The recent edition of Infest being a week earlier than usual – and now that the festival appears to have moved to Manchester permanently – has had me in a reflective mood, especially as that was my 25th Infest (including the two online editions), having first attended in 2000, and of course there wasn’t one in 2009.

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I’ve written about nineteen of them on /amodelofcontrol.com, as well as DJing at three of them (one of them 2020’s Stay-In-Fest) and contributing video interviews to both 2020 and 2021’s online versions, and so I’ve seen an awful lot of live acts at them. Indeed, my records tell me that I’ve seen 355 live sets across the 23 in-person editions, and 325 unique acts. A good number of those acts, I was well aware of before and indeed would be looking forward to – or in some cases, wanting to see as little of them as possible. Some disappointed, some delivered what I wanted.

But there were others that got me excited: either new bands, or bands that I knew about that surprised me. So this week, to complete my Infest coverage for 2025, here are ten bands that did either or both, from across my time at Infest. The idea for this post came from my wife, who suggested I do something like this.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Welle:erdball
/2002

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Seemingly years before everyone else was doing what we now know as Chiptune, Welle:erdball were using Commodore 64-created sounds as the core of their music, but rather than being studio nerds, they decided to take their show on the road. In 2002, they descended on Infest with a hugely entertaining, stylised show that made great use of screens, retro-styled dancers and backing vocalists, and an awful lot of inflatable balls that were bouncing around the venue for hours afterwards. But crucially, it was a show. It was perhaps a hugely important moment in the festival’s history, looking back: it took a while, but other acts playing at the festival also began doing similarly, reminding that the alternative electronic/industrial/goth scene is just as capable as having fun as anyone else (not that the wider image of the scene ever really shows that), and it’s one of the things that continues to make Infest such a joy. It isn’t just about watching live music, it’s about having a good time.

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/Je$us Loves Amerika
/2003

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I mean, it was an awfully long time ago now, but I’m absolutely certain that Infest 2003 was when I first met JLA frontman Paddy, after his group’s ferocious set blew me away. JLA was never the most prolific of groups: their one album Advanced Burial Technology was released back in 2002, and then there were a handful of singles in the early 2010s, but they had various other songs that they played live that ended up unreleased (aside from a handful of remixes of tracks like Exit Strategy and Everything Is Fine, both tracks that deserved full releases).

I saw the band quite a bit over the years, and became good friends with Paddy, his off-stage persona very different to his aggressive, confrontational onstage delivery. We bonded over a love of 242, hip-hop, industrial rock and football (we were teammates in Real Gothic FC in the earlier days) and to this day remains the only person I ever trusted to take my camera off me while I was photographing the band (not that I had much choice in the matter, mind…). He died late last year, and I still miss him terribly.

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/Parralox
/2010

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There aren’t many artists that have come over from Australia to play Infest, and when travel issues meant that Parralox were delayed and weren’t going to make their Saturday slot, a bit of rejigging ensured that they would play after all on the Sunday afternoon. Perhaps, fifteen or so years on, eighties-obsessed synthpop is a bit passé – mainly because everyone has tried it – but listening again to Parralox this weekend, I was reminded just how great at this they are. They understood the balance between the original songs that were clearly the launchpad for their music (and they’ve done a host of great reinterpretations of those songs over the years, too), and their own style and the slick, anthemic songs that they played at Infest that year turned me into an instant fan.

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/Me The Tiger
/2016

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Another complete unknown to me prior to the festival was Swedish synthpop group Me The Tiger, who made a name for themselves that weekend despite being on a stacked Friday night bill (they played alongside this site favourites Dead When I Found Her and a rejuvenated Pop Will Eat Itself). Like the best synthpop, they are a group that found a particular niche within the wider style, that means you don’t spend half the live set picking up references or borrowed elements from a host of other songs, but crucially, they have the have written the kind of songs that take up residence in your head and stay there (hello, Pocket Sized Edition Ending), and, as their name suggests, a good number of their songs are unafraid to bare teeth either.

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/Divine Shade
/2024

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Perhaps as I’ve got older – and time gets shorter to prepare pre-festival, especially as other life stuff gets in the way – I’m gone in colder to festivals, allowing myself more chance to be surprised by the unknown-to-me bands playing, and perhaps also allowing less outside influence on my opinions. This worked out handsomely last year with French band Divine Shade. A relatively new band – indeed their debut full-length album was eventually released earlier this year – their punishing, propulsive live sound came across as a hybrid of Killing Joke and The Young Gods, which as my wife noted at the time, couldn’t have been any more my kind of band to see at Infest.

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/WINKIE
/2025

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I have to admit, now the event is over, that the original line-up announcement for Infest 2025 didn’t exactly excite. There wasn’t much on the bill of the bands that I knew that I hadn’t already seen, or had much interest in, which left a fair number of bands that I knew nothing about. Would I have much to write about that was positive?

As it turns out, I had a lot that was positive to write about across the weekend, and there were even some new bands to me that were extraordinary, and top of that list was NYC duo WINKIE. Sonically, they are a band that is difficult to explain, but let’s try: somewhere in the netherland between noisy shoegaze, Witch House weirdness and pummeling No-Wave, they take to the stage in white suits and uncanny-valley, fixed-rictus-grin masks, and unleash an uncomfortable, unmissable hell for the time that they are onstage.

Unsurprisingly, they entirely divided opinion, but for me those are the best acts. They garner a fierce response, there is no middle ground. And that’s the way I love it.

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/S.P.O.C.K.
/2002

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Now, onto the surprises. On an afternoon at Infest 2002, prior to the weekend, we were looking forward to a rare UK appearance by Neuroticfish. But – as it turned out, not for the last time – they cancelled, and they were replaced by S.P.O.C.K.. A Swedish synthpop band who at the time, mostly wrote songs about Star Trek (and other elements of science fictions, too). Would that be a bit of fun, but boring after a couple of songs?

Not a fucking chance. They turned out to be one of the most fun sets I’ve ever seen at Infest, forty-five minutes of joyous, anthemic synthpop performed by a group who were in on the joke, and crucially wrote great, memorable songs. Indeed, Dr. McCoy remains in my occasional synthpop/industrial DJ sets to this day.

I did eventually get to see Neuroticfish, too – their glorious Resistanz set in 2013.

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/Witch of the Vale
/2019

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This was a classic case of a band having a buzz around them prior to their appearance at Infest, and it drew a comparatively enormous crowd early on a Saturday afternoon. As Erin’s vocals echoed through the room, you could hear a pin drop, for once everyone in the room ending their private conversations to enter the duo’s world instead. Remarkably, everyone remained captivated for the entire set, as their ghostly, Scottish folk-infused, slow-paced industrial sounded like pretty much no-one else at the time (and intriguingly, six years on, still doesn’t).

A live performance like this – and as good as this was – needless to say garnered them a lot of attention, and while releases have come, there still isn’t a huge body of work, and clearly life away from music has also restricted their live shows. Maybe that works in their favour: their intense shows are still an event worth showing up for, and it was unfortunate that they had to cancel their appearance at the Infest pre-show event on Thursday just gone.

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/Tenek
/2012

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Back at one of my very first Infests, in 2001, a electro-industrial band called The Nine were one of my highlights. A four-piece who had big, melodic hooks amid a swirling, very much of-the-time sound, they didn’t last too long, sadly. A good few years later, Geoff Pinckney and Peter Steer from the band began working together again, under the name Tenek, and as I recall the penny only dropped of the connection when they took to the stage.

The harder edges mostly smoothed away, Tenek were very much more modern synthpop, and live were enormously enjoyable, the kind of band where most of the crowd was singing away with chorus after chorus – the point where I was well and truly hooked was the mighty wallop of If I Should Fall – and it wasn’t long after that I owned the albums and EPs. My wife saw them again supporting Republica a few years later before they went on what looks to have been a permanent hiatus, and I genuinely can’t remember why I didn’t go to that…

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/Mind.in.a.box
/2011

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Infest 2011 wasn’t even the first time I’d seen MIAB live. That was in the early hours at Kinetik in Montreal, earlier that summer, where issues that I now can’t recall meant their set was shuffled until about 0200. Beset by technical issues, the set was enjoyable in fits and starts, and gave us an idea that what they were doing live was radically different to their insular, dark – but beautiful albums that I’d been obsessed with for some years by that point.

But on that August Sunday afternoon at Infest, everything slotted into place, and Mind.In.A.Box put on what was probably the most flawless show I’ve ever seen in thirty years of gigging. It was an hour or so of a band transformed, turning their intricate studio creations into an electronic-prog-rock extravaganza that was full of emotional highs, and of songs that made me – and many others – cry (the astonishing Fear), songs that made me want to punch the air (the closing rock-out of 8 bits), and just gape in awe (Stalkers). Indeed, it was such an emotionally draining set that to this day I remember little else of that line-up.

I saw the band a couple more times after that – once at Resistanz, and a return to Infest – and no other time captured the same magic. But how could they? Just that one time of perfection was enough, and it remains talked about in hushed tones every time the discussion of the best bands seen at Infest comes up. The more I think about it, the less I doubt it being the best ever.