A New Zealand show by local stars Devilskin has been marred by what one eyewitness graphically describes as “a huge mess of shit, just completely spread all in the mosh pit.”
The show, which took place at the University of Otago’s Union Hall on Saturday, was the second date of Devilskin’s current tour, a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the band’s Be Like The River album, which topped the NZ charts in late 2016.
According to the local newspaper, the Otago Daily Times, the incident started when a middle-aged concertgoer “shook a log” from their trousers during Devilskin’s set.
“It was huge, like, massive,” says the eyewitness, who prefers to remain anonymous. “I haven’t seen one that big before.
“There was a lot of jumping. And then eventually someone must have looked down and noticed that there was just a huge mess of shit, just completely spread all in the mosh pit, all over the floor.
“It’s on people’s feet. People are wearing skirts and shit is up their legs and stuff, and then one girl went bleh – just vomited on the shit – and then everyone else starts vomiting.
“There was one lady with vomit in her hair, shit on her legs, and just crying, crying, crying.”
“It was like a scene from a B-grade horror movie,” Doug Stewart, bassist from opening band Pieces Of Molly, tells Metal Hammer. “This strong aroma wafted over the audience; the crowd parted like Moses parting the Brown Sea.
“Word quickly spread through the crowd as everyone realised what it was. It was at that point I started to see people throw up on the pit deuce. The other boys were in the green room, and that’s when I decided to make a quick exit myself to take advantage of said green room and free beers.”
According to the ODT, the loose-bowelled culprit was tracked down by local authorities but not charged with any offence. Devilskin’s tour continues, while Pieces Of Molly’s new single Alligator is out now.
Devilskin: Be Like The River 10th Anniversary Tour
Jul 31: Tauranga Mercury Baypark Stadium Lounge, New Zealand Aug 01: Hamilton BNZ Theatre, New Zealand Aug 07: Palmerston North Fly Palmy Arena, New Zealand Aug 08: Hastings Toitoi Opera House, New Zealand Sep 25: Auckland Spark Arena, New Zealand Oct 24: Wellington Brewtown, New Zealand
Pieces Of Molly tour dates
Aug 15: Christchurch A Rolling Stone, New Zealand Aug 21: Auckland The Mothership, New Zealand Aug 22: Wellington Valhalla, New Zealand
EN: Summer break time, as it is every year. Still in Rock goes quiet until September. Until then, the Summer-a-Go-Go 2026 playlist has you covered for the sunny months, and I’ll keep dropping videos on Instagram and Facebook all summer long. Cheers, my friends!! FR: L’été est là, et avec lui ma pause annuelle. Still in Rock se met en veille jusqu’en septembre. D’ici là, la playlist Summer-a-Go-Go 2026 vous accompagnera tout au long des beaux jours, et je continuerai à balancer des vidéos sur Instagram et Facebook tout l’été. Cheers les amis !
The first time a Sinner album landed on my turntable was almost exactly 40 years ago. Back then, the band led by Mat Sinner had just released its fifth album, Comin’ Out Fighting, and what came through the speakers made an immediate impression. Sinner has been a fixture in melodic metal ever since, releasing a long… Continue Reading →
There’s been several concert recordings from Bob Marley and THE WAILERS issued over the years, starting from the now-classic “Live!” and “Babylon By Bus” that saw the light of day while the great Jamaican was still with us, and each … Continue reading →
American boyhood can resemble a long induction into somebody else’s war. Strength is measured by the ability to make others submit; tenderness is seen as a liability; and young men learn to police one another before an employer, institution, or army ever needs to intervene. On “Victory in Death,” avant-garde darkwave project Mellow Code follows those instructions toward their brutal conclusion, confronting a model of masculinity designed to turn human beings into obedient bodies molded into the perfect vessels for capitalist greed and imperial power.
Led by Josh McVety and Oliver Michael German, Mellow Code opens the track with deep, processional drums and a funereal mass of synthesizers. Buzzing, bit-crushed electronics churn across the upper register while shuddering samples keep the arrangement under strain. McVety’s resonant vocal booms from a distance, suspended somewhere between lament and military command.
The track draws upon the physical machinery of early industrial music, but feels colder than EBM and graver than conventional darkwave. The body here is already bleeding out on the battlefield, with the genre’s flag lowered to half-mast. Repeated orders to “force it down” and “fall in line” turn masculinity into drill practice, while “just be a man” becomes both a taunt and a test whose only reward is further obedience. Even the title’s promised victory requires a form of self-erasure.
Mellow Code explains:
“Victory in death is a song evoking the feeling of growing up the way American culture targets boys. Preparation to be used as bodies for capital and imperialism. Fortify yourself little kid and don’t show weakness, that would be feminine or gay. Perpetuated in a cycle of abuse, boys police each other and the most conservative minded lash out at the perceived threats to that sense of “natural order”. Advertisements use the essence of porn and evoke rugged individualism to sell things but also that idea. The manosphere is only the newest mutant to spawn from this toxic path. These things feel inevitable at times but it’s not. Community and human contact is essential to humans, as is creating art. Sports are the most acceptable forms of community that also allow for some structured contact for young men. That’s why growing up as a soft art boy or boy adjacent can be hard. But if you’re lucky you find the other-ed and make art that speaks to rebellion against status quo gender existentialist bull shit. Maybe help some realize they also feel trapped by those structures.”
Shot in the high desert, the accompanying video turns that critique into an unruly nocturnal workshop. Around a campfire, a gang dressed in leather, mesh, workwear, and smeared makeup saws, drills, sands, and paints pieces of wood into oversized mallets, spears, and toy-like projectiles. Those scenes are intercut with McVety, sporting a yellow mullet and delivering the song from the cold white interior of a van, a knife resting in his hand.
Soon, a red-lit pickup carries the crew across the scrub with an enormous handmade slingshot mounted to its bed. Their target is a brightly painted wooden male dummy, equal parts carnival attraction, military mascot, and childhood invention. The friends bombard it with their homemade arsenal before closing in with clubs and axes, collectively demolishing the figure that has been built to represent inherited ideas of manhood. Orange firelight, hard headlights, flying sparks, and icy interior lighting give the desert escapade the character of a pirate raid organized by art-school outcasts.
For McVety, the production returned to the reckless ingenuity of childhood while placing that freedom in the hands of his closest creative community:
“This video was an absolute labor of love that was entirely done with and by my community of artist friends. I wanted to recapture what it felt like to be a kid when me and my freak friends would make weapons and contraptions and forts inspired by whatever movie we had just seen and often Jack Ass. Whatever felt Rad as Hell then still holds true. We built weapons and made a truck into a giant slingshot. I made a wooden dummy and my friends painted it. It was a party in the desert with the people closest to me.”
The video was photographed and co-directed by Adrian Stucker of Melankolia, with Daniel Maggio serving as co-director and editor. It stars Josh McVety, Eli Gray, Matt Hanson, Miranda Sharp, and Eric Runner, with color by Grady Colors.
Watch the video for “Victory in Death” below:
On creating the video for Victory in Death, Adrian Stucker discusses the film’s high-desert production and the internal conflict represented by its handmade weaponry:
“Serving as both Co-Director and Director of Photography for Mellow Code’s “Victory in Death,” I had the opportunity to craft a fantastically fun and highly conceptual visual narrative. The creative direction tied together the rebellious, youthful energy of The Lost Boys with the rugged, weathered aesthetic of desert-faring pirates.
Shooting out in the high desert always presents its own unique environmental and logistical challenges, but the cinematic payout is consistently worth the effort. To ground the raw aesthetic of the environment, I frequently utilized a hard, single lighting source, carving out striking, high-contrast imagery against the barren landscape. Drawing directly from Mellow Code’s actual thematic focus on fabricating custom instruments and devices, we wove that maker-centric vibe deeply into the video. The narrative visually documents the meticulous process of crafting tools from other tools, which are eventually forged into weapons. However, the story intentionally subverts the traditional use of these weapons. Instead of directing this arsenal outward at enemies, the weapons are turned inward for a deeply personal fight.
The core of the video captures Mellow Code on a mission to confront and metaphorically slaughter his own preconceived notions of masculinity. It is a visual exploration of dismantling internal barriers, illustrating that the most important battles are often fought within ourselves, ultimately making room to replace those outdated notions with the strength and love of the surrounding community.”
For Maggio, the concept also provided an opportunity to place McVety’s skills as a carpenter and fabricator directly before the camera:
“I love working with Josh. Not only does he make this wonderful, dark, hypnotic music, but he is also a master builder. He’s a brilliant carpenter who can create pretty much anything he designs. The opening shot of FACE IT (the last video we did together) is a handmade illuminated pentagram. He seemed to have made it in his spare time. I was blown away by the detail and its functionality. What can’t this guy do? For the second video, I was curious how far we could push his talents as a craftsman. He runs a shop in Alhambra and naturally works with an extremely talented, fashionable, and hardworking team. Every handmade object featured in the music video was created by the on-camera talent. You can tell they are all friends who share a professional working relationship. One of the highlights was the slingshot mounted to the top of the pickup truck. Our first launch was unsuccessful, and my fondest memory of the shoot was watching 4 cross-faded engineers troubleshoot this thing. I hope it’s as much fun to watch as it was to shoot.”
Listen to “Victory in Death” below, and order the single here.
Mellow Code is an avant-garde darkwave project led by Josh McVety and Oliver Michael German. Mechanical rhythms, new-wave vocals, EBM, house, and bright FM synthesis converge with samples gathered from the group’s fabrication workshop. The recent album Object Reality, along with tracks such as “Ich stehe im Blut” and “Face It,” develops an industrial club language in which handmade devices function as instruments, images, and extensions of the music itself.
Marshall Bruce Mathers III, known globally as Eminem, was born on October 17, 1972, in St. Joseph, Missouri, and raised in the working-class neighborhoods of Detroit, Michigan. His early life was defined by instability—abandonment by his father, an often-contentious relationship with his mother, and the constant upheaval of changing schools. Hip-hop became his outlet, and by his teenage years, he was participating in local rap battles under the name “M&M,” a name that would evolve into Eminem as he sharpened both his delivery and lyrical style. He began attracting local attention in Detroit’s underground rap scene during the early 1990s
Historic, previously unreleased footage of Black Sabbath playing the classic N.I.B. has been uploaded to the official YouTube channel of the pioneering German music show Beat-Club.
Beat-Club, which ran for 83 episodes between 1965 and December 1972, was broadcast from Bremen, West Germany, and hosted Black Sabbath twice in 1970.
On the first occasion, in June 1970, they played a cover of Carl Perkins’ Blue Suede Shoes while the studio’s audio and camera levels were being set up, unaware that the performance was being filmed, as well as their own Black Sabbath. They also performed N.I.B., but footage of the latter performance has not been officially released until now.
It is believed that the footage of N.I.B. wasn’t broadcast in 1970 because Ozzy Osbourne made a mistake with the lyrics, singing “Your love for me has got to be true” instead of “Your love for me has got to be real“.
Black Sabbath returned to the show in September 1970 to perform two tracks from their second album Paranoid: the title track and Iron Man.
Other bands to appear on Beat-Club during its seven-year run included Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper, The Who, The Kinks, Grateful Dead, Fleetwood Mac, King Crimson, the MC5, Mountain, Status Quo, Yes and Santana. The show was syndicated to more than 30 countries, but not to the UK or the US.
“Our idea when we started the programme was that we couldn’t please both the mums and dads and the kids too,” producer Michael Leckerbusch told Record Mirror in 1970. “So why not do something that appealed exclusively to the kids – even if the adults thought it disgusting?
“British television fits the Establishment view of things. Young people don’t necessarily want to accept that view. And that’s what I try to show with Beat-Club.”
The show was rebranded as Musikladen in late 1972, which ran until 1978.
