Live Review: Svalbard - Rebellion, Manchester
20th November 2025
Words: Dan Barnes
Photos: Rich Price
After nearly fifteen years together, Bristol’s Svalbard have decided to call it a day and embarked on this five-date tour of blighty to draw a line under their career and remind us of what we will be missing. I caught the second show at Manchester’s Rebellion Music Bar on a chilly Thursday evening as the band come to bid a farewell to a town that is clearly close to their hearts.
Whether deliberate or merely a happy accident, but the three-band-bill for this tour not only celebrates what is great about the current UK extreme music scene, it also acknowledges the ladies are more than holding their own when it comes to delivering some of the most aggressive and inventive tunes of the current era.
Brighton’s Knife Bride hit the stage first with a gritty and gothic take on the nu metal model. Blending blasts with eastern flavours and playing with light and shade, this four-piece hits heavy while maintaining eminently danceable progressions. The Don’t Dream Too Much EP’s Sacrifice/ Surrender and Permanent Smile pass through the first half of the set; Crucify arrives much to the shock of singer Mollie, who hasn’t got her lenses in, and hits hard with an industrial feel and is “fun to play”. Alone at the Altar has some big hooks and Worthy, for all it’s saccharine intentions, avoids falling into cliché by combining the heavy hits with an alternative 90’s pop feel. Set closer, Fang Dummy, is everything Knife Bride do well, encompassed in one monumental song. A fantastic start to the evening.
By all accounts shenanigans of some sort the previous evening in Glasgow is the reason Cage Fight guitarist Will Chain is playing this show from a chair. But fear-not, as even an incapacitated quarter of the band removes little of their aggression and power. Where Knife Bride played with light and shade, Cage Fight is nothing but a full-force wrecking machine, and tonight that machine is running perfectly. While the band opened Bloodstock with aplomb back in August, it’s in the dark club environment where they are at their most formidable.
Galloping guitars and machine gun riffing, hard-hitting breakdowns and an angry punk attitude are all custom-built to make you want to smash shit up. Walls of noise assault the crowd, yet it’s never so gratuitous as to be unapproachable, and always maintains that melodic aspect. Eating Me Alive comes with some old school death metal credentials, an insatiable hook as Rachel grunts and squeals her way through like the most accomplished Slam spewing front-person. There’s sludge, there’s groove, there’s huge beatdowns and there’s a band in the finest of forms. The crushing riffs of Hope Castrated bring the set to a close and reminds us that Cage Fight is the real deal and should rightly be considered as contenders.
“Thanks for coming to our funeral” says Svalbard vocalist Serene Cherry as part of the introduction to Defiance, bringing home the fact that this is the band’s last visit to Manchester. While their dissolution may not hit the headlines in the same manner Take That or the Spice Girls did, the Bristol four-piece have become a sure and safe pair of hands and many bands had recognised that, taking them out on tour with them. Just last year alone I saw Serena and co giving headaches to headliners Enslaved and Alcest; yet tonight is my first – and last – time of seeing them as the headliner.
Opening with Disparity, from the appropriately titled debut album, One Day All this Will End from 2015, comes with a stage awash with pink lights and powerhouse riffing which sets every head in the venue bobbing. It’s apparent that even early on Svalbard were developing their own sound in which a fat low end was countered by light, ethereal, dancing melodies, weightlessly gothic in their ambience. Open Wound veers into the melodic death metal, new track If We Could Still be Saved is more consistently heavy yet given the subject matter of the band’s break-up it’s hardly surprising.
Serena announces the next tunes are depressing, giving warning to those of a nervous disposition, before To Wilt Beneath the Weight, Throw Your Heart Way and the morose Lights Out.
Quitting while they’re still friends is as good a reason as any, I suppose, with “passion in our hearts and no money in our bank accounts.” For the Sake of the Breed rages for Animal Rights and Serena admits to forgetting the chorus to Faking It last night up in Glasgow, so had been practising it all day. It goes off without a hitch tonight. The killer riffs of Eternal Spirit were originally written for Joey Jordison but has been expanded out for all the fallen musicians who have inspired.
Svalbard is finishing while they are ahead. Rhythm section Matt and original drummer, Mark keep everything nice and tight, while the interplay of Serena and guitarist and backing vocalist, Liam, is as precise as ever.
One last song for Manchester, Greyscale, from the very early days of the band is full of speed and youthful aggression and seems a fitting way for Svalbard to end their relationship with the town. Walking away from the Rebellion Music Bar, one couldn’t help but wonder what might have been for such a talented band?
I think all of us at The Razor’s Edge wish the very best for all involved in their future endeavours.
Photo Credits: Rich Price Photography
