Gaerea @ Brundenell Social Club
Gaerea x Conjurer
09.16.26
Conjurer
Opening for Gaerea on their UK tour after a successful festival season, including a well-received set at ArcTanGent Festival last month, Conjurer brought heavy riffs, incredible doom metal, and a show that ensured anyone who didn’t know them before that night certainly would after leaving. Highlights of their set included the blisteringly heavy song ‘All Apart’ and singer Dani Nightingale’s passionate statement about their identity and its place in the metal community before the song ‘Let Us Live’, which was met with great reception from the audience, especially as many in the crowd were members of the LGBTQ community. Their stage presence and melodic vocals, combined with the harsher vocals that mark Conjurer’s place in the scene, cannot be underestimated.
Gaerea
This Portuguese band has been working hard on the touring circuit to finally gain a place in many British metal fans’ playlists, and has been a favourite of mine for a few years now, since first seeing them playing on tour with black metal legend Gaahl in 2022 alongside Saor. The performance delivered in Leeds on their first UK headlining tour showed everyone in that room why they are one of extreme metal’s rising stars, following the release of their latest album ‘Loss’ in March of this year. The setlist included many songs from that album, including their most popular song to date, ‘Submerged’, which is marked by incredible drumming from the member known only as ‘Xi’ (from the Greek alphabet), and lyrics that many feel connected to, and the relatability of the focus on mental health through the use of water-based imagery.
Onstage, the band moves as a singular beast, one that is channeled through each member to create a wall of sound that had many in the pit, and everyone screaming along to songs such as ‘Hellbound’ and ‘Phoenix’. Their technical team helped to deliver a pristine light show, bringing depth to the stage with clever use of floor lights along with the traditional lighting rigs, and of course the venue itself had an immaculate enormous mirror ball, and how many metal bands can say they make use of an item like that in most venues?
Anyone unfamiliar with Gaerea across the pond in the USA will have the chance to see them on tour with Imminence and Dying Wish during a month-long tour starting in November, and can see for themselves how phenomenal this band is, who have dominated the EU festival circuit for the past few years.
Overall, I love this band and what they do, and if you get the chance to see them, they are a MUST see.
