Live Review: Igorrr – O2 Ritz, Manchester
23rd October 2025
Words: Dan Barnes
Photos: Rich Price
It was a little over a fortnight ago that Blood Incantation mesmerised and bent minds at the Albert Hall with their cosmic death metal, bringing Sijjin and Oranssi Pazuzu along for good measure. In a ‘Hold my beer’ proclamation, French avant garde extremist, Igorrr finish off the first part of his European trek with three UK shows, cumulating in an end of tour shindig at Manchester’s Ritz.
It’s a full evening of musical insanity, beginning with a set from masked blackened death metal outfit Imperial Triumphant who get the show off with a set heavily reliant on their most recent Goldstar album. Shorn of space, the band use what little room they have to full effect, though the minimalist use of lighting and their masked personas give them a mysterious distance. Lexington Delirium is tortured as though forged in the inferno itself; Gomorrah Nouveaux is built around a warlike beat, like a counsel of Angels meeting in Pandemonium. Devs est Machina is the only non-Goldstar track on offer tonight, coming as it does from the Abominamentvm debut. Zachary Ezrin addresses the crowd through a modulated voice box, giving the whole thing an uncanny sense of otherness, the band themselves, little more than wraiths haunting a barely lit stage. Industry of Misery adds a cosmic element to it, while the closing Eye of Mars comes with a fearsome rumbling low end. Making their Manchester debut, Imperial Triumphant whet the appetite for a speedy return.
You don’t realise you’ve been missing instrumental computer metal until you hear it, and Master Boot Record – or MBR – is here to introduce you to the concept. The brainchild of Victor Love, these Italians blend electronics, synthwave and power metal guitars into a melting pot of confusion and joy. CONFIG.SYS has those classic heavy metal tropes, CPU is where fat riffs and noodling meet and clash, with the first pit formations starting down on the floor. DOOM comes with rear projections of everyone’s favourite first-person shooter. FTP has a distinctly Maiden-like sound at times, while BAYAREA.BMP comes with some Helloween style speed metal; right down to virtuoso guitarist, Edoardo Taddei, shod in white high-tops like it’s 1990 all over again. The set ended with Victor distributing CDs of classic video games to the crowd, in the way musicians usually throw out guitar picks.
I’m no stranger to seeing Igorrr live, but I’ve never been this enraptured by their performance before. Perhaps because it’s previously been in festival setting and fatigue – and maybe beer, too - had blocked the nuances from properly sinking in; but tonight there’s no such excuse and I get the full force of mad musical scientist, Gautier’s Serre’s unhinged creative output.
Latest album, Amen, has only been out about a month, so its secrets have still to be fully revealed. That doesn’t stop that album’s material dominating the setlist, with Daemoni kicking things off under searing white lights and fat chugging guitars. Vocal duties are shared all night between JB Le Ball’s growls and the angelic sounding Marthe Alexandre on the operatic parts, beauty and the beast, if you will. Baroque guitar opens Spaghetti Forever, before giving way to a fat groove; those Eighteenth century vibes open Nervous Waltz, as Marthe’s classical pipes blend with blast beat drumming and even some electronic elements.
Igorrr have always had a noticeable eastern influence in their music and Blastbeat Falafel weaves those in among screamed vocals and rampaging percussion. Downgrade Desert is fast becoming a fan-favourite, ADHD is pure musical madness, and Hollow Tree is almost devotional.
At times it feels as though Igorrr have taken Celtic Frost’s Into the Pandemonium and used it as a starting point for pushing the envelope of classically-inspired extremity, at others it gives you the idea of what it would be like for Meshuggah to have recruited Dame Kiri Te Kanawa in order to write the score for Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.
Newbies Headbutt and Infestis go hard and rage, Silence wouldn’t be out of place on Radio 3 or Classic FM, while Very Noise is a frenzy of dance rhythms and big beats. Those eastern vibes come back strong on Camel Dancefloor and the show ends with the band classic ieuD and JB heading into the crowd.
For all Igorrr’s inability to conform to any recognisable genre and prefer to exist in a quantum superposition in which all musical styles exist at exactly the same time in the same point in space, their fan-base is rabid and frenzied. At no point does the floor of the Ritz stop moving, more so with JB leads the charge, but I don’t imagine Marthe’s operatic coaching included how to avoid crowd surfers.
Tonight Igorrr were magnificent, and any minds bent by Blood Incantation the other week will be twisted into pretzel shapes as they walk back out onto Whitworth Street after this one.
Photo Credits: Rich Price Photography
