REVIEWED: Incineration Festival 2026 – Part II: Blood Fire Death

While Bathory may have been brought to an untimely end following the tragic passing of visionary founder and figurehead Quorthon back in 2004, the band’s immeasurable influence continues to echo and reverberate through every murkily cacophonous, frost-stricken and bone-scrapingly scabrous inch of the subgenre. And tonight, more so now than ever as we await the tremendously anticipated arrival of BLOOD FIRE DEATH - a meticulously orchestrated tribute to the staggering legacy of these aforementioned icons, comprised of some of the most prestigious names in extreme music. Featuring the intensely venomous and caustic vocal talents of Watain’s Erik Danielsson, ex-Gorgoroth genre maverick Gaahl and the untouchably searing, stratospheric riffery of Enslaved’s Ivar Bjørnson, this iconic collective of musicians promises a grand finale of truly incendiary, post-apocalyptic proportions.

With the Roundhouse all but plunged into pitch-darkness but for a ghoulishly illuminated backdrop of artwork sourced from the Swedes’ genre-defining 1988 album, a sombre procession of hooded figures finally looms into view. In amongst eerily echoing, dissonant strains of whinnying horses and elegantly spiralling acoustic guitar, a sumptuous swathe of blackly enveloping baritone drifts upward into the vast vaulted blackness suspended above us – a muted yet intensely ominous hush settling over the vast hordes of black leather-clad disciples. Then, in a half-stupefying blaze of manically accelerating riffage and abyssal howls corrosive enough to strip flesh from bone, the diabolical collective launch into the climactic opening of ‘A Fine Day to Die’ with ruthless, jugular-ripping immediacy. Spewing forth a corrosive profusion of diaphragm-rupturing, guttural screams and eldritch shrieks, Gaahl’s ever-imposing and morbidly magnetic presence propels this hellfire-stricken anthem to electrifying zeniths of infernal grandeur.

And as feverishly impassioned chants of “Quorthon! Quorthon!” swell and accelerate into a deafening collective roar of enraptured applause, a shift in the band’s rotating repertoire of prestigious frontmen sees Watain legend Erik Danielsson take the helm on ‘Enter the Eternal Fire’. Comprising an intensely malevolent fusing of blackly churning, mesmeric bass work and exquisitely lithe guitar leads whose intricately wrought, scalpel-keen throes writhe and bristle like a nest of infernal serpents, it’s hard to imagine a vocalist more flawlessly equipped to conjure forth the track’s notoriously deathly, ritualistic presence. And with his uniquely visceral repertoire of vocal cord-shredding snarls and tautly sustained, bile-stricken howls spilling forth into the prevailing gloom in amongst great, leaping plumes of livid orange fire, Danielsson and co. deliver an audial assault that’s as teeming with hostility as it is tangibly drenched in deathly atmospherics.

Traversing Bathory’s darkly engulfing sonic legacy via a career-spanning setlist pulling together tracks as varied as riff-laden Viking epic ‘Under the Runes’ and the prized, blackly eviscerating carnage ‘Woman of Dark Desires’, it’s with immeasurable gravitas and impeccably taut circularity that we return to iconic title track ‘Blood Fire Death’. Brimming over with a world-ending multitude of weighty, propulsive blasts, sumptuously enveloping choral sections and delirious, stratosphere-grazing crescendos of scalpel-keen riffery, seldom does a single piece encapsulate so completely the essence of black metal in its most vital and lethally undiluted form. And as a great, gleaming cascade of incandescent, white-hot sparks rain down upon a stage engulfed in the intense collective carnage of this savagely ripping and diabolical ensemble, this is a truly iconic moment both for Incineration Festival and the infernal, all-consuming flame that is extreme metal.

Click HERE to check out Part I of our Incineration Festival coverage