twenty-one artists playing, a quick count-up suggests 39 men and nine women playing (and women fronted six of the acts). It’s not a great proportion, still, but better than many festivals I/we attend. It was also notable that two of the acts were fronted by people of colour, which was notable enough in a mostly white scene to mention.

---

/Resistanz 2025 /Friday /Corporation

/Priest
/ALT BLK ERA
/Toronto Is Broken & REEBZ
/Beyond Border
/Nox Pulso
/Ray Noir

---

A few post-gig beers meant for a fuzzy start to Friday, and that and a more relaxed schedule for us over the weekend meant that we missed the opening act Ray Noir on Friday (at least partly because of the way our bookings worked, we had to check into our weekend hotel on Friday afternoon, so a band that started just after 15:00 wasn’t going to work for us), but I did get there in time for Nox Pulso.

A Manchester-based industrial metal duo, their heavy beats, roaring breakbeats and guitars certainly nodded in the direction of acts like Cubanate in particular, but where they fell down was in a muddy sound mix as well as one or both of the microphones not working at all. That wasn’t such an issue when I was in the photo pit – the sheer power of the vocals was loud enough to hear over the beats there! – but when I dropped back it was really noticeable. It was a shame, too, as they should have been exactly the kind of band I wanted to hear, and I’ll be looking out for future gigs to ensure I can give them another chance.

Maybe I’m just a little out of the loop these days with European industrial/futurepop/synthpop: I’d never come across Beyond Border before this weekend, but I certainly won’t forget them. A German band whose sound is familiar but fresh, full of sweeping melodies, punchy rhythms and a vocalist in Kai Vincenz Németh who has a deep, rich voice that suits their songs well. In addition, between songs there was entertaining patter that avoided the usual meaningless shout-outs to the crowd, and helped us understand the band a bit better (although hearing Kai has roots in my hometown of Huddersfield – not to mention finding out later that his dad moved from the UK to the same part of Germany that my dad did, around the same time – was a bit of a surprise).

Those English roots might have explained the unexpected use of “C**t!” in the set highlight Mr. Nice Guy, too, although the cover they chose in the set was an interesting one, too: a swooning take on a relatively obscure Depeche Mode b-side, Dangerous. It was a great version of it, and suited the sound of the band well.

Very much one of the discoveries of the festival, and going on the chatter over the weekend, this band made a great many new fans.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect with Toronto Is Broken & REEBZ, but what we got I enjoyed enormously. Pretty much a metal infused drum’n’bass set with a live vocalist, which took in snippets of songs from Spiritbox, Poppy, Deftones and Linkin Park at least, but submerged them in furiously heavy bass and beats, while REEBZ unleashed all hell with their vocals. To these older ears it was something of an exhausting listen – it felt like we got through about ten tracks in the first twenty minutes – but it was damned impressive work, and as my wife put it, the whole idea sounded like Pendulum when they were still DJs destroying dancefloors, fronted by Poppy. And that’s certainly no bad thing.

Possibly the most eyebrow-raising announcement for Resistanz this year was that of ALT BLK ERA – a young duo from Nottingham who’ve been rising stars for a while, and their alt-rock-meets-drum’n’bass-meets-R’n’B-meets-youthful energy felt initially like it could be an odd fit.

Happily, it turned out to be nothing of the sort, and instead one of the highlights of the weekend, with a big crowd that caught on quickly. The sisters that are ALT BLK ERA (they had a guitarist and drummer firmly in the background, too), like many of the young artists now bursting through, care little for the rigidity of genre, so skipping from the pop hooks of SOLAR, to the dreamy power of Straight to Heart, to the skittering rush of Run Rabbit, felt surprisingly natural, and nothing felt out of place.

The older of the two sisters, Nyrobi, disclosed that they have been dealing with chronic fatigue over the past few years, and that the recent album Rave Immortal was at least partly dealing with the consequences of that, and how it has impacted their life and friendships. But isn’t an album wallowing in depression: Crashing Parties and Upstairs Neighbours both rattle with the club-bound energy of teenagers partying as hard as they can, without regard to the consequences – and they both rocked the venue here, while set highlight My Drummer’s Girlfriend, complete with crowd singalong to the cheeky chorus, was enormous fun.

By the end of the show, closed with the raging middle-finger to conformity that is I’m Normally Like This, it was clear that this young duo are set for great things, and will likely be playing venues a whole lot bigger than Corporation in the coming years. So it was great to see them at close quarters, and it was a hugely impressive show.

I was less keen on Friday headliners Priest. Ex-members of Ghost (with the stories that have come out, I’m beginning to feel that Tobias Forge gets through a lot of Nameless Ghouls), they’ve interestingly retained their anonymity with a uniform that suggests Leather Daddies in studded gimp masks. But I was hoping for a bit more from their music: 80s-leaning synthwave with a gothic edge that seemed to me to be a lot of the same ideas that had me heading for the bar after the few songs. Maybe I was just tired and lacking in patience: but then, the day I like every single band at a festival, I’ll probably be organising it myself…

There were DJs after the bands, and we stuck around for a dance to Ultravixen’s Warehouse set, which was a mix of classic futurepop and post-Millenial industrial, and turned out to be just what we needed to burn a bit of energy off.

---

/Resistanz 2025 /Saturday /Corporation

/Ashbury Heights
/Years of Denial
/Harpy
/Chump Wrecker
/Dark Machine Nation
/Palindrones
/Neuroklast

---

Saturday openers Neuroklast had an awful lot going on in their set. For a start one of the few bands to make full (and I mean full) use of the shiny new screens providing the backdrop to the stage, their apparently complex cyberpunk narrative took a lot of text on the screen, not to mention a great many cool images too, all of this accompanied a thumping, bass-heavy industrial sound that was pretty overwhelming for someone who’d not had a lot of sleep the night before.

It was, though, a bit faceless, with the two core members of Neuroklast mostly hidden behind their electronics to the side of the stage, and some much-needed stage presence was provided by a host of guests – Grabyourface, Jamie Blacker (ESA) and then Mechanical Vein turning up to give the set a huge shot in the arm.

London duo Palindrones have been touring and playing live at a relentless pace over the past couple of years, and that work seems to be paying off with higher-profile gigs and a new album out just recently (Chapter Two: The Slender Blade). I’ve seen them before (supporting In Strict Confidence eighteen months or so back), and it’s clear they’ve made quite a few steps forward since, not least with a much more engaging and polished live show. Their techno-leaning synthpop at this show felt a bit too “90s world music” for me, though, a style I was quite happy to leave in the past. A good many friends really liked what they were doing, though, so maybe it’s just not for me.

One that was definitely not for some, including in this case my wife – she promised to give it a go, and I swiftly got a “Yeah, No” message after she lasted all of ten seconds – was Dark Machine Nation. A brutal, very loud take on industrial power-noise that probably used enough bass to mine into the earth under Sheffield, as much as I enjoyed it I got the feeling that even the recently-upgraded sound system in Corporation still couldn’t quite cope with it. The edges of the hyper-dense sound mix were just that bit…blurry? Maybe, though, it was just the sheer volume, and my trusty earplugs telling me I need a new pair sometime soon.

Reaching similar volumes in the smaller room was Ian Hanratty, under his Chump Wrecker guise. Previously in the industrial band Analogue Blood – who to my ears never quite got their potential down on record – Chump Wrecker instead doubles down on furious breakcore and industrial drum’n’bass. The result was a hugely enjoyable set that fizzed with energy, and was hard not to like when you could see Ian grinning away as he unleashed drop after drop. (Sadly, thanks to the high stage and then the big table set-up, photos were to put it mildly a challenge!).

One of the fascinating things about music at the moment is the rise of female/non-binary/trans artists that have been having gleeful fun trashing gender and genre norms, mashing up styles and doing their own thing. I’ve heard a lot of them, thanks to my wife’s general preference for this kind of music at the moment (as those of you that listen to our occasional livestreams will well know), and one that had very much got my attention was Harpy. My route in was Slaughterhouse, which sounded like her formative musical obsessions might well have included Nine Inch Nails (and judging on this, I was correct).

Watching a full set, it turns out that Harpy’s influences are rather wider. They play hard into a domme image, so much so that they looked like they might be hotfooting it to a BDSM dungeon right after the show (my wife turned to me during the said and noted “I think she might be a top…”), but there were a number of surprisingly tender songs in the set – even if you pay a little more attention to the lyrics, there’s still a barb or four hidden beneath the surface (such as the marvellous alt-rock swooner Medicine, and the savage takedown of an ex-turned-abuser in Not My God Anymore).

Even better, opener Swallow had an industrial pulse and Gaga-esque pomp, while Inside Out had even more of a mighty stomp live than it does on record (think Poppy – them again – fronting 16Volt). The set ended, as we might have expected, with an absolutely ripping take on Slaughterhouse, with everything turned up to eleven and the sense of being thoroughly shaken down by the end of it.

Hopefully there’s an album to come in time, as quite a few songs played here were as yet unreleased, and there’s a whole world of potential here.

One of the surprises on the bill was Years of Denial, a duo that came with enthusiastic recommendations from friends and felt a very different sound to basically everyone on the bill. Not yet another darkwave duo, thankfully – interesting that Resistanz completely eschewed that style, at least this time around – but a duo doing a stark, confrontational electronic style that to these ears didn’t sound a million miles from what ADULT. have been doing for some time. But this French duo had an aloof and sharp feel that made for an engaging set, and some of the tracks they played were absolute bangers.

They also ticked off another experience as a photographer that I don’t recall having to deal with ever, or at least for a long time – the singer coming down into the photo pit while us photographers were still in it…

It turns out that 2025 marks twenty years of Ashbury Heights (and eighteen years since debut Three Cheers for the Newlydeads). A lot has happened since then with the band – Yasmine Uhlin left the group, before returning in recent years, with other founder member Anders Hagström working with other female singers in the meantime.

The return of Yasmine was something that I was hoping was for the best: the one and only other time I saw them live was at Infest 2014, which was a wooden, lacklustre show that left a bit of a bitter taste.

Happily, within seconds of them taking the stage on Saturday night, all fears were dispelled with an energetic, joyous set that mostly stuck to the higher-tempo songs, with both Anders and Yasmine looking like they were having an absolute ball onstage. I must confess that I’ve not paid as much attention to their more recent material, but going on this show, I’m going to be having most recent album Ghost House Sessions Vol. 1 on repeat in the coming weeks: particularly anthemic tracks like Spectres from the Black Moss and Tunguska.

Old favourites were happily included, too, with a newly reworked take on Waste of Love (long my favourite song by the band) not taking anything away from it, while the ticking, nagging hooks of Spiders dragged me in again. By the time of closer Anti-Ordinary it felt like a well-deserved victory lap, and it was an utter joy for them to return and play one more, the bleak darkness and hearsay of Derrick Is A Strange Machine turned into a crowd-pleasing anthem.

Maybe because of the joyous nature of that set, we headed next door to see what the Virtual Goth Night DJs were going to bring – and that turned out to be a few hours of keeping us on the dancefloor, until our feet protested and sent us to bed.

---

/Resistanz 2025 /Sunday /Corporation

/Aesthetic Perfection
/Cyferdyne
/Leæther Strip
/Everything Goes Cold
/Video Kids
/genCAB
/Jamie Headcharge vs Ms DeVine vs Bloodjoy
/Junkie Kut

---

Perhaps because of all that dancing, our Sunday was leisurely to say the least to begin with, a slow-paced lunch followed by beers in the sunshine watching the snooker, and as a result we missed the first two acts. I heard great things about Junkie Kut, and I knew in advance that Jamie Headcharge vs Ms DeVine vs Bloodjoy wasn’t going to be my bag.

But there was absolutely no chance that I was going to miss genCAB. I first heard the band on Glitch Mode compilation h0rd3z ov thee el33t released back in 2006 (!), with a demo version of the glitchy, downbeat Perish The Thought, and after album II transMuter a couple of years later, aside from a single or two, it took fourteen years for a follow-up to appear, the lockdown-recorded Thoughts Beyond Words and then Signature Flaws quickly afterward, before David Dutton returned to his early material and released the excellent III I II Third Eye Gemini, which rethought and refashioned his early songs into new sounds alongside a few new tracks.

What do they sound like, though? Well, if you ever wanted to hear the emotional troubles of the robots in cyberpunk, this is your band. genCAB songs are often complex, dense industrial tracks that unusually for the genre, have a lot of emotional depth and as I recall, there are no songs about becoming a cyborg. But there are many great songs, and while Perish The Thought was mystifyingly omitted (apparently due to a late decision over longer set-times that meant it wasn’t included), another old favourite was – the soaring gloom of Six Hits (Let It Be), which was an early highlight.

The stuttering rhythms of Another Glass Eye sounded a whole lot more powerful live, too, and the set was ended with that single that ended the silence of a near-decade. Channel the Past is something of an anomaly from genCAB, being a thumping dancefloor-bound track, but one cautioning against only looking backward in life – and here, it was an awesome, powerful track that felt full of the now. I waited nearly twenty years to finally saw genCAB live, and they delivered on every level.

Also, the set was notable for the cutest “booping” of a bandmate I’ve ever seen onstage. Who says industrial bands can’t show emotion onstage, and be a bit less serious for a change?

In-between the two bands I really wanted to see this weekend, we headed over to the second stage for Video Kids. We’d already heard their self-titled theme song, which opened the set and in many ways told us all we needed to know. A big, eighties sound, squealing guitar solos, hooks you could hear from space and an image to match (complete with VCR and old-school TV playing eighties workout videos). They really know their references – the music nerd in me was having trouble keeping up, so stacked are the songs with motifs from the 80s – and it escapes being a pastiche by the way the duo go all-in, making it all utterly believable. A hugely entertaining set that was a ray of sunshine in this line-up.

Conversations over the weekend suggested that, aside from members of a few other bands, I was only one of two people at Resistanz who’d actually seen Everything Goes Cold live before – and that was back in 2011, at that exhausting five-day Festival Kinetik in Montréal, where EGC closed off the first night at about 0200 in the morning. That was a messy, chaotic show, topped off by a drunken take on What Time Is Love? that perhaps went over the heads of most of the North American punters, so I was curious to see how the rejuvenated, reactivated band were going to go over in the UK.

It turned out: very well. Another band to make excellent use of the screens, with eye-popping visuals that took in their occasional videos, video game and comic-book culture and a host of in-jokes, and there was a lot going on on-stage, too, with the full band set-up playing everything aside from a few triggered samples live, from what I could tell (not something that could be claimed by every band over the weekend, I’m sure).

The set took in pretty much every release Eric Gottesman’s project has put out, from the sneering first single I’ve Sold Your Organs On The Black Market To Finance The Purchase Of A Used Minivan, all the way to recent comeback single Nadir (hilariously introduced as a song written in 2024 “when things couldn’t possibly get any worse…”), and observing the whole set, there were a few things to note.

Firstly, …Minivan (I’m not typing all these long titles every time) is still a great slice of industrial-rock-meets-90s-US-coldwave, with a dark sense of humour unusual to most of Gottesman’s peers, while that new single Nadir shows an unexpected maturity from this project, a gloomy, downbeat song that reflects our times well (the video keeps the humour, though), while I Will Harness the Powers of Darkness To Destroy You (maybe I should charge by the word count for reviewing EGC, Eric) was the perfect opener, bubbling synths exploding into a savage chorus that remains probably his best.

Then there was that cover. Marie aka Grabyourface returned to the stage for a second time over the weekend, and this time it was a sober, powerful run through a song that the crowd knew well, and What Time Is Love? was a world of fun, and the right way to end the set. A triumphant first appearance in the UK for Everything Goes Cold, and Eric, please come back soon.

A late replacement for Die Sexual, who had visa issues as I recall and thus couldn’t make it over from the US, there weren’t many grumbles when the mighty Leæther Strip were announced as their replacement. Claus Larsen now plays solo, after his husband Kurt Grünewaldt Hansen succumbed to cancer in 2020, and you could be forgiven for thinking that this might slow his show down – in reality, absolutely no chance.

Leæther Strip has been a going concern for nearly forty years, and over that time Larsen has stuck with the style he knows best – thumping, club-bound electro-industrial that rarely drops the tempo, or aggression (or, indeed, the politics and politics of sex). The set here, limited to around forty-five minutes, was a relentless trip through his career, with old and essential classics – particularly the still-thrilling Strap Me Down and Don’t Tame Your Soul being powerful highlights. But in these dark political times, the searing, frank Civil Disobedience made a welcome appearance, too, and sounded fucking fantastic. To close, we were taken right back to his debut single, the bruising and stark Japanese Bodies, a song that dates back to 1989 and live is still a gold standard in the genre.

Perhaps I’m getting old, but after a good few hours of standing on my feet, watching almost every moment of the past four bands, I needed a break, and that meant that I missed the final live show by Cyferdyne. I always felt like I missed the boat with this band, and maybe I did need to see them live. I’ll chalk that one down as a missed opportunity.

Seventeen years ago, I made the second Aesthetic Perfection album A Violent Emotion my number one album on /Countdown /2008 /Albums, and unlike many albums from that era of industrial music, it’s still an album I go back to. So when it got announced that to mark twenty years since his first album, Daniel Graves was going back to basics to revisit the old material (complete with David Dutton from genCAB on synths), there was no way I was missing this – especially with a reworked (from the original tapes, apparently) take on that first album as Closer to Human coming in the summer.

What transpired was a marvellous set – but oddly front-loaded in some ways. The four best songs from A Violent Emotion came in quick succession early on, most notably a rampaging take on The Great Depression to open the set, that barely left us taking a breath before pummelling us into the floor, and reminding also that The Siren remains the best song Daniel Graves ever wrote.

The really surprising bit was hearing how well some of the first album songs stand up. I don’t think I’d listened to any of them in some time, and having had a few tweaks – and with cleaner vocals than before – the galloping power of Fix and the more measured Architect seemed even better than ever. Then there was I Belong To You, the first song I heard from this project all those years ago, and it was an interesting point to reflect: while many of Graves’ peers were growling away through all kinds of vocal filters and making identikit aggrotech, he was instead using similar base ingredients to make oh-so-human songs that actually had melodies and hooks, and stood out from the start.

Maybe for me the second half of the set sagged a little after the onslaught of the first half (I’m fairly sure the setlist I recorded here was correct, please let me know if not!), but I’m willing to forgive that: this was a second victory lap for an artist over the weekend, and a rare instance where time hasn’t weakened the songs in this post-millennial industrial landscape.

Having not been to Resistanz for so long, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Would I care for most of the bands, how would the expanded venue affect things, would I still know enough people, indeed would there be enough people there (what with Whitby and Dark Malta following the next weekend)? The answer to all of this was emphatically positive – the sound is much, much improved in Corporation, as is the venue generally with the newer Warehouse space providing much-needed space to move and chill-out where needed (although they really needed an extra person on that Warehouse bar).

It was great to be back, and great to find new discoveries amid the old favourites – as festivals should be.