Brighton
7 November 2026
Saturday night on the seafront in Brighton and why not catch some disgustingly heavy music with your pals? Cracking laugh.
Openers Primitive Future do a fine line in two-piece grindcore. They’re apparently meant to be a studio project that leaked into reality. Songs about the impending ecological collapse and the futility of living in these times. Grindcore is a great medium for that.
Grindcore is meant to sound like this — short and tight and fast as fuck. It’s no frills music (there isn’t much space with just guitar and drums) and it’s suitably suffocating and punishing. They’ve really captured the subject matter well. Dipping your toes into the poisonous seas of despair. Nice.
Next we get Healing Wound, who are probably closer to the death metal side of things. Which means that, relative to Primitive Future, there are times in the songs when everything isn’t fast as fuck. It is heavy as shit. It is also oddly groovy. Not in a Bootsy Collins way, but in the sense of the rhythm section hitting the one hard.
I’m not always a one for heavy music theseadays, but it pleases me that heavy music in 2026 is OK with not being clearly this-or-that genre — there’s plenty of shifting and ratcheting — is it black metal or grindcore? Perhaps both, with a beatdown.
So the headliners Machukha hail from Ukraine but are based in Berlin now. I saw them earlier this year supporting Agriculture and they were probably better than them. That night they had way more confidence than a support band usually do and tonight was much the same. It’s one of those venues with only a wee stage and the crowds were not enormous, but they’ve got alarming confidence.
The set was largely from their forthcoming album and for much of it there wasn’t a pause for applause. And at times they got really fucking quiet. I saw an interview recently with Graham Kemp from Urusei Yatsura where he was talking about Mogwai being entirely fearless in the face of an audience that weren’t bothered — Machuka’s audience tonight were certainly bothered, but I did think of that. Where a band, especially a band that I suspect is quite young, simply acts like they’re giving a BIG performance to BIG audiences. And I hope they get there.
I was thinking while I was watching that Machukha are like an answer to a series of problems in music. Post-rock has dynamics but isn’t very sexy. Black metal lacks dynamics and tends towards fascism. Emo’s music doesn’t quite match the despair of the lyrics (FWIW I’m thinking second wave emo). Machukha fix all of those problems for my money — such dynamics, such despair, not fascists, such anxiety. Also bonus points — possibly as many as three femmes in the band, including a female drummer.
When I saw them supporting Agriculture they were with a sit-in drummer. Tonight we get their regular drummer and she’s fucking excellent. I’m fairly sure one of the songs had a section in 7/8 but each 8 was in triplets. So it’s basically jazz. Or less boringly — the drummer does an excellent job of keeping the rhythm solid while pulling in a lot of variations. It’s not jazz — there’s a minimum of syncopation — but there’s a lot of invention around the rhythms.
I was, fancifully, wondering if what I liked about them was that it’s a bit like operatic music — the motifs are simple but the drama is off the scale. Whispered, bone-quiet sections, effulgent black metal overkill, an entirely off-kilter lead guitar / saxophone section. A really fucking special band — they’re touring the UK this week (10 November Leeds, 11 Norwich, 12 London, 13 Bristol, 14 Nottingham), so try and catch the fuck out of them please.
-Words: Kev Nickells-
-Pictures: Agata Urbaniak-
